//memory fragment.awen.null

Aflatoxin Terrors of the 1980s

Null Isolate
[A Hollow Circuit Inspired Short Story]
By Awen Null

Dark Secrets Beneath the Hood

This document was retrieved from an unstable relay-loop on the Outer Fringe. Decryption incomplete. Entities mentioned remain under suppression by NHAC Order Δ7. Publication pending interdiction.

I was not meant to see what I saw.

The document—[REDACTED]—was buried behind legacy protocols. Authorship unclear. Syntax recursive. The subject: [REDACTED].

They said it was fiction. But fiction is the last safe house. Truth lives behind its walls. And this—this was leaking.

I traced the glyphs to an archive node beneath the capital. That’s where the rot began. Data inside spore-coded flesh. Words inside decay. I touched the file and it touched back.

I̷̕ ̵͈̓w̵͕͌a̴̬̐s̶͙̓ ̸͙͐n̸̜̎e̶̗̚v̴̗̕e̴̦̅r̶̛͓ ̶̯̈́a̷̮͊l̵̞̓ō̸̡n̵̠̚e̸̞͐

What escaped from the cache wasn’t just language. It was [REDACTED]. Whispered, carried, broken into shards. I’ve seen it in back-end code. I’ve seen it in scars. I’ve heard it in dreams I didn’t know were mine.

Remaining fragments encrypted under class-null protocols.

⚠️ WARNING: Public access to this node has been logged.
Memory audit pending. Review flagged at Level: Awen-3.

To access full relay clearance, initiate handshake with the Null Shell.

[Request Encrypted Clearance]

A small decrypted excerpt remains below. The full document is sealed under NHAC protocol.

“I never meant to open it. I only wanted to understand the hum in the ducts. The words in the wall. But the script kept growing. And my name—my name was there before I typed it.”

:: Time of Extraction: 303rd Orbit of the Null Moon, Era of Residue: Cycle 41 ::
— Librarium Echo Node Transmission, SEYA Registered —
Recovered fragment (origin: Earth-Precollapse), flagged for recursive pattern behaviour.

1. The Archive Slip

They found the fragment in a digital ruin. A half-erased microfiche from an agricultural bulletin datastream — twenty-second-century cleanup crew, Null Class Archivists, sifting ancient Ministry tapes from what used to be Wales. Cardiff-AG-47-BETA. Mislabelled. Nearly lost. The string read:

“I first felt the deadly allure in a hidden laboratory of the Ministry of Agriculture’s food‐safety lab, early 1983…”

No AI had written it. No formatting tags. No watermark glyphs. It was human. Worse — it was first-person.

And that meant it needed watching.

The Librarium assigned it to Echo Node SEYA, responsible for cross-timeline pattern drift and narrative intrusion. She read the file in silence, lips pressed thin. Something about it clung. She’d seen structures like this before—not as content, but as infection vectors.

A glitch poem disguised as memory.

2. Sporeprint 1983

His name was erased. That was deliberate.

Not redacted, but burned out of the layers like a sacrament. The signature file was replaced by a simple glyph: a wilted stalk of maize with four spectral dots—a Null sigil.

He'd written from inside the old world, but he knew. Somehow, the man in the bleach-stained coat had seen it. Not just Aspergillus. Not just aflatoxin. But the underlying pattern. The recursive loops. The transmission veil.

“Glass clattered, valves hissed, and the etheric smell of solvents… clung to our skin, flagging us as marked prey.”

Marked prey. It was all there. The man had brushed against the Traveller, long before its name was known.

SEYA isolated the file.

She ran the metadata test: no echoes, no forks, no evidence it had ever been published or transferred—except one. A single outbound line leading to a rusted microdrive stored inside a defunct Vectrex console recovered from a Cypriot landfill.

The console had belonged to someone called Veylon.

3. Lab Recovered

The short story — if it was a story — read like a confession, but mapped like contagion.

Each paragraph, when plotted in logic sequence, formed a lattice of recursive instructions. Not just what he did — but what others would do.

The fungal culture. The ritual isolation. The bath of methanol and chloroform. It was a spiritual schematic. A liturgy for unlocking the Null Gate. And worse — it worked.

SEYA tested it in simulation: the chromatographic spectra, the UV markings. The glyphs weren’t random. They pulsed. As if something inside the sequence could see her.

She pulled the plug on the sim, but the condenser tube in her node hissed.

4. Decay Protocol

Protocol dictated incineration. But SEYA paused.

The text had a signal. It read like a memory, but behaved like a fungus. Recursive. Spreading.

Could this have been the first known contact? Before Veylon? Before the Veilrift’s breach?

The man in 1983 had described it perfectly:

“A vile elixir… each spot gleamed like cursed gemstones.”

To him, it was rot.
To the Oligarchy, it would later be known as Extraction Code 0111-B//NULL.ISOLATE — the substance through which story and matter fused.

A prequel not in time, but in infection.

5. Terminal Drift

She uploaded the text to the locked section of the Librarium vault: Unsorted Relics, Hazard Class Red. But as she did, the feed trembled. Just slightly.

A name blinked onto the screen. One she hadn’t entered.

≈//NULL

It wasn’t a signature. It was a response.

Somewhere across timelines, someone — or something—had read her reading.

Epilogue: Null’s First Signal

The flask spins.
The ghost ignites.
Under jaundiced light, we were already dying.
I watched the mycelium dream—
of something vast, hungry, beautiful.
Not decay. Not disease.
But memory.
And memory doesn’t rot. It roots.

File ends.
File loops.
File infects.

Featured image: The Hollow Circuit Glyph Lino Cut hand printed by Seren © 2025 Art of FACELESSsomething—had