The queue

Chapter 1 : The Queue
NEGATIVE DIVIDE — Episode 1: “The Queue” OPENING “The Day Already Happened”MC (narrating): “I think today happened yesterday. Or maybe tomorrow. It’s hard to say—time keeps absolutely refusing my math.”
The heat of a perpetual midday shimmered over the cracked curb where I sat. I scribbled nonsense equations on a napkin, using a coffee-soaked ring as a particularly troublesome variable. The world looked mostly normal: college kids, traffic, heat haze. But the little details felt actively, aggressively wrong.
The reflection of the clouds in a nearby window seemed to stutter—a micro-skip in the frame rate of existence. The stoplight flickered with an unnerving confidence between red and blue instead of red and green. I noticed, shrugged, and took a drag of my too-sweet iced coffee.
Inside the café, the world's most absurdly long queue had formed. No one looked frustrated, though. They were all contentedly, deeply waiting.
Logic joined me, sliding onto the curb. She was pale, her hair a messy bun held together by what looked like a spare thermal wire, and she wore a lab coat over street clothes.
“You were supposed to monitor today’s anomaly, not sit outside it,” she stated, professional clipboard already out.
“I am,” I said, not looking up from the napkin. “I just can’t find it yet.”
Logic looked from the glitching stoplight to the coffee shop and back. “You’re sitting in it. That’s probably why your drink tastes like Tuesday.”
“Oh. Cool.”
We sat for another half hour. The barista had been pouring the same stream of coffee for five minutes straight, and no one in the line had moved a single step.
 “The Queue That Doesn’t End”We stepped inside. The air was thick, humming like badly grounded static. The queue was physically impossible. It didn’t just snake; it spiraled through doors that shouldn’t exist, looped past shelves that bent inward, and doubled back on itself toward the entrance.
Someone who had been standing at the front earlier was now directly behind me, humming a four-note motif calmly. Every single person in the line held the exact same order slip: #42.
“I’m getting déjà vu, like… consecutively,” I observed.
Logic clicked her pen. “Temporal stasis with recursive identifiers. Classic queue paradox. The event is generating its own causality.”
“Right. The short version?”
“Someone forgot how to stop waiting.”
The silence that followed wasn’t empty; it was filled with the low, persistent, magnetic hum of the anomaly. The tension crept in through subtle visual distortions—faces in the line looked indistinct, subtly wrong, like they were composed of low-resolution textures.
We finally reached the counter. The woman at the front was perfectly still, her hand hovering over the payment terminal. She’d been “next” for hours.
Her hand trembled slightly, vibrating too fast, like a taut string plucked and left to buzz.
 “She Can’t Move On”“Ma’am, are you okay?” I asked, leaning in.
Her smile was static. “Almost next.”
Her pupils rattled like tiny coins in a can. When I reached out to touch her shoulder, the air around her felt elastic. My fingers stretched for a split second, and when I jerked back, a small section of my skin, right near the knuckle, was missing its pixels. I glanced at my napkin in my pocket; the paper had grown warm. The scribbled equations were rewriting themselves:
 First NullbornThe woman cracked, not like bone, but like a ceramic figurine. Her neck snapped, and her jaw unhinged with a thin, sharp sound—like paper tearing.
Her body began to stretch horizontally and vertically, folding into itself and then expanding outward. People in the line started merging, their torsos twisting and compressing like Möbius loops, their limbs forming a single, horrifyingly long organism. It was a grotesque centipede of human patience, its skin forming a sheath of receipt paper that quickly wrapped around the cafe’s interior.
The creature repeated, in a hundred synthesized, soft voices:
“Almost next. Almost next.”
The Queue Nullborn had manifested.
Logic opened her field notebook—the pages covered in what looked like blood-red trigonometric functions—and braced herself against a rapidly melting counter.
I cracked my neck, a familiar, painful adjustment. “Alright. I guess we’re doing this now.”
“Try not to divide any constants by prime numbers this time,” Logic warned. “The recovery sequence is a nightmare.”
“No promises.”
“Divide by Zero”I stepped forward as the room fully distorted. The line creature lunged, its hundred mouths screaming the looping promise.
I flicked my hand, and the very space in front of me divided. The sound dropped out first, followed by color. A mug froze midair, suspended in a zone of perfect silence.
I muttered the forbidden theorem under my breath:
Reality folded into grayscale geometry. I punched directly through the Nullborn's mass, and as I did, my own body glitched, my reflection lagging a full second behind my movement. The creature’s blood sprayed—it wasn’t liquid, but pixelated shrapnel that tried and failed to render correctly in the broken space.
Logic screamed formulae, stabilizing the walls with glowing blue energy as the structure threatened to melt entirely.
The creature’s voice multiplied infinitely, piercing the near-silence:
“Nextnextnextnextnext—”
I caught its monstrous, composite head, and with a tight, wrenching flex of reality, I deleted the word “next” from its vocal expression.
The infinite sound cut off. Silence.
Then: pop.
Everything snapped back into place.
 “Reset”I was outside again, sitting on the curb. The café looked perfectly fine. People laughed, cars moved, and the clouds drifted lazily, no longer stuttering.
Only my hand still flickered faintly, the missing pixels rapidly self-repairing. I looked at it, half a smile crossing my face.
Logic was standing over me, stirring her freshly poured coffee like nothing at all had happened.
“Hey, Logic,” I said.
“Mm?”
“Did we do something important today?”
She took a sip, adjusted her lab coat. “Define important.”
I sighed. “…Forget it.”
I stood up and walked off, the caffeine crash hitting me hard.
The camera panned up—to a large digital billboard that glitched, just for a split second, showing a single, stark message:
“KEEP WAITING. IT’S ALMOST YOUR TURN.”