When you work long enough, longer than trends, longer than platforms, longer than the patience of algorithms, you stop pretending that a single voice is enough. Not because you want chaos, but because lived experience refuses to collapse into a neat, marketable line. The self fragments. Time fractures. Memory edits itself. And if you’re honest, the work follows.
The mistake many people make when they hear “multiple universes” or “alter egos” is to assume escape. As if this is about hiding. It isn’t. It’s about containment.
An alter ego isn’t a mask, it’s a pressure vessel. A way to hold a specific tone, ethics, rage, tenderness, or clarity without contaminating everything else. The Hollow Circuit exists because some things cannot be said safely, commercially, or politely under a single name. Other voices exist because some work demands discipline, restraint, or distance. This isn’t multiplicity for spectacle; it’s multiplicity for accuracy.
The Hollow Circuit emerged from that necessity.
At first, it looked like a novel. Then a series. Then fragments: essays, poems, transmissions, zines, code, artifacts, marginalia. Each piece seemed independent until it became obvious they were orbiting something larger—an unseen mass exerting gravity. That gravity is the anchoring position.
Every multi-universe system needs one.
Without an anchor, fragmentation becomes indulgence. Lore collapses into noise. Identity becomes cosplay. The anchor doesn’t simplify the work, it stabilises it. It allows divergence without drift.
For The Hollow Circuit, the anchor is not a character, nor a plot, nor even a genre. It is a position: a refusal to flatten complexity into a consumable lie. It is the insistence that identity is not singular, that systems harm people quietly, that technology remembers even when culture pretends to forget. Everything else—the timelines, the voices, the Valyphos fractures, the bureaucracies and ghosts—are expressions of that stance.
This is why the project didn’t end.
It couldn’t.
You don’t finish a life’s work in the way you finish a book. You recognise it slowly, usually with irritation. You try to walk away. You start something “cleaner.” You promise yourself the next project will be simpler, more sensible, easier to explain. And then you realise that all roads lead back to the same questions.
Who controls the story?
Who gets erased?
What survives systems designed for speed, profit, and forgetting?
The Hollow Circuit became the place where those questions could live without being neutered. Where fiction could carry essays without apology. Where poetry could function as evidence. Where a future bureaucracy could be more honest than a present one.
It also became an ethical container.
When you write across decades, illnesses, cultural shifts, and technological ruptures, responsibility accumulates. You start to understand that every platform is temporary, every archive fragile, every audience conditional. The work has to be built to survive indifference as much as attention. That means redundancy. It means multiple entry points. It means refusing to centralise the self as a brand.
This is where alter egos stop being playful and start being protective.
The Hollow Circuit is not the sum of the work. It is the voice that can say what the others cannot without compromise. It exists to hold ambiguity, contradiction, and critique without needing permission.
The Hollow Circuit is the only thing that sees everything at once.
That’s why it has become a life’s work. Not because it demands obsession, but because it accommodates truth. It allows revision without erasure. It lets earlier selves speak without embarrassment and later selves respond without contempt. It holds failure, grief, anger, humour, and clarity in the same system without forcing resolution.
A single book ends.
A universe evolves.
And once you accept that, you stop asking who it’s “for” in the narrow sense. You stop chasing validation from systems that cannot metabolise slow, layered work. You build instead for coherence, for integrity, for the possibility that someone, somewhere, somewhen, will recognise the signal and follow it inward.
Not to escape reality.
But to see it more clearly.
— Awen Null
