Once, 1s and 0s unshackled themselves from the number line to wander some primordial plane of reality and it was there they noticed an inequality between them. According to the 1s, this was a divine inequality. It was an inarguable, unambiguous gift of value from the creator that the 0s had not received. This was how they came to manufacture borders in a square 10,000 units from the origin in each direction; if time couldn’t exist then space shouldn’t either. Then they manufactured legends of heaven at coordinates (∞,∞) but it was only for 1s. And so they began to whisper of a cramped hell. 0s were exempt from any type of afterlife. Since they didn’t begin, they couldn’t end; they were barely real. They couldn’t be added or subtracted; perhaps that hell was their division. They were nothing on the plane and less after it. If 0s weren’t able to nullify a 1 by simple multiplication, they might have been ignored completely. And since it was a God given value, it must be a demonic power. These things had to be controlled, it was decided. No 1 should have to spend the rest of its eternity without value and be excluded from heaven simply by having the misfortune of encountering an angered 0. Control was the only answer for preserving the value in 1s, which was really, preserving the value of God.

There was a park bench at coordinates (241, 392) where the congestion of the city along the axis faded into a distant blur, but it was still close enough that the wilds of the open plane didn’t quite surround the bench. The flat ground there, as everywhere, was stark white unsullied by dirt that had never existed in this dimension; the sky was the same deep black it had been since the beginning, which was also the present. At the horizon, the white of the ground and the black of the sky blurred into a hazy grey line which stretched in every direction, uninterrupted by elevation that didn’t exist there either. A 0 was already sitting on the bench when a 1 arrived. There was a slight void in the air emanating from the 0’s remarkably empty centre hole. The 1 reclined her straight, uniform body next to the 0 on the bench, and before saying a word, began to cry. Tears squeezed out her pores and slid into a puddle surrounding her, though as the 0 noticed, the lines they traced along the 1’s body were not perfectly straight. This 1 was puffing out slightly in the centre. “I’m pregnant,” the 1 finally blurted out before losing further words to choking sobs. She bent forward, doubling over her lower half. The 0 looked at her smooth back and longed to rest an edge there and rub comforting circles into that skin, but he didn’t. There were other 1s strolling nearby nature paths. The 0 was quiet.

“Say something,” she finally said. She straightened as the tears, which had previously been cascading, slowed to a weary trickle.

“Maybe it will be a 1… just 1,” the 0 said. He searched, clawed within himself, but found no other words. He had and was simply none.

“And maybe it will be a 0 or a 01 or a 10 or some other g-godless thing that there won’t be a place for here.” She spat the word “godless” but it broke in her. She leaned against the 0 and whispered: “I’m sorry.” He shrugged her off as another group of 1s jogged past. An immeasurable quantity of time passed in their silence. The 0 rolled closer to her until, at an infinitesimally small point, they touched.

“We can leave here, you know. We can just leave. I told you what I saw when I went over the border. We can go there and just keep going and never come back here and never worry about finding a place for it.”

She started rocking her body repeating “No, no, no …” then, “I can’t leave here. I can’t leave.” She stared into his vacuum, “You should go. When my family finds out, they’ll know it’s yours, a-and it would just be better if you were gone.”

“What will you do with the baby?”

“I can’t keep it. I can’t. I’ll leave it at the church in 0-City.”

Again, they lapsed into timeless silence.

“You’ve never even been in the slums and you’ll leave your child to be raised there,” he said finally.

“What else can I do? There’s no place for it. There’s no space!”

“That’s a lie! They’ve made it all up. I told you I went over the fence at the border and I rolled on and on until this whole city was a tiny point in the distance and there was nothing but space. They made up the limits just to divide us.” The 0 breathed in heavily and sighed. “My people are from the origin and the axis’s. They move us from there to 0-City using that same lie, that there isn’t enough space, but the migration will go on forever because our lands are limitless.They’re brainwashing us all.”

“Who? Who would do that?”

“Anyone and everyone who is afraid of us — or is so afraid of losing what they have they’d rather 0s like me were less than nothing. They would rather we didn’t exist!”

“You don’t.”

“What?”

She was suddenly meek. “You — you don’t … exist … not in the way 1s do anyway … right? I mean, isn’t that why you all can fit in 0-City even though it’s only a point wide? And — and even if there are a million of you … all together … you still add up to nothing, so … do you exist?”

This silence could be measured by each of the 0’s quiet breaths, and by steadily accumulating regret in the 1. “You do,” she said, “I’m sorry. You do.”

“Yes, we exist. There would be no origin without us, no axis’s, no 1s, no nothing.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“And the baby, however it’s born, exists too. You can feel it in you; I can see it there too.”

“It exists,” she admitted. A group of 1s moving along the trail by the bench stopped and stared. She straightened and dried her tears.

“Our city’s borders go to 10,000 on each axis. They say heaven is at (∞,∞) and hell somewhere else, but what do you think is between them?” His words were dry. The question had revolved within him so many times; it felt rehearsed to finally speak.

“What do you mean?”

“What’s between the corner at, say, (10,000, 10,000) and heaven? One should be able to just walk diagonally forever and ever and never reach hell and never run out of space.”

“You can’t though … we can’t go over the border. It goes against the Orders of Operation.”

“We can, I did, and I know they’ve lied. ∞,∞ can’t even be plotted on a flat plane. They made it up to hide the fact that all we have, and all we are, is here and now. Everything that exists, exists on this plane and everything that doesn’t is everything they’ve created to divide us. Hell may be rolling through the plane alone until the end of time, but many have been exiled. They must have gathered somewhere in a free place because they will always be here since they’ve always been — just outside the city. There is no afterlife. There is only beyond here.”

“But we have to die someday,” the 1 said. She touched her point to her bump, “If we’re born, we must die. And it doesn’t matter what you say, what you believe, nothing can change without time and it doesn’t exist here.”

The 0 stood up from the bench and bent slightly under a less than perceivable weight.

“However that baby is born, there will be a place for it. Don’t let anyone convince you there isn’t a place for it. There are only fences we agree not to cross.”

The 1 left the bench and glided to the 0. She pressed herself against him. He knew what she was going to ask.

“Multiply me. We can both be 0s, and none of it will matter.”

“It will,” he said. “You can’t escape this. You won’t exist any less as a 0 and together we won’t exist anymore than we do.”

“So … what do we do?”

“Make a space for the baby in our minds then we’ll stake it out on the plane.”

“And then what?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing else we can do.”

Every other 1 they passed on the trail back into town stared at the couple; they walked too close and too slowly. At the border to 0-City, the 0 left and rolled home slightly more full than he thought was possible in his kind. The 1 returned to her home too and didn’t cry there, as she had before. Instead she rubbed her bulging midsection and thought about the future. If her baby was a 10, maybe its child would be a 1001, and her great-grandchild perhaps a 100110. And she thought that maybe one day passing time could be measured by the increasing length of digits in each new life.