I get asked about the name more than I expected to, mostly by people who assume it’s supposed to be funny, some kind of nihilist joke, lucas and the void, ha ha, nothing matters, rate everything one star. That’s not it. I named it after a specific night and I’ve never actually explained the night anywhere, so here it is.
I’d been on the overnight shift about a year at that point, still adjusting, still catching myself falling asleep at nine in the morning like a normal person and then lying awake at midnight like an idiot. There was a meteor shower that week, one of the reliable ones, and I’d bought a cheap telescope a few months earlier that had mostly sat in its box because setting it up alone felt like a chore with no payoff. But I had a night off that lined up with the peak, and I drove out past the edge of town, past where the last gas station’s sign stops being visible in your mirror, and I set the thing up on the tailgate of my car in the dark.
It took maybe twenty minutes to get oriented, which is longer than you’d think, fumbling with a red flashlight so I wouldn’t ruin my night vision, cursing the little alignment screws. And then it just worked, and there was Saturn, actual rings, not a photo, an actual thing hanging there that I was looking at with my own eyes through a piece of glass I’d bought for less than I make in one night shift. I sat on the tailgate for probably three hours. Watched maybe a dozen meteors. Didn’t see another car the entire time.
What got me wasn’t the meteors, honestly, it was the quiet. I spend five nights a week in a building that hums, servers, cooling systems, the low white noise of a place built to never actually be silent, and then I drove twenty minutes and found a silence so complete I could hear my own pulse in my ears. I remember thinking, this is the same void, basically. The server floor at three in the morning and the desert at midnight are doing the same thing to me, they’re both just enormous empty systems that don’t care whether I’m paying attention to them, and something about that stopped feeling lonely and started feeling like company, weirdly. I’m not going to pretend I fully worked out why. I just know I drove back into town at four in the morning feeling better than I had in months, and when I started this site not long after, the name wasn’t even a decision, it just arrived already made.
I still go out there most months when the moon’s dark enough. Haven’t seen Saturn look better than that first night, though I keep trying.