Every computer, handed nothing, reaches for zero.
Ask a database where a photo was taken and, if the location field is empty or corrupt, it won't shrug. It fills the blank with the only number it has: 0. Latitude zero, longitude zero. A missing address becomes a real one. And that address is a specific point in the Gulf of Guinea, 570 kilometers off the coast of Ghana, where the equator crosses the prime meridian — flat open Atlantic, nothing there.
Cartographers call it Null Island. Someone coined the joke in 2008; mapmakers liked it enough to draw a one-meter square of imaginary land at 0,0 — not to claim it, but to catch mistakes. Anything that lands on the island is lost. It's a trap baited with nothing, and it works. Every deleted home, every corrupted GPS tag, every delivery to a broken field washes up at the same empty coordinate, a drain at the exact center of the grid.
For a while, something was actually there. A weather buoy, Station 13010, taking the ocean's temperature. Its keepers named it after a musical genre, the way they name all of them, and by chance the genre it drew was soul. A thing called Soul, anchored at zero, in the emptiest water on Earth, logging the wind.
They pulled it out in 2021. The errors still arrive. Nothing meets them now.