All Creation has a minion!

the Stars

When the time came, I made myself as a god. I severed the ties between myself and the laws of the universe. I became, as it were, immortal. In the infancy of my true existence, I found no desire to become the dictator, nor the savior of man. Rather, my purpose lay beyond the place of my birth.

I left Earth, my former home and indeed, home to life in the only way I'd ever known it. I watched this place, this cradle of mine, as my perception of the passage of time began an exponential increase. Initially, my interests lay mainly in the influences of man, often best seen in the lights they shone on the planet's dark side. City patterns shifted and undulated as settlements refined their technology, bloomed in size, fell into decay, then winked out. Larger and larger swaths of light began to dim away, until no more light shone. I mourned quietly, as Earth became both the cradle and the grave for the descendants of man.

With no civilizations left to watch, I set my sights to the drifting continents. They fluttered toward a central point, closing in once mighty oceans. The land buckled together, uniting as a supercontinent. Time's exponential increase sped forward, and I watched volcanic supereruptions wink on and off as the planet was pelted by comets. Mass extinction events rippled across an increasingly warming Earth. I thought again of the impacts of man, which had affected the planet for thousands of years. I had felt, at the time, that the ramifications were so long-lasting, so severe. But now, as I passed my billionth year of existence, I witnessed the death of all multi-cellular life. The oceans had long evaporated away, and the few hearty organisms that had taken shelter within the planet's crust finally faded into memory.

I turned my attention then, away from this dead world. I looked now on my constant companion, the sun. Sol. I basked in the vicious luminosity, watching as my beloved star expanded and cooled to a deep red. It expanded and contracted like a beating heart, heating and cooling, heating and cooling. I felt the desperation of the situation. Sol was struggling to continue fusion, resorting to fusing heavier and heavier elements. In a final death rattle, Sol puffed its outer layers into the void, disintegrating the charred husk of Earth in its wake. A brilliant nebula surrounded me then. Gentle. Ethereal. It danced around the white-hot corpse of what was once Sol.

This star no longer shone, not in the way so familiar to me. It had ceased fusion, and now radiated light and heat much in the way of the coils of a hot oven. A memory from an ancient life of mine, memories from billions of years past. I crept toward Sol's remains now, drifting through the clouds of rapidly cooling gases. This dense, hot core had begun cooling already. But I watched my ancient friend still as I reached my 100 billionth year, and still it shone brightly. Perhaps I would not have imagined its light as "luminous," back in the days when stars still fused atoms. But I had witnessed countless supernovae, and the dying whispers of even the smallest red dwarf. My Sol still shone, dimmer and dimmer as its body grew colder and colder. I understood now, this form of Sol, the one I had known for so many hundreds of trillions of years, this was not its corpse. This was its true body, having bloomed from a brief, stelliferous infancy.

The planets, the children of Sol, one of them once my home, they were flung away. Cast out of orbit. I watched them dash out into the void, some consumed by bodies more massive than they. We traveled alone, then, as Sol's electron-degenerate body further cooled. Once a shining white, it had bathed me in the gentle moonlight-glow I remembered from my life so many eons ago. Now, as Sol's final gentle whispers of heat faded, that glow had gone. Sol's body lay cold, truly and finally dead. Dark now, and dark it would remain for the rest of time. I mourned for my companion, then left its side for the final time.

I then watched my galaxy, or what remained of it. In times long gone, I recalled it as a swirling disk of nuclear bodies and hot gases. A streak of white pinpoints across a dark night sky. It was now an amorphous blob of degenerate-matter stars, bulging from the countless collisions with other galaxies. With each galactic merger, white dwarves and neutrons would be pulled into each other. These aggressive dances would birth black holes and nuclear stars, the latter of which would rapidly blink into degeneracy.

I saw life, even then. In the gentle glow of white dwarves, a few remnant mortals clung to existence. Their lifespans vastly dwarfed my own mortal existence. They had long ago been forced to flee their own planets of origin, and now these creatures were bound to their dying stars. All but one of these mortal outposts lacked the knowledge, the capability, and the sheer energy required to travel the deep distance between dimming bodies, and thus were extinguished along with their stars.

One by one, those gentle, degenerate lights flickered out, each dying the same quiet death as my Sol. I watched as my galaxy slowly dimmed into frigid oblivion, then I watched each galaxy in turn see the death of their final degenerate stars. The galaxies flung away the resulting black dwarves, casting them alone and into the void. Soon, galaxies ceased to be. My eternally expanding universe was filled only with far-flung black dwarves and their black hole cousins. By now, the expansion of the universe was accelerating matter away from itself faster than light could travel. No longer would mortal eyes be able to perceive light from any celestial body.

I found myself in darkness. Complete, absolute darkness. I began to feel my senses adjusting, compensating for this lack of true light. All of my former senses combined into one, allowing me to see, to feel and to hear my new universe. I was surrounded by a boneyard of black dwarves, kept warm only by the gradual decay of their protons.

A solitary mortal enclave was using the rotation of a hypermassive black hole to power their civilization, one so bewilderingly exotic from my ancient kin. Trillions of years passed between thoughts for these entities. I felt compassion for these beings. Though they were incomprehensible to my former human understanding of life, I still felt a kinship with them. After all, had I not once been mortal myself? I grieved for their demise as the universe's final lifeforms succumbed to proton decay.

I had, by then, become a concept. No longer was I bound by matter nor antimatter. For these things, too, were ephemeral. Baryons, hadrons, strange and degenerate matter, it all ceased to be. I watched the end of antimatter, and of dark matter. The boneyard universe had finally decayed.

For trillions upon trillions upon trillions of years, my universe had been a creature of heat and light. But now, I knew it differently. My companions now were the black holes, incapable of emitting light as I had once perceived it. But now their rotational and gravitational energy dominated the universe. Powerful gravitational waves rocked the very fabric of spacetime. I could see it, hear it, feel it. Like the beating of an ancient drum. These beasts, infinitely dense and almost as ancient, pervaded the universe. For as distant as they were, black holes still interacted with each other gravitationally. They shyly crept toward each other, gathering into clusters of common rotation. These black hole galaxies brought back warm memories of a young universe filled with matter, with stars and nuclear light. I was overcome with euphoria in understanding that the universe I had always known was but the absolute infancy of its true lifespan. Life, stars, physical bodies, and matter itself shrank away into the deep past as I traveled the black hole cosmos.

When these bodies rotated in binary pairs, I heard singing in their gravitational havoc. I could see the bending and absolute disrespect for the otherwise orderly fabric of spacetime. I danced about, weaving between my gravitationally anomalous companions. They stayed with me for so much longer than any of my companions past. I found myself wishing they would remain with me eternally, but I knew it was not to be.

Initially, they consumed each other. They merged, and they cannibalized those smaller than themselves. These events triggered eccentric reactions, huge bursts of energy and heat. But I began to witness these mergers less and less. Those once locked gravitationally had already fallen into each other, and those who escaped a common orbit had drifted further and further from their kin. At last, there was nothing left to devour. The universe simply expanded too quickly for any of them to interact with another of their kind.

Quantum mechanics would be the ultimate downfall of my archaic companions. As virtual particles flickered into and out of existence at the event horizons of remnant black holes, the unlucky halves would tumble down, never to return. The lone survivor particle, unable to annihilate with its partner, would radiate away. The black holes began to evaporate, streaming off remnant virtual particles as a terminal radiation. Little by little, they fizzled away, gradually losing mass. As they shrank, the radiation of virtual particles only increased.

I saw to them in their final moments. The dying shouted out in one final act of brilliance, a stunning burst of photons and particles. They lit the darkness in death, giving the universe its final moments of light. One by one, I saw them rendered into nothingness.

As the void encroached, I found myself in the aging presence of the very last black hole. It was an almost timeless thing. It had traveled with me for trillions upon trillions upon trillions upon trillions of years; for lengths of time indescribable, it accompanied me through my mortal moments and into ascension. It was with me as I bounded across the stelliferous cosmos, basking in the glow of relentless nuclear fusion. It grew quietly as I danced with degenerate stars. In its long life, it had become supermassive, and then hypermassive. So many of its kin had merged into it, growing into a chaotic singular collective. I grew to love this thing, my life's true companion. It had been with me all along, traveling with me through my vast journey across time. Together, we were all that remained in an ever-rampaging universe. Never, in all my existence had I felt such love for another thing. So when my love's death cry rang out in a final burst of photons and energy, I grieved. Never had I grieved so deeply from the absence of something beyond myself. In my grief, even the photons decayed. The universe itself became uniform in temperature. Heat, as a concept, became meaningless.

I was, at long last, truly and completely alone.

And yet, there was beauty in darkness.

I still felt energy in the universe, expanding it onward into infinity. I travelled the expansion of spacetime, basking now in the comfort of my memories. In my solitude, I was able to reflect on my time in this universe, from my mortal catalyst through the eons of cosmic wandering. I meditated on the lessons I had learned, the experiences and the sensations, the dreams and the love.

Even time itself had become meaningless. My universe, my home, had ceased all change, and now remained perpetually in perfect disorder. This expansion, I knew, would never abate. Nothing would continue to happen, it and would continue to not happen forever. I grew restless, inspired by my memories of things and events. I knew I had to seek change. And I knew that to do so would not be possible in the only universe I had ever known.

Finally, finally the time had come to disembark from the universe of my birth.

I now find myself in another place. Another plane, another reality. Another universe. What I have begun to sense and experience is beyond what I could hope to describe through the concept of language. But I will have time to learn. Perhaps, in time, I shall learn to create. I am almost blinded by the sheer significance of my understanding. Were I to still have eyes, I would surely weep with joy.

My existence has only just begun.


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