Entropy
Submitted to Aesthetica Magazine last month. First time I’ve ever done something like this. Go easy on me, I had a strict word limit but enjoyed the confines.
Her assignment was simple — observe the death of the Universe. She hadn’t figured it would be so, well, boring.
Standing in front of a row of screens, Prof. Adrienne Martinez, or ‘Doctor Martini’ to her friends knew how this would play out, she had studied simulations of this for years, knew that the outcome would be the same. That it had been artificially induced by accident at this scale was something unimaginable. Unimaginably dull, she thought. Martinez hadn’t asked for this assignment, it was bestowed upon her, according to the science council along with all the accolades that such a task would infer on her return with news and the data that the Universe had died. Right now, watching the last star cluster in the entire Universe dissipate before her eyes, she wished this great honour had been bestowed to anyone else but her.
For weeks she had remained out in space, using wormholes to make observations across the cosmos. She hated space, absolutely loathed wormhole travel, which everyone around her back home thought was extremely odd given her academic field of choice when she was younger. Of course, after the accident, many looked at her with a different view. It’s not easy living with destroying 14 billion years worth of cosmological history. The simulations hadn’t predicted it, civilisation had demanded a power shift and she was there to deliver it but the cascade effect had been beyond anything she or her simulations had foreseen. Within a few millennia the quantum strings that bound the Universe together were like someone lighting threads of gunpowder, the infinity of space unravelled and took everything with it.
That she would live to not only cause the Universe’s destruction but see its death throes was nothing more than the Fates taking the piss.
The star cluster faded into oblivion. Entropy had choked the life out of the last remaining light in the Universe. Staring into infinity, knowing there was nothing left was unsettling. She’d had all the data that would now and ever could exist about this, had witnessed the same events countless times personally, it was time to go home.
Martinez traced her fingers over a control panel, initiating the wormhole access. Empty space boiled and seethed around her vessel, like skin turning wet in extreme heat, and the portal opened. Like a hungry maw waiting to feed she steered the ship toward it. But there was nothing left in the Universe for the animal to feed on, and the wormhole thrashed in hunger in the void until it closed again, unsatiated.
Martinez stared blankly at where the path home should have been. She flicked across the controls again but this time-space remained quiet. She tried again, still nothing. Again. Nothing. The horrifying logic of the situation slammed into her — to open a wormhole requires an abundance of energy to sustain it long enough to pass through but in a completely inert, entropic Universe there is nothing left, not even the ship’s energy could keep the wormhole from collapsing before it completely formed now.
She was stuck.
It’ll be fine, she thought, they’ll open the wormhole from the other side once they realised she was overdue.
With black infinity on all sides, she circled the room, pacing the floor and gesturing to herself in frustrated anger. They knew this would happen. This was her cold prison for a crime against science so large that nobody could prosecute her for. They sent her out to witness the final heartbeat of the cosmos knowing it was a one way trip, and she had been too blind to see their manoeuvres.
For a long time, she waited. She kept no passage of time, there was no point in a situation like this and there was nothing to measure it against anyway. No sunsets, no rhythm of nearby pulsars, and after an unnaturally long lifespan even the sound of her alien heart had become silent to her. They weren’t going to open passage home to her, she reconciled.
She stared out into the abyssal prison of her own making. The Universe was hers. She was its sole occupant, and in a way, she was its queen. She liked that. Looking at the ship’s controls before her she recalled some classical teaching she received as a student once and smiled.
Out there somewhere was her Neverland, and she was Wendy.
“Second star to the right, and straight on ‘till morning.” she breathed aloud to herself. Martinez stared out across the empty, black sky spread out before her.
“Fuck.”
