Going

With a bang. With a whimper. With a soft slurp as a black hole sucks away a solar system, all unthinking. In a halo of red fire. In a grim, crawling silence of unprecedented pestilence. In a chain reaction of radioactive fires. In ice. In stifling heat and desertification.

I’ve seen them all.

I stand at the window and watch them unfold, all the differences, all the similarities. It seems endless.

And each victory just brings us closer to another defeat, until it becomes a cold, suffocated universe; a crushing, breaking, rebounding universe.

My mother would massage my shoulders with bold, steel fingers. “But afterwards, there will be another spark, another bang, a new beginning.”

Not our beginning though, not ours. That universe will belong to somebody else.

No, they won’t be our children. They’ll be children of the stars, and our kind may never find rebirth.

He taps his finger on the table to draw my attention.

I turn titanium eyes on him, “what is it?”

“I may have found a way.”

“Go on.”

“There may be a possibility of jumping, a sideways move.”

“To another universe?”

“That would be the intention.”

“There’s no proof that other universes exist.”

“They’ve been theorised.”

Theorised. So many things have been theorised over so many civilisations. “And if the theories are wrong?”

“We would jump into nothing. Become nothing. But we have volunteers willing to test it out. If you give the go-ahead.”

I take a moment to focus. What else is there? Our suppressed mortality is lapping at our heels, tearing at us little by little, flaring up when we think we have it stamped out. Finally, I nod, I give him a brief, tight smile. “All right then, do it.”

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work.