A Universe Removed

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

But someone did. Or, some thing did. It heard us screaming out into the void for answers. It listened to us casting our calls out to see if we were alone in the vast emptiness of the universe and it decided to respond.

At first, the only things to notice were the telescopes and observatories. They sent back data the deep-space and intergalactic dust was moving at a rate that just did not make sense. Things were moving and transforming before our eyes on time-scales that were alien and dangerous. The scientists assumed that it must be misreadings and misunderstandings or just flat-out bad data. There was no possibility of these things traveling beyond the speed of normal expansion. Any yet, the data continued. Soon every observatory looking to the celestial equator were all saying the same things. There was something out there and we should be looking.

However, when we looked with our eyes, we simply could not see anything out of the ordinary or transforming in any way. Everything was where is was supposed to be. Nothing was changing, nothing was moving. All across the electromagnetic spectrum, everything was in its place in the heavens above us.

There must have been some mistake because even the images all looked correct. The observers and astronomers all said that nothing looked amiss. Everything fit right where it was supposed to be. But, obviously there was something amiss. The computers couldn’t all be wrong and messing up in the exact same way as one another and humans the ones in the right. There must have been something we missed. There must be something there.

First, these strange readings continued for a week. Then they continued for a month. Soon, they had continued on for years and everyone grew to just assume that there was something missing in our understandings. It obviously wasn’t dangerous as we were still living and we simply could not see anything wrong.

But then, the first star disappeared. In the space where it was supposed to be, there was nothing; as if it had just blinked out of existence. There had been no indication that anything was wrong with the star before it had disappeared. Normally, scientists can see when something is changing and almost predict when a star will go out. They can predict what is coming with utmost certainty. It has truly become rare for something to occur in the universe so unheard of that it takes us all by surprise. Sure, there are many things we simply do not understand; dark matter, dark energy, early universe galaxy formation; but we know that those are things we do not understand. It is completely different when something happens that would up-end our entire understanding of something we thought we had figured out.

But this is what happened. The star just disappeared. There was just no light. As if the star had never been there in the first place.

And then, the second star disappeared the next week. Three days later, the next one blinked away. Then the fourth, then a handful, then an entire section of the sky went dark. And, as the minutes on Earth ticked by, the section of sky grew and grew. It seemed to engulf more and more; as if there was something that was in the sky and growing or something getting closer and closer.

When the sky went dark from all corners of the globe, that is when we knew it was coming for us and it wasn’t lost. There was something out there that was arriving and we knew it wasn’t simply passing through. It had taken the Solar System with us inside of it for itself. We still had the Sun and Luna, we had the other planets and their moons, but everything beyond Neptune was gone. There was nothing.

But, it was something deeper than simply being empty. It wasn’t just empty space and nothing there, it was the edge of the universe. It was closing in on us and removing us from the universe.

It seemed to have slowed down once it reached our Kuiper Belt. Now it was taking its time to explore our backyard. It was no longer content simply getting rid of us, it wanted to know where we lived.

It must have been alive, or what we would consider alive. It stopped at each of the planets other than ours and spent time there before removing it from our sight. It was as if tendrils were reaching out from the lack of void to explore that which we had unjustifiably claimed for ourselves.

Once everything disappeared, we only had Luna. It was our only remaining light anywhere. Somehow, we were no longer being lit and heated by the Sun but everything remained the same. It was as if time and space had been frozen and we were no longer allowed to be a part of it, but we were still here. We had survived.

But, what is survival when you no longer exist. That was now our goal.