This isn’t finished. I was writing it for the io9 science fiction writing contest but I realized it was really rushed and not believable and kind of shitty so I stopped writing. I thought the idea was cool but I can’t seem to pull it off properly.

I originally wanted to write a monologue about a man dealing with life in the final days of the Milky Way Galaxy, the universe having long ago finished expanding and was rapidly falling back in on itself and about to implode at any moment. But then I wanted to explain the reactions to the universe having stopped expanding. Then I got other ideas for what might happen when it stopped other than having it shift into reverse. Then I got this behemoth of boredom.

Maybe you’ll like what I have so far. I don’t think I’ll ever finish it.

~

Sometime in the 1900’s, or maybe it was in the 2000’s, scientists discovered the universe was expanding. They also estimated the age of the universe as something like 13 billion years old. This was a good guess for the time I suppose but, then again, they were still using ground vehicles as a fundamental means of transportation. God, they still used cellular towers for mobile phones and credit cards that weren’t regulated by DNA scans. Can you imagine?

We thought we lost Pluto for a while but it just got knocked into an even wider orbit, and comes within the orbital path of Neptune. They say it’s only a matter of time before they collide; they say the explosion will be so bright you’ll be able to see it during the day. They say it might knock Saturn out of orbit, or chaotically scatter its rings at the very least. Not like it even matters, really. Not to most of us.

I’m sorry; I’m not explaining this very well.

Okay, so do you remember being taught about that “Y2K” thing that happened in the year 2000, like way back in middle school? Okay, do you remember that Mayan Calendar thing in 2012? The obsessed were convinced it was the end of the world, like the Earth would just up and explode, “Oh, looks like it’s about 2012 o’clock!” just blowing the fuck up like it had a schedule to keep, like the Mayans made a deal with Satan. “Yeah guys you can have these sweet Crystal Skulls (which turns out, combined, were encoded with a shitty tic-tac-toe emulation that didn’t even work as well as those ancient punch-card versions they made back in the 20^th century or whenever, as some kind of horrible ancient joke or something) but, hey, in exchange the world’s going to die in a few thousand years; here, I’ll even help you made a calendar so you’ll know when to expect it! Sweet deal, right?” Sorry, it just makes me kind of mad I guess. Did these people really think that’s how things worked? I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad guess. Anyway.

On December 21^st, 2012, right at the stroke of midnight, Line Islands Time, the universe stopped expanding.  For about three months before, astrologists worldwide were reporting incredible changes in the redshift of solar systems we could see, how they were slowing down at an alarming rate. Then, when the first bits of Earth rolled over onto that date, the universe just stopped. And suddenly everything blinked into existence, all around them. They could see everything. Light travelled instantly. The speed of sound of increased tenfold. Scientists explained it had something to do with “universal gravity” or some such thing I’ll never really understand. They talk about it more in “Physics Shrugged.” You remember reading that essay in college? It was really long.

Since the galactic yeast had finished rising, NASA deemed it a good time to put some serious effort into getting a space exploration program into effect. But that’s not even the best part.

After a couple hundred years or so, new forms started appearing in the sky. Colossal forms, squirming and shapeless forms. Blue shifted forms. In every direction. There were other universes that were still expanding, all around our own, and into our own.

Needless to say, nobody was really prepared to hear this let alone accept it as fact. Some scientists fought it tooth and nail, spouting theories about it being an illusion created by the universe’s inexplicable halting, like clouds reflecting off a glassy lake, as if the edges of our universe had suddenly solidified into something mirrored and tangible, which would make some sense as to why we came to such a sudden stop. But I digress.

The arguments escalated. Some of the best and brightest took their own lives from, I don’t know, the stress of having their minds blown? I don’t think there’s an easier way to say that. Everyone’s minds were blown to fucking bits. The pot heads finally had something new to speculate about. Maybe some of them would be right; no one’s guess would have been any more ridiculous than another’s.

So, despite the theories, the arguments, the riots, and the suicides, those blue forms on the infinite horizon just kept getting bigger and closer and bluer and bluer and bluer. Then, on April 27^th, 2787, inclined 83 degrees into the sky, facing south-southwest, at the M.W. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, an explosion was observed at the edge of our universe. A big explosion. Like, “Michael Bay” big. Sorry, I know you’re really into classical films.

After some, shall we say, debating, it was almost unanimously agreed that there actually, truly, for real, honest-to-God multiverses and they were, in fact, nudging their way into our own bloated corpse of a system. Nobody knew what would happen next but, as is oft to happen, theories surfaced.

One guess was that our universe would eventually fall back in on itself, resulting in another singularity and, consequentially, another “big bang” some several billion years from now. This saw the most approval, as it was the most “obvious.” Some speculated that these invading universes would eventually also come to a grinding halt within our universe at varying distances, eventually leaving us with an even larger universe as they added to our own in size and density. This theory was met with great enthusiasm as well; the thought of having more galaxies to observe and some that, with luck, would land close enough to our own, without altering gravitational pulls, to eventually explore and inhabit was quite an exhilarating prospect to say the least. The last major theory was that soon the universes would begin to “descend” in one unified direction after each had been fully expanded for a determined period of time, and eventually fizzle out, each universe an individual explosion in a cosmic fireworks show.