Premature Ending
Humanity learned they were not alone in the universe when it began to unravel like a sweater.
Like a thread being pulled, the fabric of spacetime was being undone. Having started at the edges of reality, it was rushing in towards the center and in five years, nothing would be left, and not a single thing could be done to stop it.
The truth came out days after the discovery, once the data was checked and rechecked thirty times. No one much wanted to lie to their loved ones while anxiety clawed out their insides, so they spread the love.
Dread filled the hearts of people across the globe. The end was coming, and they had to come to terms with what that truly meant.
The String Theorists rejoiced as their decades of work and slow descent into being proven wrong was suddenly reversed and they were proven right, if in name only. But they took the win and celebrated anyway.
While the String Theorists partied on—drinking in excess and flipping cars over like their soccer team had just won the World Cup—other scientists worked to figure out why the universe was ending prematurely, and if it could be stopped. The answer was easy to figure out, two scientists just had to put their heads together. Literally, they kissed and had the same revelation at the same time:
Aliens. The Little Grey Men were the obvious culprits.
Those far-off weirdos in another galaxy had been messing around with physics again. This answer made a lot of sense because the only other explanations were that physics had stopped working properly, or that the laws of the universe had made an error, and that was too horrible of a thought to consider for any amount of time; much better to blame aliens.
It so happened that the kissing scientists were right, aliens were responsible.
“An experiment gone wrong,” the two scientists said in harmony. “Perhaps done with pure intentions, trying to invent time travel or faster-than-light technology. Other possibilities include testing a dark matter bomb or similar weapons of mass destruction that malfunctioned catastrophically. Whatever the catalyst, the experiment was presumably done in outer space, which caused the sparse hydrogen and helium plasmas to fuse with neutrinos and get effectively “boiled” by electromagnetic radiation reflecting off an Earth-like planet resulting in time being snipped. But since space can’t exist without time, space is also coming undone, resulting in a hole being torn in spacetime, which is why the universe is falling apart. If they were testing a dark matter bomb, the chances of this happening are near zero; the aliens simply played the odds and lost. Of course, this is all hypothetical.”
Such a matter-of-fact explanation (even if the two scientists did give themselves an out) calmed the masses, even when the two scientists reported the grave truth that nothing could be done to stitch spacetime back up. Human technology was just too primitive.
Although, speciesism catapulted to ninety percent in a single day. As one can imagine, the shock of aliens being real and being responsible for the premature death of the universe was almost too much to handle.
“Those cursed grey abominations have been coming to our planet for thousands of years, and now they’ve killed the universe! They were building a weapon to destroy us!” the Roswellians of New Mexico said in online forums.
That wasn’t true, but it helped boost speciesism to the big one double zero—100% hatred towards a species nobody had meet. Greenpeace members hated them because the environment was dying, PETA members hated them because someone else was euthanizing animals, even the Buddhists hated them. Truly, though, it was glorious to see all of humanity united under a common belief, even if it was hatred. The end of the universe does that to people.
The little grey aliens hated themselves too, and internalized speciesism exploded, bringing the total amount of speciesism hate to 200%. They didn’t hate themselves for long, however, before they were wiped out from existence, and so the number dropped back to 100%. Less than nine hours later, the Bahai faith publicly came out against speciesism, and it fell to 99%.
Back on Earth, therapists saw a noticeable uptick in clients while drug dealers became thirty percent richer, and abortions skyrocketed to twenty million worldwide. Debates on whether humans even had a soul and what happened after we die grew in number.
The religious communities of the world saw a huge uptick in converts as people tried to make peace with the end. Protestants converted to Catholicism. The Amish continued living as they always had. Baptist numbers stayed the same. Christians as a whole theorized on when the Rapture would come. Jews searched for their sacred red heifer in earnest. Hinduism overtook Islam as the second largest religion because the people who practiced yoga decided to go all in. Sikhism ran rampant through Southeast Asia.
Because of this, society pretty much continued as it was.
What else were they to do? They still had three years left to live, they would be jumping the gun if they started living hedonistic lives now. (On the plus side, people’s capacity for nonsense dramatically lowered, as it should with only three years left on the Gregorian calendar and 107 years left on the Mayan calendar.) So, they returned to their day jobs and normal routine with only a slight uptick in the amount of alcohol consumed and number of vacations used.
Then came the bittersweet reality:
Why now? Things were looking bright for humanity. Humans had been doing great—truly excellent—and would have continued on this streak of excellence for another couple thousand years. They had a tentative hold on Mars, cities on the moon, and were mining asteroids. In a single generation, lifespans had tripled, and obesity dropped to one person. Too bad the grey bastards had ruined it.
Humans always believed they would be the end of themselves. The stories were countless, from nuclear apocalypses, viral outbreaks, zombie pandemics, global warming, artificial intelligence, bringing back extinct animals; and still the list goes on. It was a common idea retold in a million different ways, only this time the story was set on a galactic scale, and humans had only a side part to play.
And that was really the sad part about the whole affair. Humans never nuked themselves to the Stone Age, never let a lab created disease ravage them to extinction. Their death, and the death of the universe, wasn’t their fault. They weren’t responsible for their own downfall. Someone else was to blame. This entire thing was completely out of their control; they were as helpless as an infant. Maybe it was pride that led everyone to believe that only humans could destroy. Who knows.
Broken, humanity trudged along, unable to commit to the hedonism they had promised themselves.
Meanwhile, the unraveling of spacetime spread faster than the speed of light on its way to Earth.
When it reached Mars, the rover recorded the demise of spacetime: for a split second, everything was frozen and not frozen in time, the light of the stars bled into the red rocks and each grain of sand could be seen. In the blink of an eye, and the agony of a millennia in non-time, space disappeared too, and the nothingness rushed in, and the rover was erased.
The snapshot was never seen by anyone because the unraveling came fast; before anyone knew it, Earth was gone. Sadly, humans couldn’t survive in a non-spacetime existent universe. Nor could anything, really.
A few pockets of humanity survived for a few minutes, fleeing in the opposite direction, trying to stay ahead of the tsunami, trying to eke out a few more seconds as they outran nothing like it was a bad dream.
Though in the end, they, and everything else, ceased to exist.