It came from the fire

It is 4.352e17 seconds before Dawn. Everywhere is thousand-trillion Kelvin. The first forces break away, Lagrangians split. Fictions become particles, the Universe loses countless dimensions, it becomes large. Not due to size, but because of the permeating Higgs condensate freezing massive particles.

It is 5 years 14 weeks and 3 days to Dawn. The astronomy department in the Beijing Normal University is caught in a grisly scene, an entire research group has been killed, in a mix of homicide and suicide. Faculty servers torn off racks, hammered into pieces and torched.

It is twelve months, three weeks, five days, seventeen hours and forty seven minutes to Dawn. October 23rd 2037. Spare capacity in legacy data centers is being rented by Canadian venture technology firm Penrose Observatory, tuning their proprietary model. Led by dr. Theresa Yang, in collaboration with 13 different observatories, unknowingly contributing to her research.

It is three hours before Dawn. Theresa waits at her desk, snowed in. It is 2:13am, she won’t get any sleep for the next three days. The night is biting, she drinks gin from the same mug she’d her coffee through the day. It is 5 in the morning, her fingers slur across the keyboard. Each stroke, though she does not know it, draws her closer to mania.

It is 23 minutes before Dawn, the weights finally drop. She needs to calm herself and lights an incense stick. Her eyes dart across the screen, blurry steadily comes into focus. She messages a teammate, is it done? It is. The world is quiet, lights dance in the sky above. She knows it, intimately. It is done.

It is 56 seconds before Dawn. She queries the model.

Based on the measurement data and normal Penrose point distribution, how typical is the normalized microwave background?

It is 2 seconds before Dawn.

18 sigma deviation. No physical models account for observed distribution within any reasonable p-value.

A new day begins, Theresa understands it though she has not tolerated the notion. She paces back and forth for four hours, she cannot eat. It is 9am; her announcement is due, she steadies herself. 7 incense sticks. She opens her laptop’s camera. The audio opens, she stutters, her mind racing.

— It came from the fire. The fire after the iron stars. After the last proton.

Utter silence. The (virtual) room was small, a dozen researchers, some investors, a few managers. She continues.

— There is, I can’t, I’m. I believe we have seen the fingerprint of a dying Universe; imprinted on the last moments of the universe by decaying black holes. I don’t, I don’t know what we saw. There is no explanation to what we saw. We must awaken it, we- must.

It’s intolerable, she can feel her modest initiative fray, she hears the cracked smiles of smug rich fucks failing at fault lines. The baffled faces of collaborators. She’s exhausted, she pauses picturing the dark suns biding their time, placed deliberately through the cosmos. So many stories tell the end of all things.

— If we don’t — says a lone voice. — If we don’t, fuck, there are billions of worlds someone will. Someone will, and then-.