De Facto Times

Anika’s plans were foiled slightly as the universe began to end.

There was a horrible disaster at the centre of everything, where some idiotic alien terrorist had thought to detonate a weapon of mass destruction after having his bluff called by an equally idiotic alien president, but we don’t need to get into the boring details of that silly situation. The important takeaway is that a chain reaction had started that was steadily collapsing space and time from the exact centre of the universe outwards, and it was spreading at an alarming rate. Galaxies were crushed in a microsecond, and their absence had effects of their own, as the sudden disappearances of mighty gravitational fields caused other galaxies to spin out of control and destroy themselves before the expanding wave of annihilated space-time even got to them. Countless lives were lost, and perhaps the most unfortunate part was that almost none of them had had any idea that their doom was upon them. The effects of this disaster travelled at relativistic speeds, so by the time anyone noticed that something was out of the ordinary (the stars were suddenly disappearing, or the ground lurched beneath their feet), one second later their entire world would end. Some would consider that merciful ignorance, but not many.

Because of how suddenly and quickly this phenomenon affected the lives of its victims, killing them before any of them were aware of its existence, it remained nameless. Perhaps it would have been dubbed “The Great Death” or “The Final Punishment” or something of that nature if it worked more slowly. But no such name was given, and the living remained unaware of it until it killed them.

One week after the weapon had been detonated, about ten percent of the universe remained. Space-time itself had somewhat stabilised, but where there were once billions and billions of galaxies was now a colossal expanse of nothing that dominated most of the universe, with a thin crust of stars surrounding it at the very outskirts of what remained of existence. Black holes reigned supreme, pulsing with gravitational power and, like an infant desperate for milk, sucking energetically at the emptiness around them in the hopes that there would be a star or planet nearby that they could swallow. There wasn’t anymore, so they existed in vain.

The stars shone still, but nothing orbited them anymore. In all the chaos, the planets had been slingshotted into oblivion due to gravity disturbances or incinerated by their stars or demolished in some other quick and irreversible way. The stars just stayed where they were, burning brightly for no reason, waiting for their fuel to run out and to shrink down into nothingness or perhaps become hungry black holes of their own. Only one planet remained, spinning faithfully around its star in perhaps a wider orbit than usual but refusing to abandon its oldest friend. It was on this planet that Anika lived.

Anika was extremely small, perhaps a half inch tall, and she had a hard shell and a dozen little appendages she used to scuttle around, and feelers to navigate. She was twenty years old and excited to enter adulthood. She lived in a wetland and got her nutrients directly from the soil.

Her race was ancient, having been on their planet for billions of years, and were known for their durability. The planet, which had many names depending on who you asked but Anika’s kind called it Squiblibon, had undergone more mass extinctions than could be counted (usually about three every million years) and was pummelled by solar flares, meteorites, and alien miners that blew apart massive chunks of the surface looking for precious metals. There was no extremely intelligent life on Squiblibon because it never got the chance to evolve to that stage, and it was very common for 85 percent or more of the species to die in a disaster incident. But Anika’s race, which had many names that are irrelevant, had endured through them all.

So Anika awoke one day and crawled out from her little den, which was an inch-wide crater formed from a drop of acid rain, and when she found the surface of her lifelong home altered in such a way that it was completely unrecognisable, she was not as frightened as most people would be. And what a difference it was – vivid green and blue had been replaced with grey and black, the spotless sky obscured by choking clouds of deep putrid vapour, all the beautiful landscapes that had always seemed to be in full bloom completely gone as if some gigantic figure had taken a rusty tool and sheared everything that was growing straight off of the surface and into a massive can, exposing only the wet, disgusting underbelly of buried soil and rock. 

The air stung Anika’s antennae and hurt her lungs to inhale, so she tried to take little breaths. While she wasn’t terrified, she of course recognized that this was an unfortunate turn of events, and would complicate her otherwise very simple plans for the day. She had reserved this day for taking a nice walk down to the riverbed and seeing if she could figure out how to sail across, and now she would have to dedicate the day to finding her family and friends and catching up with what had happened and how this would impact their lives.

On a planet with extinction events occurring as frequently as they did, Anika had been taught from a young age about what to do if something like this were to happen. She was to go to the emergency tunnels and meet up with everyone else down in the Shelter, which was a great burrow that had been dug aeons ago for that specific purpose. She had never had cause to visit the Shelter, but she remembered how to get there, and so she made her way over to the nearest tunnel and began her descent underground.

She had never heard it so quiet. Normally the underground, which she visited often, was a hubbub of activity, and on an occasion like this she would have expected the tunnels to be packed with all kinds of creatures all having their own emergency meetings. Instead it was completely silent. There was no sign that there was anyone else here.

Her legs were aching most unusually as she crawled, and she realised that she seemed to have some sort of burn all over her exoskeleton that was causing it to flake and peel away. This was disturbing, as she had never been burned in any way before and didn’t understand how it happened. Come to think of it, as she looked around she realised that the walls of the tunnel seemed to have been burned, being all black and charred, and that’s what the entire surface had looked like as well. Had this particular mass extinction (for she was sure that that was what was going on) been a tremendous fire that had ravaged everything? If so, she had been very fortunate not to have been harmed worse.

Down and down she went, and it stayed silent. The air was softer down here, and her antennae no longer stung, which she was grateful for. The architects of these tunnels had probably considered such things when they were digging it out in the first place, to maximise the comfort of anyone who was fleeing into them when disaster struck. Anika had also been taught that there was a stockpile of non-perishable food that could last fifty thousand hungry mouths for fifteen years, which was a pretty good set-up. All this was pointing to a surprisingly pleasant world-rebuilding experience, and so she scuttled along quite merrily, excited to meet up with her folks and discuss what the future would hold.

She turned a corner and she came upon the vast open room that was the centre of the network of tunnels, the Shelter. As was promised, there was plenty of food, more than Anika herself could eat in several lifetimes. It was a very cool and refreshing temperature and the ground was soft and pleasant beneath her feet. She loved the space too – just the sound of her taking a step echoed throughout and made her feel like anything she said would be heard. That was good.

The problem was that the Shelter was completely empty. There was not another living soul in the entire place, and that made Anika extremely worried.

“Hello?” she called. It reverberated off the round walls and eventually faded unanswered.

She crawled around the perimeter of the room just to make absolutely sure, and her initial assessment was indeed correct, no one else was here. Then she took the tunnels, and, moving very carefully and deliberately so as to not get lost, she spent hours traversing them, calling out and receiving no answers. There was no breath or pulse in miles, it seemed, for the tunnels went on for miles and there seemed to be no one alive.

At least she encountered plenty of dead people. These were folks who happened to be in the tunnels at the time of the event, she figured, which were surprisingly numerous. If they had only died right when the disaster struck, that meant the only people here were here by coincidence, not because they were trying to reach the Shelter for the same reason she was. The small percentage of the population that went down these tunnels habitually yielded this many corpses – Anika shuddered to think how many dead bodies awaited her on the surface.

“How did I survive?” she wondered aloud. Her voice echoed again, and she liked hearing it. She had no reason to keep her thoughts to herself, and saying them aloud almost yielded the possibility that they would be answered. As she went on, she realised that possibility was moving further and further away from any kind of probability, but she didn’t want to rule it out completely. 

“How did I survive?” she repeated, and now she actually thought about it instead of innocently awaiting a response. People who had actually been deep underground had been barbequed by whatever heat wave or firestorm or something along those lines that had swept over the surface of the planet. She stung a little but she felt pretty healthy all in all. Maybe she should return home and look around there. Perhaps the disaster had come from beneath the surface and it was actually those who were underground to begin with that had less of a chance of survival.

She made her way out onto the surface, and immediately her body reacted badly to the toxic air and the heat. She crawled back to her little divot in which she lived, and began calling at the absolute top of her voice: “Hello! Is anyone awake? Where is everybody?”

The wind shrieked in response, and the dead voices were not to be heard.

What had happened was that a slice of the space-time rupture had penetrated the star that Squiblibon orbited, and this caused time to affect the star particularly quickly. The penetration only lasted one second, but in that second the star aged eight billion years, sending out incredible amounts of radiation and heat that completely scorched all of the celestial bodies orbiting it. Unbeknownst to her, because there was no way she could have measured this until now, Anika was the single most heat-resistant member of her race, and her race was the single most durable species on that entire planet. So it followed that only Anika was able to withstand the torching that the time-lashed star dealt to its companions, while her brethren in race perished absolutely, as did all the other organisms on Squiblibon. They were burned alive as they slept, if they were lucky, or they were conscious of their immolation, which was worse but it lasted a minute at most before they were gone for good.

Incidentally, Squiblibon was the very last place in the universe that had still been able to house life, and now it was made hard-baked and sterile. Across all that remained of space and of time, the only breath that was drawn belonged to Anika, as she scurried along in vain.

“Anyone?” she called desperately. “…please?”

Death did not allow for responses, and she came to realise the full extent of the devastation that had transpired. The awful clouds parted, and at last she saw her sun in the sky, and she realised that it was not the same sun she had seen yesterday. It was weaker, a deep red instead of a healthy young white, its light scattered and pathetic. Once it had gazed upon Anika with a sharp and piercing glare, now its perspective was clouded with the cataracts of age and frailty.

“It was you,” she said to the sun. “You killed them.”

The sun shone.

“All of them?” she whispered in terror.

Bodies upon bodies upon bodies. She looked for them and she found them. Everyone she knew, and everyone she didn’t: their bodies were fresh and empty, their eyes sightless, their hearts still. She found her parents, her boyfriend, her hundreds of brothers and sisters, her bandmates, all gone from her life. She thought of the last thing she had said to any of them, and it was probably something mundane and unremarkable. She had never got in the habit of saying “I love you” casually.

“I love you,” she said to all of them, and then she closed her eyes and knelt. She stayed there for a while.

The elderly sun began to set in a horrifying dark red and purple display, very different from the fiery pink and gold display that was cheerful and awe-inspiring. That was just how it was going to set from now on, Anika supposed. And this was how the air was going to taste and feel, and it was in her best interests to get used to it.

She tried not to think about the plans she had made, and this was difficult, because those plans had been what had always occupied her mind when she was trying to find peace. For the past three years, her future with her boyfriend Al had been such a reliable and secure idea to dwell on, and even before that, her imagined future was very clear and never wavered from the theme of finding an attractive partner and spending the rest of her life with him. She had known Al since she was fifteen and started dating him at seventeen, and he’d more than fit the mould of the perfect boyfriend she had dreamed of since she was a baby. He had made it clear that he felt the same way about her, and there had been an unspoken agreement that they would be committed to each other for as long as they lived. 

That was what was in Anika’s brain whenever she had a moment to herself. But now she had a lifetime to herself, and those same thoughts that had lifted her up and given her hope and peace now stabbed her heart viciously and made her insides sting worse than the toxic air ever could.

The truths kept echoing in her brain over and over again: Al is dead and you will never see him again. Your family is dead, all dead, and you will never see them again. Ever. You will really never see any of them again. And they repeated, getting louder and stronger as they went.

She supposed the reason for this was that she wasn’t really comprehending what had transpired. She kept expecting to wake up and realise that this was all some twisted dream of hers and Squiblibon was as warm and green and happy as ever. She wandered aimlessly through the tunnels, as if she would stumble on something that would make all of this make sense. But the tunnels all looked the same, and they were dark and moist and clean but void of meaning. They didn’t have what she was looking for.

It was also a problem that because of her small size and very limited ability that she couldn’t really gather information about the state of the world quickly just by herself. She knew that her home area had been wiped out, but she knew nothing about everywhere else. It was possible that this disaster was localised, and that everywhere else was thriving as they always had.

But then decades started going by, and, once she had figured out to sustain herself and survive easily in the current conditions of the planet, she devoted time to exploring and seeking out anyone that might still be alive to talk to her and tell her what she should do next, for she couldn’t think of what that might be for the life of her.

Anika’s race was capable of secreting a fluid that could be spun into an airborne web, and with the howling winds this allowed her to travel easily across vast expanses of land. When she was forty-one, and she felt that she couldn’t bear to hear the echoes of her own unanswered questions any longer, she spun a buoyant device and climbed into it, and away she went, sailing across seas, deserts, mountain ranges, and everything in between. 

Heavy clouds hung over everything, and fierce precipitation was prevalent. Acid rain was common on Squiblibon, but now the rain was even harsher than that, eating away at all of the magnificent stone structures that had withstood the elements for so long. It was clear that simply destroying life wasn’t enough for this sadistic phenomenon; its effects could still be felt in how it was destroying the land, brutalising what could have easily otherwise been an untainted smoothed-over canvas of dignified rock and dirt. Now parts of the land were afire, parts were being tossed this way and that by little self-contained windstorms, nowhere was safe. 

It was actually in Anika’s favour that she was such a tiny frail thing that could be blown around easily by the slightest gusts of wind, for she looked down at the looming cliffs, which were gigantic and sturdy and stubborn above all else. Rock does not yield easily to air. It is beneath its dignity. As such, the cliff sides resisted the beatings from the wind, its stone sides refusing to soften even slightly when faced with confrontation, and so when the cliffs broke they broke hard, crumbling away in massive chunks and leaving behind a sad thin shell that was a pathetic remnant of what came before.

Anika had been educated on geography, so she knew what landmarks generally were supposed to be where. She knew especially to look for the Skyreach Mountains, the longest mountain range on the planet that contained fourteen of its highest peaks, but when she came upon it she didn’t even realise what it was. What should have been dozens of grand majestic towers reaching far beyond the clouds into the highest depths of the skies were instead a belt of what could barely even be called hills, just pathetic little bumps in the flat land. 

Those are the Skyreach Mountains! she realised as she floated by. What has become of them? Where did all the rock go? It further solidified the idea that the alteration of the planet was far from complete, and perhaps it was increasing in intensity. Squiblibon wasn’t merely dealing with the fallout from a natural disaster, no – it was that the natural disaster was still very much occurring, and the worst of it may have been yet to come. What else could take place, would the planet itself implode? Would time itself freeze forever? Anika had made a lot of good guesses over the years that had combined into a solid theory about what had happened to cause this mass extinction, and she knew it involved a sharp change in time. That particularly worried her – physical threats like earthquakes or meteorites or even an exploding star she figured she could handle, but if time itself was at risk, she couldn’t even begin to prepare for that. If her supply of food aged in a similar way to the star, it would expire and she would have nothing to eat! 

This made her very nervous, and she looked behind her at the home from whence she was travelling. She had packed thoroughly (she had learned how to store fat inside her body so she could go without eating for months), and had planned to spend a solid year travelling and returning home, but now she wanted to cut her trip short. She didn’t really know how far she was comfortable getting from her precious food supply and Shelter, and if something happened to them in her absence–

Of course, there was very little she could do to stop something from happening to them, no matter where she was, but she knew how much it would kill her spirits to return home after a journey across the globe only to discover there was no safety waiting for her and she was about to die– horrible. She would rather be there if some disaster befell her supplies, so that she would have as much time as possible to grapple with her impending doom.

With that in mind, she turned her web around and began riding the wind back the way she came. It had taken her ten weeks to travel so far from home, and it took her ten weeks to return. Her food was still intact and perfectly edible, thank goodness, and she sat by it and kept it safe. There had been nothing really for her to worry about, but she decided at that moment that travelling was not for her. She needed to stay alive, after all, and it would be too terrifying to go away from the Shelter and return to find it gone. Without the Shelter, she could not make it, it was as simple as that. 

She also settled on the conclusion that there was no life on Squiblibon other than herself. If something had happened that had sterilised all the thousands of miles of land that she had flown over, it was powerful enough to kill the entire planet. She recognized her own durability and realised what an exception to the rule she was as far as what could be survived. She was truly alone.

In her contemplations, she also considered the possibility that the phenomenon that had killed all life on Squiblibon had destroyed all life in the Universe – which was a fair guess, given that this phenomenon had meddled with the universal dimension of time itself. It happened to be a correct guess, unfortunately, though thankfully Anika had no real way of proving or disproving it. As such, in her eyes the fate of the universe remained blissfully open-ended – it was entirely possible that the aliens were enjoying themselves just as they always had. It was concerning, though, when she looked up at the night sky and saw that there were hardly any stars left in it. At first she had thought this was because of all the pollution in the air that was obscuring her vision, but now she was fairly certain that it was the stars themselves that had gone.

She was correct, of course. The shell of destruction of space-time was still ever-expanding from the Universe’s core. It would eventually swallow up Squiblibon, though Anika would be naturally dead before that happened, which was fortunate. She didn’t know that, and she didn’t know anything about the weapon of mass destruction that had been detonated. In the whole of the Universe, she was the only soul who had ever been aware that any kind of catastrophe had taken place, for she was the only one not immediately killed by it once it became observable.

The years went by, and she spent them all in her Shelter. She thought of Al still, her family still, all the dead around her. She didn’t spend any time with their corpses, that felt like a waste. The corpses had nothing inside them. They were all matter and no soul.

She kept in shape, exercising regularly, and she drew on the walls, but she never got stronger or better. She didn’t really care to do so, because there was really no point in developing herself. She was simply bored and wanting to remain healthy so she wouldn’t die. Weirdly, she still wanted to stay alive, despite having nothing to do since she was twenty. 

I don’t know how to be happy with just me, she thought miserably. I like myself just fine, that’s not the problem. I’m just not enough. I need more company, and I don’t have it.

She imagined friends, but they never lasted. They blew away in the wind seconds after their conception. That was for the best, she knew.

She eventually reached old age, and she was very unhappy. Why did I even bother? I should have died that very day I woke up and everyone was gone. Would have been a better use of my time.

But she supposed that deep down she had always been hoping slightly that, in living longer, she would find a reason for being alive. She had lived for fifty years completely alone, and that was plenty of time to find a life purpose, but she hadn’t. That time had all been wasted.

Unless, her brain told itself, I find the purpose for being here later on still. That will make it all worth it.

She imagined finding the meaning of life right before she died, so that she didn’t have any time to actually utilise her discovery. That was the best case scenario. It was much more likely that her life would end before she could find a reason to justify her survival. The chances of her discovering a purpose and living in accordance with it at this point in her life were so small they weren’t paying attention to. Squiblibon wasn’t changing; it went on being the near-lifeless wasteland that it now would always be. 

But she went on living nonetheless.