I had a really cool project all scheduled for this Off-Topic Wednesday, but it's not finished, so it'll have to wait until next week. Until then, here's something of my own that's very much in progress and totally unrelated to next week's special development:

For now, we will call her The Overseer. The Overseer is a cluster of ideas, possibilities, an undulating mass of intersecting realities. She is watching something.

The universe is about to end.

That is to say, two uniververse.

For some reason, as the galaxies phase through one another, as the cold fingers of stars, the wisps of galaxies fold into each other and wink into nothing, she thinks of humans, one tiny race in one tiny star system in one tiny galaxy cascading through an infinity of dimensions. This is not at all unusual. After all, a being as old as herself, so perceptive, so practiced has had a lot of so-called-time to think and has thought of a lot of things. It as much raw chance as the fact of a cup of pens spilling to the floor. It as raw chance as triangles having three-sides. It, like all that she can see is a myriad of coincidences falling through their own frail order.

The being thinks of humans, then, and the vanity of the words they use. Humans have called it the dream, the world, the cosmos, the universe, the, the, uni, the. They study it, their everything, catalogue it, watch as they spin helplessly around their sun, helplessly through their star system, helplessly around the sparkling darkness, adrift in the universe that too will one day disappear. All is coincidence, all is hapinstance, and like all universes (the silly word) one day their lucky run will run out, and the multiverse will envelop them as the stars themselves dissolve together into an embrace of nothingness.

The Overseer watches intently as the stars phaze out of being. So many billions of beings, trillions of stars, frillions of worlds. It is not a slow exodus, no gentle fall, no thousand years process as some would guess, but instantaneous. In human time, maybe slightly less than the length of a moment, a second, a pause, the eyes clenched shut for the sneeze. But The Overseer sets her own hours. She watches, intent, as birds vanish into one another, as glorpeks become mountains become air become nothing, as neutrinos, shivering, bumping, dancing, crash and shatter, scatter and fall. Finally, the last iota of matter, the last speck of time, the last fluctuations of energy, movement, and mass cease and there is nothing. Less than nothing. The absence of even emptiness or space. The nadir.

Then

In a moment

she scoops her arms down

and with a single breath

there is matter, and there is time and there is a tiny, irridescent spark.

This will be one more verse, one more turn, she thinks.

Grow, universe, sparkle, explode, bloom.

She plants this tiny bauble in between folds, warming it with the undulations of dimensions. She will wait to see it blossom, maybe to see this little collapsing thing burst with new lights, itself spawn rocks, and suns and systems, maybe just to be enveloped by other realities, incorporated into a cosmos that is so big you could not breathe there.

From this point on it is all up to chance.