Note: This story by Paul Martz is one of seven winners of the July 2025 Speckled Spectrum Awards.
Long after the last stars burn to ash, the cold remnant of a dwarf planet hurtles through the intergalactic voids of an ancient universe approaching maximum entropy. It travels alone. Flung aeons ago from the dark corpus of its host galaxy, its aimless wanderings are perturbed only by the rare tugs of passing black holes, which slowly evaporate as they siphon mass, energy, and time into new universes, born into dimensions beyond conscious thought.
The dwarf planet’s crust, fractured and broken, stabs at the airless sky with jagged peaks. Soaring escarpments loom over the barren surface, once the floors of great oceans, now a desolate landscape scarred by fissures. Life had its genesis here. Creatures evolved and flourished. Civilizations rose and fell. All were reduced to cinders. Life, in the conventional sense, died here long ago.
And yet, huddled in the bottom of a shallow impact basin, four entities remain—loosely organized condensates of subatomic particles, feeding on residual quantum fluctuations and reflecting upon their existence in the cold, black universe.
“I were just thinkin’,” Ralph transmits, exchanging thought impulses in silent communion with his companions as he glows weakly in the deep infrared. “Did ya ever think we’d end up ’ere? Back when the universe were young?”
The subatomic condensate known as Fred stirs, perturbing the fabric of the zero-point energy field. “Never saw it comin’. The universe were a pre’ier place back then, and I remember it well. Sunlight, aye! Sunlight and a bit o’ geothermal activity went a long way, didn’t it?”
“Sunlight?” says Harry. “Ya thinks ya’s an ol’ timer ’cause ya remembers sunlight? Ya’s just a wee whipper-snapper. When I were a lad, we didn’t ’ave yer fancy sunlight. We ’ad naught but great clouds of ’ydrogen faffin’ about, lost in the chaos o’ space, without enough sense to play wi’ themselves.”
“A fine atom, ’ydrogen,” Bob says. “But back in my day, matter weren’t putting on fancy airs wi’ atoms and such. The universe were naught but quarks. A right good broth, quarks. We spent us days swimmin’ in it, we did. Grand fun. Sad day when quarks up and decided to become neutrons and pro’ons. ’ydrogen? A right modern invention, that.”
Ralph stirs again. “Well, when I said the universe were young, I didn’t mean the universe proper, like. I meant cosmic inflation. Back in my day, that were the universe, to me. T’were naught but energy fields, pho’ons and gluons everywhere. We used to catch ’em, put ’em in jars. If we caught enough and waited a few millennia, ya knows what we got? One measly neutrino, maybe two—if we were lucky. Quarks? That were the stuff o’ fairy tales.”
“Cosmic inflation?” says Fred. “Ya were born then? By ’eck, ya’s naught but a child. Let me tell ya about the good ol’ days. Before all yer fancy modern things like cosmic inflation, us old timers ’ad naught but a singularity. We were all crammed into a mathematical point. No width, no ’eight, no depth. Infinitely dense and mastin’ ’ot. No privacy, neither. A man couldn’t pass wind without the whole universe ge’in’ a whiff. Packed in like bloomin’ sardines, we were. Energy fields? Luxury! We used to dream o’ wide open spaces like energy fields.”
“Aye, those were the days,” says Harry. “But I expect most o’ ya wee toddlers are too young to remember the old universe, what existed before yer singularity. I, ’owever, remember it like it were yesterday. A vast space wi’ more dimensions than ya could shake a stick at—loads o’em, all gone now, sadly. Quan’um gravity did ’er in, collapsed the whole lot like a ’ouse o’ cards. I can’t even start to tell ya ’ow it went, watchin’, ’orrified, as it tore itself to bits wi’ ma’er-an’ima’er collisions. Tragic, it were. But I were one o’ the lucky ones, bombarded by radiation, converted to another state o’ matter, and shat out a bloomin’ wormhole. What were it like? I’ll tell ya what it were like. Sheer bloody terror. No clue where I’d end up. Turned out, I landed smack dab in the middle o’ that brand new singularity o’ yers. Cramped, aye! But I were a right jammy bloke to be there. At least it weren’t collapsin’.”
“That’s right ’ow it were,” says Bob. “But, try tellin’ that to young ’ins today, and do they believe ya?”
A rogue black hole arcs overhead, and for a few millennia, the dwarf planet is caught in a 200,000-year orbit, looping around the black hole in lazy, eccentric ellipsoids. The black hole evaporates, its mass converting to energy that spirals through a rip in space-time, leaving only Hawking radiation in its wake. Alone again, the dwarf planet continues its solitary wanderings through the infinite, empty universe.
“Um …” Ralph cautiously perturbs the surrounding field of weakly interacting subatomic particles. “There’s no young ’ins today, Bob. Ya knows, ’eat death o’ the universe and all that.”
“Aye, course there ain’t. But if there were, would they believe ya?”
All the condensates glow feebly in the deep infrared. “Noo-OOO-oo.”
(the end)
