Our story begins with the universe – a collection of matter and energy, and nobody quite knows how it got here. But here it is, and if there’s one thing certain about the universe, it’s that it is constantly at war with itself.


This is how it has been since the beginning, since the very first minutes when matter and antimatter sought each other to annihilate. This cosmic battle was quick and decisive, leaving the universe bleak and desolate but, surely enough, ruled by matter.


What was left – slowly spinning pockets of gas – collapsed inward, steadily brightening. We call them the galaxies. Each was made of billions of stars, each star a cosmic furnace, cooking light elements – hydrogen and helium – into heavy elements in their core.


These stars, the high-mass ones most of all, went unstable in their later years. They promptly exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy, to become a new generation of stars.


Soon enough, there were enough of these heavy elements to form dense orbiting globules are many stars. We call them the planets. These planets, many of them, were made of noble gasses like their host stars. Some, however, formed beautiful amalgamations of heavy elements – elements like iron, nickel, and lithium – and, perhaps most importantly, nitrogen, potassium, oxygen, and carbon.


One such planet is of particular interest to us: a small, rocky planet once called “Earth.”
This planet had an atmosphere. It had vast oceans of water and an abundance of carbon. It was only a matter of time before amino acids began to hook together. These were the seeds of life.


As these strange forms of stardust evolved, eventually one species began to seem very different from the rest. Fierce, brave, agile, proud, and with a passionate intelligence, these most interesting of all animals soon invented agriculture. They crafted elaborate civilizations, intricate sciences, and elegant mythology, only to tear them down with war or internal strife. Despite these setbacks, their continued progress seemed very decidedly unstoppable.

Finally, after many tens of thousands of years, these creatures completed their crowning achievement, the ultimate Tower of Babel – these beings, with their soaring imaginations, eventually flung themselves and their machines into interplanetary space. Here they came to expand their empire, and to show one another their power, but also to stare into the face of their own creation. Here, naturally, is where their final war would take place.

It seemed innocent enough at first. Each great nation began claiming further and further planets and asteroids as their own, in a continual arms race for the higher ground. They were soon travelling between stars, spending fuel where they found it, moving on to new planets every few hundred years when they exhausted the one before. This type of consumption had quickly destroyed Earth, their first planet, the cradle of civilization and of life itself. They had taken what sparing resources were left, leaving this tortured piece of rock stripped naked, but nobody seemed to care. They had new horizons in mind.

Perhaps physical proximity on Earth had kept these nations friendly to one another, but in the vast vacuum of space, no longer relying on one another for trade and assistance, they grew hostile. Each nation split in more and more pieces, each staking out a corner of the galaxy to claim as their own.

They were small conflicts, the ones that broke out at first, but as humans do, the conflicts gradually escalated. Each nation determined that they should be deterrent by responding with a slightly more aggressive attack than the one that had struck them, and it was not long before full-scale war broke out across the galaxy.

Nuclear weapons were the fear back on Earth, but now, any weapon would be too slow. By the time it reached a planet, the residents would have hopped to another planet entirely. In this way each nation thought itself invincible.

And yet, in futility and pride, they poured their resources into more and more powerful weaponry, forgoing scientific progress in favor of military expansion. Planet after planet was turned into a nuclear waste, star after star turned to an artificial supernova, until these creatures had nowhere left to run. They had wasted their resources building bigger and more destructive weapons, and had not yet developed intergalactic transport. They were trapped, now, by their own lack of foresight. Planets, civilizations, and people were picked off one by one until finally, with the galaxy picked clean of resources, these creatures were at last cleaned from the universe.



Should these animals have launched themselves into space? I don’t know. Perhaps if they had gone together, as a world and not as nations, they would have fared better, but it is difficult to say. One way or another, their galaxy is useless now, a husk of what it once was and a ghost of what it could have been. War consumed it, as it consumes everything. And so ends our story, perhaps the greatest and worst the universe has ever seen.