The Opposite End Of The Universe

“Today, we’re going further than ever before,” Captain Nathaniel announces.

“You finished the limiter?” Haticat asks excitedly.

“Yes,” Nathaniel replies.

For many years, scientists have wondered whether space continues forever or whether it curls back on itself such that travelling in a straight line will eventually bring one back to where they started. Unfortunately, no one dares leave the galaxy, since no one can see farther than about four thousand light years, since it has only been about four thousand years since Y created the universe and light only goes so fast. However, Nathaniel has been working on a plan. He has perfected a means of precision to ensure his ship travels in perfectly straight lines to one part in twenty septillion septillion septillion septillion. He hopes it is enough.

He has also acquired a tachyon beacon. Such technology is not new, but it has never been used the way he is planning. By beaming tachyons in all directions from one point, the beams should converge at the exact opposite point in space – assuming there is one. By using very low-energy tachyons – much lower than anyone has ever used before – they will travel very many times the speed of light and reach the convergence point quickly. Finding this focus is how the crew will know they have gone halfway and allow them to measure the universe’s circumference.

Most importantly, he has also been working for years on making the engines faster. No one wants to go looking for the other side of all reality if it is going to take an entire lifetime. He doubts that there has ever been such a fast ship before.

“All systems are operating normally. Capacitors are fully charged,” Haticat reports.

“Everything is clear on the scanner. The tachyons are streaming as planned,” Doctor Bill reports.

“No enemy ships detected,” Fred reports.

“Good. Point us in any direction, full speed. Go!” Nathaniel orders.

Zip! The cross-ship races away between the stars and out of the galaxy. The screen goes dark. For a long time, they see nothing. Then there is a dim flash of milky white. “What was that?” Nathaniel asks.

“I don’t know,” Haticat answers.

“Go backwards a bit and stop,” Nathaniel orders. In a few seconds, they find themselves surrounded by stars. “Did we miss the focus and return home?”

“Negative. None of these stars are in my records. Their attributes match nothing in the catalogue,” Doctor Bill reports.

“So there are stars beyond the galaxy – and they seem to be in clumps,” Nathaniel comments.

“Another galaxy. That’s what this is. It’s another galaxy,” Haticat says.

Nathaniel wants to explore, but he dares not leave the straight-line course he has set, so he settles for taking detailed readings of the surrounding stars. Then the explorers continue their journey, encountering several more galaxies on their way. One galaxy confuses Doctor Bill. “Strange, all the stars here seem to be binary pairs of equal partners – or close to it,” he says.

“That is strange,” Nathaniel says.

“I’m also not detecting any planets or nebulae. Space is cleaner here,” Doctor Bill reports.

“That’s very strange,” Nathaniel says, holding his chin.

They move on and eventually detect the tachyon beams merging up ahead. They stop inside another galaxy at the opposite end of the universe. They have travelled 1,201 billion light years. Their trip has taken just over an hour. However, Doctor Bill is confused again. “These readings make no sense.”

“Let me see,” Nathaniel says. The stars here are tiny. The planets are gigantic. Volume seems to be roughly proportional to the inverse of the mass. Physics is backwards here. They huddle over the computers, trying to figure it all out.

Furthermore, each planet seems to be both shrinking and spiraling into its star while the stars are moving closer together. “Is the galaxy shrinking?” Haticat asks.

“No, we’re getting bigger. Our tiny mass is causing us to spread out. We’re going to grow until we collide with those stars! Land on that planet while we still can!” Nathaniel orders.

The ship lands on an Earth-like planet with lush jungles and tall mountains. Once within the planet’s gravity, and therefore merely another part of the planet, the ship’s size stabilizes. The crew exits the ship to explore. The plants are weird and beautiful. Nathaniel runs ahead a bit. He feels unusually energetic, as if there is more oxygen in the air. He stops to look at some flowers and his crew catches up.

They scan the surrounding plants. What they thought were trees are actually moss. Covering the ground in a thick carpet are woody plants with vascular tissues. Scans reveal that nutrients diffuse quickly, but not evenly if near a surface and the interiors of small plants are always near a surface. “I predict that small animals here will have heart and lungs, but larger animals will not,” Nathaniel says.

They explore further and come across a pond. Tiny flecks swim back and forth. Upon closer examination, these prove to be sharks and whales. Walking around the pond, they see several seal-sized animals sunning themselves. They are rotifers. “So this end of the universe has the same kind of plants and animals as our side, but a different kind of physics,” Haticat comments.

They keep exploring. They cross a river. They find microscopic dinosaurs, bug-sized monkeys, mouse-sized ants, and scorpion-sized scorpions. “That seems to be the neutral size,” Nathaniel says. “Also, the range between biggest and smallest seems to be wider among the aquatic animals than the terrestrial. I suspect the water here is not as buoyant as at home, but might even drag us down. Don’t go swimming.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Haticat says.

“In fact, rocks probably float here, which probably means most of this world’s water is underground,” Nathaniel continues.

“This planet is weird,” Fred complains.

“It confuses me; I don’t like it,” Doctor Bill adds.

They are on their way back to the ship when the ground begins to rumble. They run, but the source of the sound gets closer and the ground shakes enough to make them unsteady. Moss trees start to topple. Finally, they reach the relatively clear area around the river and look up. Peeking over the treeline in the distance is a worm the size of a small mountain. It pulls itself along the ground with swiveling spines on its outer surface. Then it flips its mouth inside-out, revealing many rows of hook-like teeth with which it grabs a moss tree and pulls it in. “Phylum kinorhyncha. Mud dragons,” Nathaniel mutters.

They return to running, but the creature closes in on them faster than they can get back to the ship. Once they reach the end of the pond, they are trapped. “Push the boulder in! We can ride it across!” Nathaniel yells. Nathaniel, Haticat, and Fred push on a boulder and it promptly skips across the surface away from them. As it bounces, breaking the surface tension, large bubbles of air form where it touches, promptly sinking to the bottom. It is too late to run. They turn and fire lasers into the gaping maw.

The creature seems not to notice and drags itself closer. “Into the water! There’s air down there!” Nathaniel yells. The four of them run into the pond just as the creature extends its mouth again. Doctor Bill is snagged on one of the teeth, lifted up, and swallowed. The other three sink deep into the water. They sink deeper and deeper. Nathaniel fights to hold his breath as some surprisingly normal-sized daggertails swim past. The pond is much deeper than it should be. As the surface recedes, it gets very dark. Finally, just when he can’t stand it anymore, he falls into an air pocket.

The buoyant air holds him against the water’s surface as he breathes deeply. Digging in his pockets, he finds a flashlight and looks around. He is in a cavern full of air, and there appear to be side crevices. Haticat and Fred pop through the surface. “It got Doctor Bill!” Haticat says in a low voice, the moisture seeping into his fibers affecting his ability to talk.

“I know, but there’s no time to think about that. We have to find a way out before it eats our ship!” Nathaniel says.

“Why aren’t we falling?” Fred asks.

“The air is holding us up,” Nathaniel says.

“Then why didn’t the air up above hold us up?” Fred asks.

“I don’t know, maybe because there wasn’t that much of it under us. Maybe the pressure matters. I’m still figuring it out,” Nathaniel says.

They crawl through the side crevices into extensive caverns filled with hot, yellow-green crystals, and exotic aerial jellyfish. Eventually, they reach a narrow area and climb through it – until Nathaniel sees jellyfish coming the other way. “Go back.” Another school of jellyfish enters the other end of the passage, blocking their way. The two schools close in on them. “Yikes!”

They fire their lasers, which easily burst the gelatinous bells, but then the loose tentacles go flying. Nathaniel dodges with his superspeed, but Fred is less lucky. He is quickly enveloped by multiple strings of death. Nathaniel and Haticat try to free him as he screams, but only succeed in burning their hands. Their fingers go numb and cannot grip. Fred suddenly stops screaming and faints. Nathaniel fumbles with the scanner to check his life signs, but drops it and it breaks. His fingers are useless. They stay and watch as Fred is slowly dissolved and absorbed by the hot crystals. “Let’s get out of here,” Nathaniel finally says.

The two remaining explorers dodge jellyfish for a couple kilometers of winding passageways before finding another pond. The distance to the surface looks climbable. Nathaniel starts up, followed by Haticat. When they reenter the jungle, they realize they are on the other side of the ship – and closer. Their hands are also starting to feel normal.

Then they come across a clearing. The trees have been flattened. They are all lying in the same direction. “What is thi…” Nathaniel says before he is whisked off his feet by the wind. He grabs a moss tree before he is too high to grab anything. Keeping to the outside of the clearing, Haticat makes his way to Nathaniel, who struggles to reenter still air. “This must be the trail of the mud dragon. The air is following it at the same speed it moves.”

“Why doesn’t the wind mix with the surrounding air?” Haticat asks.

“Laminar flow creates a frictionless interface in some fluids. The air on this planet must act as one of these fluids at this scale,” Nathaniel says.

“Yeah, but why?” Haticat asks.

“I don’t know. Nothing here makes sense. I just want to go home,” Nathaniel grumbles.

Haticat looks across the enormous clearing where the wind still blows. “You’ll figure it out. You’re a genius. You always figure it out.”

Eventually, they fold over a giant moss leaf and use it for wind shelter. It takes all their strength to hold it up against the flow, but it works to deflect the wind around them, trapping a bubble of quiet air underneath. It takes twenty minutes to get most of the way across the worm’s path. Then Nathaniel trips. The leaf collapses and blows away. He grabs on to some rhizomes, but Haticat tumbles along the ground. “Ow! Oh! Aaaah!”

“Haticat!” Nathaniel yells.

Haticat continues to tumble along the ground, bouncing off rocks and moss rhizomes. For protection, he retracts into his soft shell and continues to bounce. Nathaniel wants to go after him, but dares not let go of the ground due to the risk of being carried up into the air. Without contact with the ground, he can’t even take advantage of his superspeed. He crawls the rest of the way across the path into the safety of the jungle and runs after him from there.

Several minutes later, he sees what look like tufts of Stuffian fibers stuck to a very rough-textured rock jutting from the ground. He keeps running and then sees some more. Further along the path, he finds the remains of Haticat’s torn shell, a tail, and a hand – all stuck to the rough rocks. He keeps running, but never finds anything more. The fibers have dispersed.

It is a long walk back to the ship. Nathaniel feels very tired. Not knowing what else to do, he pours a bowl of milk and cereal, but then barely touches it. His appetite disappears. Doctor Bill was gone. Fred was gone. Haticat was gone. The ship was too quiet. His home wasn’t a home without them. Without a crew, was he even a captain? He cries a little, takes a nap, and prepares to return to his home galaxy. Why? There was no reason to go back. He keeps losing people. Arko, Marv, and the other Fred had gone their separate ways. Mister Dinosaur had moved on. Jash, Jain, Darryl, and Mojo had died. Why couldn’t friends stay friends forever?

He walks the ship in a bit of a daze. He ends up in the laboratory where he keeps his soil samples. He looks over his shelves of books from the future, his potted plant collection, the parts of an extra scanner Doctor Bill had been augmenting, and the results of Fred’s most recent target practice. The lab was a beautiful mess.

Still hungry because he had not finished his cereal, Nathaniel opens the stasis box and takes out an unfinished hot chocolate from the other day. It is still hot. A few sips make him feel better, but he rapidly loses his appetite again. He sets the mug back inside next to the ice cream he was keeping cold and the time crystal that kept both nearly frozen in time. He stares at it, feeling stuck in time himself. “Time crystals,” he mutters.

Nathaniel suddenly gets up and strides to the control board of the wheels and rails that make up the time machine. “History can be changed.” He sets some coordinates. It was time for another trip.
Pop! The ship appears just a bit to the side of its original landing site many hours before. He has timed its materialization to coincide with the exact moment he and his crew left the ship earlier so they will not notice his arrival. He runs outside and hides among the moss trees. Soon enough, he sees his earlier self, running ahead, energized by the high diffusion rates of oxygen on the planet. Then he sees his crew lagging behind. “Hey!” They turn around and walk toward him. “Let’s go back to the ship.”

“Why?” Haticat asks.

“It’s dangerous here,” Nathaniel says.

“We’re not afraid of danger,” Fred says.

“I know. Let’s just go back in the ship,” Nathaniel says.

“We’re not giving up on this big of an adventure just because of a little danger. What is going on?” Haticat asks.

“Look, you all die several hours from now and I’m rescuing you from the future. I’ll tell you the whole story inside the ship,” Nathaniel says.

“We’re dead?” Haticat asks.

“You will be if you don’t leave now,” Nathaniel says.

Something in Nathaniel’s voice convinces them to follow him. They take off and fly back home while Nathaniel fills them in on what happened. “So, where to next?” Haticat asks.

“I don’t know. It will be hard to top a trip to the opposite end of the universe. Maybe we’ll visit a planet that can give us immortality. Then the adventures never have to end,” Nathaniel says.

“Yes, let’s do that. That sounds like something worth searching for. Let’s go,” Haticat says. The adventure has only just begun.

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