It's the End of the Universe as We Know It...

[Gyrfalcon]

It all started simply enough, when you look back at it. Technician 2nd class Tomas Boswell had just opened the maintenance panel when his boss shouted for him to help out with something down the way. Sighing, he dropped his spanner back into the toolbox and went to go see what was up.

 

However, the spanner didn't land in the tool box, but right on the edge, precariously balanced, and as the errant breath of wind that was his passage created teased it, it slowly tilted forward... right into the main power conduit.

 

The short dimmed the lights across half the ship before the auxiliary systems caught it and rerouted the power around the interrupted conduit. But at the conduit itself, the electricity coursed and arced and flashed across the corridor, grounding itself in one of the primary computer hubs on the ship, a design flaw that had been corrected in later models. This might not have sparked catastrophe however, as its functions were picked up by the other hubs.

 

However, one of the hubs had been suffering from slow memory degradation, and as it picked up the weapons control function, it errantly believed that it had received a signal to fire on the nearest hostile target.

 

At the delicate peace conference the Einsworth was attending, tensions were high between the warring Earth Federation and the Xenthial Empire, and each side still had the ships of the other culture designated as hostile. The nearest hostile ship to the Einsworth was the Xenthial Empire's ambassador's shuttle. It exploded cataclysmically as the Einsworth's main weapons array locked on and fired.

 

It was poor recompense that in the ensuing fleet action, the Einsworth was destroyed by the massed fire of no less then eight battleships. The battle spiraled out of control, and casualties reached over sixth percent for both sides before the battered fleets broke off the engagement. Among the dead was the Earth Federation's ambassador, and both sides claimed that the other had fired first.

 

Even this disaster might have been solved, albeit after many more years of bloody battle, if the Xenthial Empire had not begun to bombard Federation planets, having decided that the Earth Federation's treacherous slaying of their ambassador of peace proved their underhanded and evil intentions once and for all.

 

The atrocities grew and accelerated as more and more powerful weapons were funneled to the front lines. Planetary bombardments gave way to planetary annihilation, massive bombs that shattered planets like eggs, spilling out the molten mantle to freeze in the cruel grip of the universe. Planetary annihilation gave way to stellar annihilation, massed beam weapons at specific frequencies fired into sun after sun, destabilizing and aging them well beyond their time, and eventually causing them to explode into supernovas, even stars that would never have reached that phase.

 

And finally, stellar annihilation gave way, accidentally, into universal annihilation. A desperate Earth Alliance dispatched a weapon team to the center of the galaxy, where a prototype weapon was to draw on the energy of the massed super black holes that formed the center of the galaxy and use that energy to annihilate a swath of stars four hundred light years wide and six hundred deep, carving the heart out of the Xenthial Empire.

 

But something went wrong. The energy fed back on itself, and grew exponentially. The super black holes grew, merged, and consumed greedily, feeding on the energy they gained and reaching out to grasp more and yet more. Stars fell into their grasp, and whole systems disappeared, then whole nebulas, constellations and clusters.

 

It happened in less then an eye blink in stellar scales, less then two centuries, and the black hole sucked in all matter, even to the farthest reaches. And then something that had never happened before - a black hole had consumed all the energy that it could contain, and it itself collapsed into a singularity, a singularity containing all the matter in the universe. And there... it waited.

 

God looked steadily at the singularity. It was all He could do not to take His own name in vain. Billions of years of work, screwed up by one idiot maintenance worker and his metal lunch box. Sighing, He raised his arms and said concentrated on the singularity. "Right, let's do this again, and let's do it right this time."

 

"Let there be light."

 

And there was light.