End Time


There is a lonely planet. This planet is known to its inhabitants as Maro. It knows this was not its original name but it cannot remember what its name was, so Maro works. Maro has no star. As a matter of, Maro orbits nothing and is orbited by nothing. All the stars have long since died and so Maro also lives in complete darkness, except for the artificial light Maro’s inhabitants make.
Maro’s parent was called Sur. Sur was very white and also quite lonely. Before Sur was Zha. Zha was very big and very bright and very red. Zha was not quite as lonely but did not like people anyway. Zha was preceded by Sol. Sol knew many people and was quite friendly. There were nearly a dozen other planets and hundreds of moons and asteroids for Sol to talk with. Eventually they all died, though.
Many were killed by the tiny people who now live on Maro. Maro’s
people would walk among them and build great mines and colonies. Yet they were never satisfied. Maro’s people multiplied tremendously and always needed more resources. Soon most of the asteroids were gone and the moons became tapped out. During this time, Maro’s people would also go to other star systems and eat them, but they never all left. There were always many to carry out the work of killing Sol’s friends. When there were no more asteroids or moons they ate the giants and the dwarfs. After the giants and dwarfs were gone, the small people killed the very planets they lived on. Sol could only watch as his friends died in the most horrible ways, with their guts wrenched out for energy and materiel, and their faces poisoned with noxious fumes. The agony was so great that Sol could not live any longer and died in a massive explosion to kill the tiny people and attempt to save the rest of his friends.

Sol died in vain, however. Sol’s death throes had killed two of his own friends and very nearly consumed the very planet the tiny people called home. This planet’s orbit adapted quickly enough to elude death but the surface was far too hot to live on. The tiny people used their great technology to pull this planet back into an orbit where it would be habitable and thus saved their home world.

The tiny people rejoiced too soon, however, as Sol’s death attracted the attention of other, stronger tiny people. These tiny people invaded the few remaining planets and enslaved the original tiny people who called themselves “sapens”. Zha would watch the newcomers and the “sapens” fight and die and kill each other. The newcomers built up great massive mines and ate all the worlds except the home world of the sapens. Eventually, the sapens would overthrow the newcomers and completely eradicate them in vengeful fury. They would then launch a massive crusade to reunite their race and form a new galactic empire.

Many years later, after the new empire had been replaced hundreds of times, Zha would collapse in on himself and Sur would be born. Sur was very white and incredibly lonely. The sapen home world had long ago died and they merely lived on its corpse. Sur would live for incalculable sextillions of years and would see the sapens, or their descendants at least, finally eat their home world’s corps and would live near Sur only in numerous large space stations orbiting Sur and collecting the energy he emitted to sustain their existences. After many trillions of years, Sur would emit so little heat and light that the sapens would actually descend and live on the very surface of Sur. These sapens were but shadows of their former glory and only rarely had contact with their far-flung relatives, whom had also degenerated. The sapens weren’t the only ones; however, all the tiny people were degenerating and dying. The stars themselves were dying. Sur was but one of millions of what we call “white dwarfs” and were joined by what we call “neutron” stars and “black holes”. The universe was very dark and lonesome.

Soon, even these would die. Many of the neutron stars would go dark and dormant, simply floating, dense rocks. Without food, many of the black holes evaporated into sweet oblivion and were envied by all for their release. The white dwarfs like Sur would all gradually fade until they produced no heat or light and became “black”. This was how Maro was born.

Somehow, the inhabitants of Sur would survive and would continue to live on Maro. They had all long ago evolved into totally new and unrecognizable species dozens of times. Maro’s people were short and had only small eyes. Their skin was slightly elastic, seemingly impossibly smooth for organic life, soft, and inconceivably black. Maro’s people large, thin ears and highly developed noses. Their eyes had been artificially changed on the genetic level to see in the utter blackness as well as you or I could see in full daylight. Of course, there was some light that they created artificially, or else they wouldn’t be able to see no matter how good of eyes they had. They could not produce much though, hence the artificial evolution.

Maro’s people lived in small clusters which they called “cities”. These cities were often mainly in the form of underground tunnels and burrows with public caverns and small faint lights spread around at regular intervals. All of their society was bent towards conservation and recycling in order to stretch their species’ existence indefinitely. As such, Maro’s people had strict population controls and had abandoned currency as causing greed and short-term thinking and exploitation. The cities rarely had more than one or two thousand inhabitants and all of them to a man dined together in one large cavern. Maro’s people lived in large complexes that we might liken to apartment buildings that were underground. Each family had one room facing towards a corridor linking many other abodes together. This room was purely for sleeping as breakfast and dinner were eaten with the entire city and lunch was eaten at work or school.

The government of these people was generally self-appointed with the government choosing replacements as it required them and having no large scale elections to replace itself with. Their society largely ran itself with the government only performing calculations using its incredible technology in order to sustain their society indefinitely. In order to make sure that the resources never run out, all the city governments cooperate to an extent and regulate the activities of each other.
The main problem all of them had was to sustain the temperatures needed to survive. All of their architecture was made to trap heat inside their cities and prevent it from dissipating into space. They had long ago sealed off every city from the outside world to prevent heat loss and the cities themselves were linked together with one tunnel which led to one cavern for the various governments to debate in. Around the same time they had genetically modified the species to require as little external and internal heat as possible and had gradually been reducing the heat in the cities’ closed environments over billions of years to affect a natural evolution towards requiring even less heat. The decrease was so slight that no one noticed it and even the government was only aware because it had caused it. Even as this happened, their great technology harvested and recycled as much energy and resources as was physically possible just to prolong their miserable existences.
One day, a great thinker had, using the machines, developed a plan which would prevent any and all energy loss and thus allow their society to continue on into eternity. His plan required that the very machines needed to calculate this were to be turned off, however. Jubilant at this solution to their trillion year old problem, the government immediately implemented his plan and was scaled back to be merely an administrative body as Maro’s people did not progress or move backward. Rather, they stayed the same for untold eons, doing the same exact things for trillions of years.
It came swift and unexpected. Even if the energy loss was as insignificant as for it to appear to not exist, energy is still lost. So, after many eons of waking up and carrying out their lives in the exact same way, one day, they stopped. With no more energy even to simply live, Maro’s people stopped. They physically continued to exist, but were not alive and were not moving even a hairsbreadth. They had reached absolute zero. Total entropy. Maro himself stopped. Thus the last vestige of the universe died. No big crunch. No massive explosion. They simply stopped.