In the depths of darkness, where the only sounds were those of silly videos, she sat unnaturally calm facing the door, scrolling through the clips on her phone with boredom as if she were an ordinary being — yet nothing about her was ordinary. Her skin looked as if carved from plaster. Her third eye, perched on her forehead like a planet watching the world from above. Her white clothes poured over her body in a union that made her look as if she, too, were sculpted from plaster.
The sound of small footsteps approached the door. It was a little boy of about five years old, his clothes torn and dusty, wearing only one shoe; the other foot bare and chapped from the cold. Behind him was an icy landscape.
She revealed sharp teeth in a terrifying smile in the dark and said, "You've come at last... Do you know how long I've been waiting for you?"
"I'm sorry, the dream was convincing and I didn't see through it easily."
The little boy burst into a cloud of smoke and became an adult — a handsome young man of twenty-five, dazzling in his looks. His messy black hair rebelled like the shadow of a scientist driven mad by his passion for the unknown; some of it fell over his face like ink streams on white paper. He wore an ash-gray shirt printed with the words: "Gravity, the trick. I am the one who keeps you on the ground." The young man continued, "Guess what I was dreaming... I dreamed I was still poor, haha."
The strange being felt a stomachache and said, "You should thank me. Without me, you and your family would still be eating dust now."
The young man moved closer to a table, grabbed a chair and sat, then took her hands.
"Delta, no matter how much I thank you I can't repay you... but you're a fictional creature. True, I don't know how you affect reality — maybe it's coincidence or I'm hallucinating — but I can test you with an idea."
"I want to see you do it, and you'll book your return ticket, you fool. I'm responsible for your success... That's not important. [She looked serious.] Let's talk about tomorrow, and to be honest, I don't know what will happen. Since we can't receive messages from the future using backward-causality tech, it's probably bad."
"What really scares me is that this is inevitable, according to the principle of history preservation that prevents the universe from contradicting itself. Even if we decide not to do it tomorrow, the same problem will remain. Frankly, I don't care if the planet is destroyed and humanity wiped out — I'd rather we all die than that I die alone. I think Marcot agrees with me, haha."
Delta sighed, looked down and chuckled a little. She raised her head and said with a smile, "3..2..1."
The alarm rang.
Farid woke a second before the alarm and turned it off. Delta always woke him before the alarm, which often left him wondering how she could watch the clock from outside his body even though she was only a fictional tulpa. Farid kept his room decorated with turn-of-the-millennium aesthetics and the technological optimism of that era. He went into the bathroom to empty his bladder and washed his face.
A knock on the door shattered the silence of the large room. It was the maid in white clothes, brown hair tied in a bun, faded hazel eyes and an annoying stutter in her speech. She said, "M-Mr. Farid, your parents are waiting... Y-You're late."
He opened the door. "I'm here."
"G-G-Good morning, M-Mr. Farid."
"Hello, Lily. How are you, and how's your father? I heard he was ill?"
"I'm f-fine, th-th-thank you for asking... It's true, my father is ill but he's recovering."
"If you need anything, just tell me."
After a long walk...
"Hello, Mom, Dad."
He stared at his sister with a smile frozen on his face. Karen, two years younger than him, looked down at him over her glasses with disgust and said, "You're not funny. Grow up; you're not a child anymore."
"Have some respect, I'm a doctor."
Their father interrupted, "Sit down, eat your food, and move — you're late."
Farid sat. His mother, who preferred to cook herself rather than entrust the task to one of the maids, sat after him.
On this important day they would try a new way to test string theory, the nonsense that had outlived itself after scientists despaired of finding a theory to unify the laws of physics. Today's experiment would either prove it or drive another nail into its coffin.
Many scientists attended, including Nobel laureates, drawn by the existential revolution started by Aileen Fazari after the quantum mechanics upheaval. In this generation many long-standing questions had been solved, and this era was called the Golden Age of Scientists. Farid's mother said, "I feel like this is nonsense... you're doing trivial things and wasting taxpayers' money, and you'll cut the power to run that thing."
His father said, "Yes, your mother is right. You discovered this triviality that doesn't seem logical... H-How will this benefit humanity?"
"I saw a video about your experiment saying you want to open a gate for demons, and there's a leaked video of you performing pagan rituals."
"Damn conspiracy theories," Farid said. "Mom, those are videos by non-experts talking conspiracy logic. Just because you don't understand doesn't mean a grand conspiracy is being plotted against humanity."
His mother replied, "I think the Freemasons pay you well to say that."
Karen finally spoke, "Mom, you believe cleverly made AI videos with silly voices, haha."
Annoyed by the argument, Farid replied quickly, "I've finished my food. Goodbye."
He changed clothes and put on a dark blue dress shirt, a black tie and polarized glasses that changed tint when you rotated the lens. He grabbed his keys and went to his car.
Farid headed to the shop to buy three juice cartons for his team, then straight to his workplace — the Super Hadron Collider.
He parked his car in a distant spot because the place was crowded. He carried his bag with a pristine white lab coat hanging from it while Delta hovered beside him in the air as he walked toward the front door. Turning along the wall, he found the door jammed with people trying to storm the agency.
A sharp whistle sounded. Farid turned and saw his rival, Dr. Aileen Fazari, peeking at him from an iron door; even he hadn't known she'd be there. She was two years older than him, her black hair messy and her gray eyes dried from sleeplessness. Her body embodied all the perfections of femininity in ideal proportions, like a piece of art shaped by a master sculptor. She wore a blouse and a skirt slightly slit on one side in deep blue, long sheer stockings, and shoes, all cloaked by a lab coat draped over her shoulders like an old friend accompanying her research journey.
Farid raised his hand slightly and waved; she replied nervously, "Put that greeting where the sun doesn't shine. Just get in, quickly."
She and her team resented Farid because he had run away yesterday and hadn't finished his tasks. He entered through the secret door, scanned his access card and rode down with Aileen and Delta — unseen by anyone else — in an elevator heading down. Farid broke the silence, "I've never seen a girl whistle before, haha."
Aileen didn't answer.
They descended kilometers down to the giant tube of the hadron collider. "Damn, I forgot to bring the apology drink," Farid said.
Delta's voice in his head: "There are photographers outside and the place is far."
Farid turned and returned. Aileen looked at him and said sarcastically, "What did you eat for breakfast to be this dizzy?"
He snapped back irritably, "You should be the one to tell me what you ate for breakfast the day you destroyed the economy."
"Haha... you terrorist, your tone and foreign accent make your replies sound like children's shows."
Aileen stepped on a patch of water leaking from the cooling pipes and slipped, letting her leg slide away. She fell forward on purpose to catch herself before hitting the ground and got wet. "Next time watch your words, you racist," she said, standing up, annoyed, her hand in the pocket of her lab coat. Suddenly a voice shouted, "Duck!"
A cloth covered in black oil flew toward Farid's face. In his imagination Delta leapt out, grabbed his hair and yanked him hard backward. Farid put his hand on the floor to catch himself before his back hit the ground. Aileen tried to kick him between the legs but cramped.
"Haha, nice try. You two will never get me."
The director appeared in a golf cart touring the lower levels and the three of them fell silent and serious. Farid, after they moved away, said, "I think that's enough... Lunch and dinner are my treat. Stop trying to take revenge; I am the luckiest man in the world. After dozens of attempts you still couldn't get me — did you expect to win this time? And Dr. Dan, from afar you look like a molar, haha... the wisdom tooth, you and that dirty lab coat — if I had a coat that size I'd use it to cover my car, haha."
Dr. Dan Lopez was a barrel-shaped man in his mid-thirties. He replied, "Fine, you convinced me. Let's go to a fancy restaurant, and grow up — you're not a child."
Aileen cut him off, "Enough. Use your skill and tell us how the stock and currency markets are."
"I don't want to spoil it. People wait for my opinion and pay hundreds of thousands, even millions, for it. I can't give it to you for free."
"We're your friends."
"My friends don't hide pepper spray in their pockets."
Aileen, angry: "Are you going to speak, you bastard?"
"Okay... Honestly I don't know. I'll call you when I guess something."
They decided to stay hidden below until test time, but Dan's phone rang and the director told him to come up for the group photo. They rode up in the elevator. Aileen said sarcastically, "I'm scared, Dan. The elevator might fall, haha."
Dan smiled, veins bulging from his forehead, "Do you know, children, that excess weight used to be a trait of kings and the rich, while skinny bodies like yours were the exclusive domain of slaves who had nothing to eat, haha. If someone from the past looked at us, they'd think I'm the owner and you two my servants, under my shoe. [Silence them during the ride.] How nice, how nice that you're quiet, haha."
They reached the ground floor. The place was decorated with engravings; the floor looked like a circuit board painting with neon lights and the walls bore complex drawings of hadrons and Feynman diagrams. Farid said, "I forgot my lab coat... Aileen, where's Marcot?"
"She's hiding in the control room closet."
"Mr. Farid... Mr. Farid..."
Suddenly the place exploded with photographers. "Oh, damn."
"Dr. Farid, is it true that this experiment will destroy the world? What are the risks?"
"Uhm... honestly it's very unlikely and there are no risks in this experiment. All you've heard is a silly conspiracy theory."
"What were the risks?"
"People said there was a chance of forming a black hole, and that's true — such black holes form, but they're tiny and evaporate almost instantaneously due to Hawking radiation, so they pose no danger. The second plausible thing was a Higgs particle collapse, or so-called false vacuum decay, but current studies indicate the Higgs field is more stable than we thought, so literally there's no danger from the experiments."
"Dr. Aileen, are rumors true about your romantic relationship with Farid and... where did you get the inspiration to start the revolution you called the Ontological Revolution, which specialized in studying time and its relation to abstract things within the science of Beyondology?"
Aileen looked at Farid in surprise at the first question and said, "No, we're just colleagues. As for the ontological revolution, the inspiration came during my PhD. I modified delayed-choice experiments and invented a method to make instantaneous quantum entanglement across time last longer. I set up several experiments to send a message to the past in Morse code. Suddenly a message arrived from my future self, sent five minutes after my moment of observation and perception. That's when I got the idea to create a contradiction and test what would happen if I didn't start the machine and didn't send that message to the past — yet the experiment seemed to run by itself as if that zero-probability alternative were occurring instead of the normal no-machine possibility. It was strange, like a Rube Goldberg machine embodying determinism. I realized time is conserved and temporal contradictions don't exist. I published a paper and a revolution began, like Dr. Louis Astrolikon's theory of the tiny probability of the constants of the universe, and beyondological particles like the information particle called the Meme, which started as a unit of cultural transmission and transformed, in the theory of Non-Contradiction, into a unit of information transmission discovered by Dr. Marcot Beyondraim, and also the Chrononon particle as a unit for..."
"Mr. Dan, tell us how you achieved superconductivity at lab temperature..."
Suddenly the lights went out because a vacuum cleaner fell on them. The three fled and Aileen's phone rang. Photographers turned lights back on, and their image of them fleeing was comical, especially Dan, who looked like a running cow waddling left and right, his fat flopping. Aileen and Farid hid behind him. Aileen pulled out her phone and smashed it against the wall. When they moved away, Farid said, "Thanks to this phone scandal [pointing at her], everyone saw our rears as we ran. I wish the planet would explode right now."
After much dodging and selfies with scientists, researchers, and students, and a group photo with all the prominent scientists and Nobel winners at the conference, they entered the kitchen and closed the door. Aileen banged one of the cupboards; as it opened, the smell of skin burst out and a dramatic giant woman over two meters tall (about seven and a half feet), taller than all three little people standing in front of her, emerged. Her body was like a sacred monumental statue of a goddess of beauty, a gothic Platonic model of a woman whose huge body radiated a flawless whiteness. Her breasts were like swollen moons of divine flesh that hid the light from Farid's eyes as he stood afar. The curves of her body defied geometry and silenced every imperfect artist trying to draw it. Her silky black hair flowed smoothly, doubting the very theory of blackbody radiation. Full red lips pierced by two side rings, heavy eye makeup made her whites and blacks more terrifying. She had no eyebrows, which gave her a gaze colder than ice, freezing and shattering the bones of anyone who looked at her.
It was the scientist Marcot Beyondraim. She came straight to Farid, who could not tell whether she was angry or not; he could only see her wide eyes hungry to devour him. Marcot was the only person who could get to him.
"Please don't... no... just don't look at me. Look over there, please..."
Dan bought coffee with Farid's bank card, his mouth watering at Marcot, and said, "Lunch and dinner are on him. If he doesn't pay we'll beat him up."
Marcot did not speak. Farid tried to change the topic, "You missed the group photo."
Marcot replied in a deep voice, "Why should I care about a photo if the world will be destroyed before I see it?"
"Why are you so pessimistic?"
Aileen answered, "It's obvious it will fail. You're just trying to hide the sun with a sieve. Today is when the Great Filter theory will come true. Our knowledge has reached its limit. We will be destroyed inevitably, so I suggest we beat you now."
Farid stepped back and shouted, "Stop... [then, more calmly and firmly] I am the luckiest man in the world and I say it will succeed. Don't be unfair. Your guess that the world will be destroyed is belief without evidence and not scientific. You rely only on faith that it will fail, but... where is your scientific evidence? Haha, we are scientists; we speak by scientific evidence, don't we?"
Dan said, "Whoever says the experiment will destroy the planet, raise your hand."
Everyone raised their hands except Farid, who replied quickly, "See? You have no scientific evidence. Even if we didn't perform the experiment and the planet was to be destroyed as you claim, history-preservation would just make it happen anyway. Let's perform the experiment to give our death meaning, rather than it being a nearly zero-probability coincidence. Let nature take its course."
---
They all sat in their places. There were more than two hundred people in chaotic motion and phones rang everywhere. As the particles accelerated, the power was cut to the city to increase the magnetic fields that speed the particles beyond usual levels, raising the fractional digits after ninety-nine percent of the speed of light. Farid pressed the button to steer the particles onto the collision path so the experiment could succeed. Immediately after pressing the button he felt his mass drop intermittently for moments.
From behind he heard a scientist say, "The space observatory and several ground observatories have recorded illogical gravitational waves."
The screens began displaying data. The data analyst said, "Something is wrong... the amount of energy does not match the hadrons we launched. There are odd gamma-ray readings... the ontological chamber is detecting hadrons of the 'sorcerer-qarri' and their antiparticles... it seems we created a black hole and this is Hawking radiation."
"Stop the process and monitor it closely. The 'sorcerer' and the 'qarri' need high energy and heat to form, hoping Hawking radiation will dissipate them," someone said.
Aileen, responsible for temperature, said, "The temperature is decreasing slowly."
"Damn, that thing is growing."
"It's feeding from the inside; our instruments are still intact... [beep... beep] Okay, it's gone dark; we're blind to what's happening there."
Farid said, "But how can it feed from the inside?"
An empty chair next to Dan began moving toward the giant screen before them. Everyone stared at the chair in deadly silence...
Suddenly the power cut out. In the chaos some tried to run and escape.
Dan took a sip of coffee, waited for it to settle in his stomach, stood up and pulled out a revolver. He fired a bullet that struck the back of Farid's head and killed him instantly. Dan declared, "Did you think you'd get away with your act, you terrorist? Consider this our revenge, you clown."
Panic erupted. Most people ran out after seeing the gun. Dan sat back down and some, like Marcot and Aileen and others, surrendered and stayed inside. Marcot applauded Dan for what he did and smiled. Dan said, "Marcot, I never saw you laugh, haha."
Aileen climbed up to them and said, "You have the right gun. We're dead, we're dead. Why not play Russian roulette?"
Dan said, "I think popular opinion is right: most scientists have a spectrum of madness... okay, you first."
The black hole was pulled toward the Earth. Though small, its event horizon sliced through material as if pulling a thread from dough, heading for the planet's center, its mass increasing exponentially.
Marcot came out of a door with blood stains on her clothes from her friends and a triumphant smile on her face. She opened the trunk of her only car in the underground garage, took a bag and got in. She started a livestream titled: "We're saving some people from the end of the world."
"Hello everyone... and welcome, notification army. Ooo, the notification battalion is bigger this time. I love you all."
"Is it the end of the world?" "Will the world end, O Princess of Darkness?" "Are you going to tell us the world ended?" "We want cosplay Robin."
"Hold on, nebrassolian, you'll be banned. This is not cosplay time. Anyway, when you see me smiling and talking a lot know that something bad will happen. Officially, it's the end of the world, haha. I challenge you to find anything worse. I'll go out in a minute... yes, you'll receive the official alert soon. Throw your phones out the window because the sound will be annoying. Hide in a safe place with a computer or something and watch me save some people. If you have someone you care about, tell them the news."
"What will you do?" "How will you save people?"
Marcot put on a helmet with a camera and built-in donation-reading tech. She drove at full speed and began running over students and people trying to survive. Her powerful SUV was not stopped by the human bodies. "I have some weapons in the bag. Send donations and I'll kill people as requested, starting at $100 for an adult, $500 for a teen, $1,000 for a child."
People tried to call the police but no one answered. A strong earthquake began to shake the earth and the clouds moved faster. At the same time phones malfunctioned and began emitting very loud alarm tones with text:
☆ Emergency Message — Government ☆ To everyone who receives these words: A black hole is forming inside our planet, expanding rapidly and heading toward the center of the Earth. Scientists confirm the end is imminent and unstoppable. Turn off the lights, hold your loved ones, say what you didn't say, pray and forgive one another. These are the last moments... the last minutes of humanity. — National Emergency Agency —
"You saw? I told you. The hunt has begun."
"Charlie_ $500 — the boy with glasses and the blue shirt"
Marcot struck him down with her first shot. "I practiced shooting after discovering this Silence Era nine months ago," she said.
"Jp097_6 $1150 — hit the mother cart"
She rammed him with the car. Someone ran out of an alley and shouted, "Say 'uwu' and save me, O Princess of Darkness."
She killed him, "Haha, this kid is crazy."
She kept mowing people down until she reached Farid's house. She smashed the fence, took out her phone and saw a maid trying to run. A rifle bullet blew off the maid's head. She smashed the door lock and entered. Farid's father, mother and sister were all killed.
"Five million views, haha... Well, this is what I managed to save before my ammo ran out. I advise you to save yourselves too. I know an elite handful are still watching this criminal right now... As a grand finale, I thought I'd kill myself ten different ways, pay one push and be the first. I apologize to the souls of those I killed, but I won't reach Farid's level who actually annihilated humanity... they were dead anyway, I only provided them with a better death. Did I kill them? Wait, look — the clouds are falling to the ground. I hope your houses are earthquake-proof like this one."
Marcot took a full bottle of pills from her bag and swallowed them. She tied a rope around her neck, strapped explosives to her waist, slit her wrists and poured a bottle of fuel on herself.
"You will see me on the other camera, and as last words I want to thank Farid for killing more than 9 billion people. He's the greatest murderer in history. I'm proud I worked with him. I will commit suicide and I'm completely satisfied and proud that everyone will die with me. As I always say, reality doesn't wait for you to digest it, and most importantly no one will gloat or attend my funeral, haha. Screw you all."
She set herself ablaze, put Dan's revolver in her mouth and raised a bottle of acid in the air. She turned it and quickly fired the gun, dying instantly. The acid dissolved her face. Her body stuck to the house facade and then exploded into pieces. Seconds later the phone flipped due to the earthquake and the tilt of the ground and began ringing because someone was calling. Gravity intensified; people felt a crushing force pressing them down like a giant foot. Limbs broke. The same thing happened on the other side of the world. Buildings collapsed; the ground split. Iron crushed structures; they gave way under the weight, rising in giant blocks revealing abyssal depths. All living creatures were turned into flattened patties and pools of blood while the Earth's crust sank into hell.
The scene shifts to outer space, where Earth comes into view—shattering, breaking apart, its crust folding inward as a black void opens at its center and consumes it whole.
The planet has been destroyed. Humanity, with all its countless hopes, was wiped out in a single, unavoidable strike—so strange, so impossibly bizarre .