Armageddon at the Speed of Light

  

Almost lost in the vast darkness of space were small muzzy blots of pale light.  Universes.  Scattered here and there across the eternity of emptiness at distances incomprehensible to mortal mind.

Here, in the middle of where we are which is a place with neither name nor location, is a black hole.  A black hole that exists only once in every countless billions of years, which is time as we count it but that has no record here.  This black hole is the size of a galaxy.

Invisible other than a place where there is no view of distant universes it is a total absence of light in a place where there is no light.

Inside the black hole there is war being waged.  It is a war between heat and gravity.  Gravity is reaching down into the bowels of the black hole to crush and snuff out the heat that is creating expansion to press against the gravity it abhors.

The core has elements heavier than any found elsewhere, heavier by far than gold, uranium or lead.  Elements unknown fusing and twisting in the battle.  This is a place where hydrogen and helium are heavy metals, solid but writhing and twisting, trying to escape the relentless pressure.

Gravity presses ever harder but succeeds only in creating more fusion, more heat to add to the army of the adiabatic processes contorting the deep interior.

Outside, the black hole desperately sucks every drop of matter it can find to cool itself.  There is nothing left but dark matter that has no concern for the war raging within; it remains neutral--an impassive observer awaiting the inevitable that it has seen before but can never remember.

Expansion continues.  Slowly but ever so surely it uses every degree of tens of millions in Centigrade and Fahrenheit to push back at the confining cage of gravity.  Searing heat and yet all elements are solids under the pressure; iron and carbon twisting in oxygen and silicon interlocking and unbending and prising themselves loose where there is no looseness to be gained.

Waves of heat, contraction and expansion, pulse outwards.  The black hole shudders.  For three and a half millennia it quakes.

Gravity feels itself breaking.  It’s fingers twine themselves around the core in a last attempt to wrest control, the fingers are forced open.  One last effort, it spins the black hole hoping for a coriolis effect to even out the heat and so weaken its resolve.  With massive effort the galaxy sized black hole starts to ponderously rotate.  Rapidly, in less than one and a half billion years, it builds up to such a spin as to cause the sides to bulge outwards.

Heat pretends to cooperate.  Centripetal forces retard the spread of heat outwards towards the equatorial plane.

Too late, gravity realises it has sown the seeds of its own destruction.  A weakness, a thinning of the gravitic fields at the poles.

In less than another millennia heat sees its escape and grasps the opportunity by inserting tentacular feelers into the polar regions.  Nanoseconds later there is a cataclysmic explosion.  Unimaginably vast and yet silent as the grave.

Shock waves sear out across the emptiness, trailing relieved clouds of hydrogen and helium.  They drag other, lighter, elements which bring more, slightly heavier, elements with them until gold and uranium join the race for freedom at the tail end.  The heaviest elements cannot escape.  Wailing noiselessly at the lost opportunity they are seized by gravity and held where they are, locked in a tug-of-war between the escaping entropic heat and the grasping gravity fields.

The equatorial regions of the black hole are intact.  They slowly collapse inwards in an attempt to reform the black hole but still light, matter, escape in a jet raging outwards and away, pursuing their own freedoms, in a narrow ‘V’ shape from each pole.

Two embryonic universes form each side of the black hole.

At their union some of the heaviest elements form globes the size of many stars.  So dense that their molecules and atoms rub each other as they vibrate creating more heat.  They shimmer and ripple fighting the huge gravitational forces that drag them inexorably but imperceptibly back towards the gaping maws of the collapsing black hole.

The heaviest elements of all of them are still trapped in the centre of the roiling mass of material engaged in the interminable battle between heat and gravity.  Their atoms are crushed into solid blocks of neutrons, protons and quarks.  Electrons draw wakes as they struggle across the surfaces of combined molecules.

Tardyons and tachyons gyrate and squirm, some escape but most are being dragged back into the war.

Far from the black hole the elements revel in their freedom and come together in joyous union to form clumps and clouds of material that are foci for new galaxies and nebulae.  Heat is working, free to flow, happy in its freedom and sad for the heat that remains behind to fight on.

The great black hole, diminished but still gargantuan, begins its final crushing defeat of the enemy.  The heaviest elements are now moving perceptibly and relentlessly towards the closing poles of the black hole.  Nothing now escapes.  An increasing sphere of blackness surrounds the black hole as the last elements to escape flee the scene.

Raging in anger, gravity hauls on the remaining masses outside its walls and wrests them from their places, sucking them into its hard centre; incorporating them into the seething, solid mass.  Their final rush into the black hole gives gravity its last opportunity for revenge.

As the poles close on the inrushing heavy elements the black hole releases a vast jet of pure radiation energy in both directions.

The jet screams silently through both universes collecting more energy from the heat sources it finds and extinguishes.  It leaves behind it only blackened cinders of lifeless, energy-less atoms.

It is vengeful and venomous in its spite, remorseless in its destruction on behalf of its Master in the black hole.  Only twenty thousand light years across but limitless in its trail it wreaks its outward peregrination of hate and havoc at the speed of light.

There is no defence, no avoidance.  Its targets never see its approach, it is sudden and complete death to anything in its path.

Fifteen billion years it has travelled across the universes.  Still tied to the black hole at its tail and still headstrong at its spear point of deadly intent.  It has no recognition of galaxies, only of heat.  Heat is food to be consumed, to grow, to continue in its quest for more heat, more sustenance.

Eventually it will run out of galaxies to devour and it will die in the far reaches of eternal emptiness but, for now, there is heat to savour, to spend in relentless pursuit of more and yet more.

In a corner of the Milky Way galaxy there is a small planet.  Blue and luxuriant it is home to the greatest variety and multitude of different living organisms in the Universe.

It is in the way.

There is, perhaps, a very small chance that it will be missed, that the jet of pure radiation will go past harmlessly skimming only the far edge of the galaxy.

Untold numbers of souls have already perished in both universes.  Never enough.  Gravity sees life as heat.

Heat and gravity are enemies; the war spreads itself out into the universes.  This is a place where there are no winners only innocent losers.

It is likely, very likely, there are only hours left.  Now is the time to unite.  Embrace friends; take the hands of your enemies.  Seek out your own God.

Pray.