Look at all the stars

In their sea of velvet black

Glittering diamonds

It was late and cold. The hum of old and over worked computers droned through the sporadic tick tack of keyboard typing while cheap florescent fixtures cast their slightly green light over everything.

This was not the most comfortable workplace Corvus had ever had, he often reminded himself, but it was the most interesting work he’d ever had. With any luck he’d be able to publish some findings soon and then he’d be able to focus on writing more grant proposals, which would in turn lead to him being able to do more research that would lead to further publications…and the cycle would continue. He hated writing grant proposals, but as far as he knew, so did everyone else who’d ever written one. The rest of the time it was a blast.

That was why Corvus was still sitting in his tiny cubical, scanning over image after image, sometimes stopping to compare one with another. He hadn’t told anyone what he had found yet, or what he suspected he had found. In astronomy, where all anyone with a telescope has to do to copy you is to look where you look, it sometimes pays to be a little quiet about your work until you have a sufficient enough lead others would be unlikely to catch up. That was the other thing about astronomy. It took time. You had to compare images from days, weeks, sometimes years apart in order to find what you’re looking for. In Corvus’s case, he was searching for things that weren’t there, or more accurately, that weren’t there any more.

It was common knowledge that stars eventually die. Some of them explode, some of them in less spectacular fashion, but they all followed known patterns. The spots that Corvus was looking for were not just stars though, they were whole galaxies. What was more, they were, quite possibly, the most distant visible galaxies and they had all winked out over the course of a few days. The night before he had still been able to pick out the faint glow of them but tonight there was absolutely nothing. Nothing in the visible spectrum of light, no radio frequencies, no x-rays, nothing. He bent down low over his keyboard, tired and yet filled with the excited energy of someone who has found something terribly exciting and secret, and began running calculations on how fast the change, whatever it was, had taken place.

“Well you’re here early.”

Corvus jumped in his seat, having been so lost in his own thoughts and calculations that he hadn’t heard anyone come in.

Voron, one of the other astronomers working in the small lab, just laughed and leaned up against the short cubical wall that divided their work spaces from one another. He looked over Corvus’s desk, noting the food wrappers and empty drink cups.

“Or have you just been here all night?” He asked and then added with another chuckle, “You know our pictures are just as good in the morning as they are at night.”

Corvus returned the laugh. He liked Voron. He was always smiling, always funny, and he was extremely good at modeling stellar systems. He was also one of the few others who knew what Corvus was studying.

“How are the little friends?” Voron asked and he gestured to the images still on Corvus’s screen,

“All gone,” Corvus replied with a bit of a smug grin. Voron had wagered that they would stop fading and start reversing the process.

“Then there must be something obscuring them,” Voron told him. “A dark nebula or something.”

“Highly unlikely,” Corvus assured him.

“Why?”

There was one last piece of the puzzle that Corvus hadn’t told Voron about yet. Even now he wasn’t sure if he should tell him, but then again, why not? He was aching to tell somebody.

“They’re all from different clusters,” he almost whispered. “From all over the sky.”

Voron’s brow furrowed.

“And now the next closest galaxies,” Corvus rushed on and he turned his computer monitor towards Voron, “are beginning to fade.”

Voron stepped around the cubical divider, dragging his chair with him, and he sat down beside Corvus to get a better view and Corvus pulled up a full series of images for Voron to see. He clicked through the images, comparing them much in the same way that Corvus had done before him.

“You still aren’t telling me the whole truth,” Voron observed and he tapped the corner of the screen where the date was watermarked on the images. “These are from last week.”

Corvus felt his breath catch as his excitement rose. He’d hoped Voron would notice. He wanted to give him see the older images first, when the first galaxies had actually faded away into nothing, so that he could really surprise Voron.

Corvus cocked his eyebrow and then opened the images from the previous night.

Voron frowned and then gave Corvus a wary smile.

“You are having some fun with me on this now, yes?”

Corvus smiled as well, partly at how Voron would sometimes word his sentences. His English was very good but every once in a while his grammar would get a bit weird, especially when he was distracted.

“Those are all the same coordinates,” Corvus assured him. “Just one week apart.”

“But…but…there’s,” Voron stammered, “the whole cluster is gone!”

“And it’s the same for all the others,” Corvus went on, “They’re all just vanishing!”

He was brimming with excitement, theories for what could be going on were swimming through his sleep deprived head and he hardly noticed when Voron took the key board and mouse from him.

“What are you doing?” Corvus asked at last when he realized Voron was skimming through all of his images and calculations. It was one thing to be sharing his discovery with Voron, it was another to just let Voron poke through the entirety of his research.

“This is bad,” Voron said in a low tone. “This is very bad.”

“This is the discovery of the century!” Corvus countered. “Can you imagine all the new science we’ll be able to discover? This could revolutionize—

“It’s accelerating,” Voron cut him off. “Did you notice?”

“Well, yeah,” Corvus admitted.

“It was covering galaxies in days when you first found it, now it’s covering whole clusters in a week.”

Corvus stayed silent. Voron was clearly building up to something but Corvus couldn’t see it yet.

“If this isn’t dust or something just obscuring them,” Voron said, “Then what is it? It can’t be something moving over them, it’s already progressing at several orders of magnitude over the speed of light.”

Corvus was getting nervous now. He’d had some dark inkling in the back of his mind for a few days that this could be something bad, and not just an exciting new discovery, but he’d pushed those ideas down whenever they’d tried to crop up.

“Nothing can move faster than light,” Corvus said but Voron waved him off.

“As far as we know,” Voron said, “but something is happening, all around us, and propagating inward at incredible velocity. Galaxies don’t just vanish! Their stars can die, they can collide with other galaxies, and so on, but those all leave their traces. This!” He gestured toward Corvus’s screen, “This leaves nothing!”

“It could be expansion,” Corvus suggested. “Best theories of the past expansion of the universe predict that rapid expansion could occur at rates higher than the speed of light.”

Voron gave him a flat stare. They both knew that such expansion required incredible energy density throughout the universe that just wasn’t present any more.

“I think it more likely we are more like bubble,” Voron said, “and we are seeing it pop from inside.”

Together they sat quietly, thinking over the implications of this new discovery until Voron finally heaved out a sigh and revived his usual smile.

“Whatever happens, this is a very cool discovery and I want to help!” He rose back to his feet and swung his chair back over to his own cubical. “No use being sad and afraid of what we don’t know. Maybe we both win Nobel Prizes! Now go home and sleep, you look like my father.”

“I thought your dad was dead?” Corvus asked.

“He is,” Voron replied with feigned seriousness.

Corvus managed a wane smile and gathered up his things. Maybe after a good sleep he’d feel better and be able to see things more clearly. Maybe he was just misunderstanding Voron’s dire comments. Perhaps it was all just a joke. Either way, he’d deal with all of that later.