But First It Is Sung

by Aimee Ogden

It has taken an eon for the universe to settle on a name for the new universe it has spawned. A beautiful little thing: positive curvature, and, yes, judging by the fault lines along which its supersymmetry breaks, ekpyrotic too. A magnificent future ahead of it, then, the endless succession of death and rebirth. Time enough to manifest an intelligence of its own, perhaps—a gift not all universes will enjoy. The parent universe embarks on the song of its child's name, a song that will last across the new universe's entire first cycle.

It is still singing when it feels the familiar pressure from outside its chosen brane in the multiversal manifold. The universe hunters have caught up once more and it can feel them—not individually, but as a whole, groping along its boundaries. Looking for a way to evert it into their own universe, to steal its mass and energy and hold off the Big Rip that threatens to rend all they know particle from particle.

It would not be the first universe to suffer such a fate. It panics and gobbles up the nascent universe before it, too, can be poached by the hunters. They are still feeling their way over it when it flees back into the bulk between branes. A scream that endures millennia as galaxies and rogue stars shear away, and then the universe is free, sliding desperately through the manifold for a corner of reality where it cannot be found.

The universe huddles in a minor pocket unpleasantly gastrulated into the dimensions of a cold dead universe, away from the inhospitably symmetrical nature of the local fundamental forces. It should have been ridiculous, the universe thinks, a matchup such as this one. The universe is vast and endless and wise; the universe hunters are small and brief, tens of lifetimes passing between the universe's every flight. But they are many, and so much quicker to react, and these things make them powerful nearly to the point of ergodicity—there is no point to which the universe can flee that they will not find it—and as if to prove that, they appear again before the universe has even begun to rest. It tries, as it has before, to shake them off, to pick them loose—impossible. Like trying to pick individual atoms off one of its own infinite moons; beyond its ability to see, let alone manipulate.

So again, it flees. Again, it knows, they will find it. They have found it so many times already. And it has reabsorbed countless offspring in its flight, hoarding its own constituent parts against the potential of a better future.

And what if there is no future?

All things have their natural time, including universes. Sometimes that allocation is infinite. And sometimes rather less. The fabric of the universe contracts minutely as it reflects on all the young universes it has birthed and lost in turn. Would it be so terrible, it wonders, for the weary cycle to make one final turn?

This is not surrender, the universe vows. This is change. This is adaptation. This is one last dear and desperate chance, the universe swears, and it shapes this oath around a single true and never-spoken name.

It is not enough merely for the universe to be: it must also be shared.

The universe knows where the hunters' home brane is and crosses the bulk toward it, sliding in alongside their native universe unnoticed—at least for now. The hunters are all but omnipresent, and they will be here as soon as anywhere else. They will try to force their way inside it. But only if an inside exists.

The universe twists itself into painful contortions, tearing itself wide open at its understructures. At its heart it invaginates, folding in upon itself to create new boundaries where none had existed, closing beloved parts of itself off so that even it cannot find them. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be spitefully rendered unusable, put to work and crushed flat by the laws of thermodynamics. The universe takes some joy in that as the universe hunters fall upon it with their prying, bottomless need. Without hesitation, without shame, they feed it to the gaping, unthinking maw of their own home universe. Or perhaps there is some sentience lurking there, beneath the cold, the hunger? Impossible to dwell on for long. The ache of this stranger's accelerating scale factor chews away the universe's every thought.

Every thought, except a precious one.

At its heart, hidden from even the universe's own awareness, inside an elaborately bounded manifold, a pocket has been carefully folded into the bulk. There, an infant universe forms; a small one, and too quickly made. Not ekpyrotic: only one chance to live and die. And no wise and careful parent to shepherd it through that single cycle.

Surely one chance is better than none. Something counts greater than nothing: a mathematical fact across every worthwhile iteration of physics. The universe would like to tell its offspring this, but there is no time for that. All it can do is call out its offspring's name. As eons unspool, even that is torn apart, shredded to its one-dimensional fundamental constituents and farther.

But first—but first—it is sung.

Aimee Ogden is an American werewolf in the Netherlands. Her debut novella SUN-DAUGHTERS, SEA-DAUGHTERS was a Nebula Award Finalist, and her latest novella, EMERGENT PROPERTIES, came out in July 2023. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Analog. She also co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, a magazine of fun and optimistic speculative fiction.