When soap is added to a sink full of water, and the soap is adequately mixed in and the water is sloshed around enough, bubbles form on the surface. And the bubbles that are touching other bubbles, sometimes suddenly merge together into one larger bubble.

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Long after all of the universes had gone quiet. Long after the last star died out. Long after the last black hole decayed to nothing, and even long after the last proton had withered away, the universes became empty.

They were empty of life, of matter, of energy, of anything.

But the empty universes themselves were still there, they still had their own rules and laws and inherent properties, and lots of them were still expanding.

And the ones that were expanding, had never stopped expanding.

They never stopped expanding even though there was nothing inside of them and no gods awake to guide or stop them.

They were an empty shell of what they once were; like an abandoned town, that used to be full of people that would eat and drink, celebrate and mourn, live life and create life, be born and die, but was now just a memory of lives once lived, holding nothing but the distant memories of what they once were.

A graveyard of memories.

But the universes did not stop expanding.

They did not stop growing.

They kept getting bigger, and bigger, and eventually their sizes grew so big that they started getting close to other universes.

They were not designed to do this, the gods had made them very, very far away from each other so that they would be separate.

But the gods that created them were asleep, and they had been asleep for so long that even the gods themselves eventually atrophied and withered away into nothing.

After a very, very, very long time, the expanding universes started to come into 'physical' contact with each other.

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When they did, a strange thing happened.

They joined together, becoming one, like two bubbles in a sink full of soapy water merging into a single, larger bubble, it 'created' a new universe.

And the new universes kept the same inherent properties of the old ones. They were still expanding, still growing.

After some time, all the universes had joined into one. A single, giant universe made up of all the others that were first created.

But the old universes were tied to their own set of rules, and some universes had rules that contradicted the rules of other universes, but because they were, at first, separate, this was never an issue.

But they were no longer separate. They were together. They were one.

This new universe now encompasses all that ever was, and all that ever had been, it was made up of all the dead universes, every last one. Filled with nothing but memories of a long distant past, of life that once lived. It was a graveyard. The graveyard of existence.

This new universe, that was once a collection of many, smaller universes, had its own rules now. As the smaller universes came together to merge with others, their rules and their properties also merged. But because some of the rules contradicted each other, when they merged, they created entirely new rules with entirely new behaviors.

They behaved in ways the gods themselves had never imagined nor intended. And as they all became one universe, the new universe ended up behaving in very, very odd ways.

Ways that were, in the truest sense of the word, 'unnatural'. This new universe defied normality, it defied the laws that belonged to the original universes, and it defied the original gods. It defied existence itself.

This new universe was dead, composed of nothing but decayed and foul-smelling memories, but because it had laws that should not have ever been, it behaved in ways that a universe should not have ever behaved in.

And so, over a very, very long time, strange things began to happen.

Things began to emerge from the nothing, from the void, from the empty.

Beings that should have never existed, but now do.

These things, living in a rotten universe filled with nothing but the memories of a time long past, of life that no longer lived, of a reality that was no longer real, started to do the only thing they could do: Imitate.

They mimicked the life in those memories, but the things were not life nor were they alive, they were a mockery, a falsity of life itself. If existence was true, they were false. If life was positive, they were negative. These dead but not dead things started to move, to feed, and eat the other things like a predator would eat its prey.

As the new universe was big, so too were the new beings, and they also 'lived' a very long time, longer than anything that had existed before them did, almost forever. Usually, they would spend their time just existing, doing and thinking nothing, for eons at a time. Sometimes they would hunt each other, and when one hunted another, the hunt would last for millions of years. They did not know what the purpose was of what they were doing, they were just imitating what once was, they were simply acting on instinct, with usually little more intelligence or self awareness than a cockroach.

They were beings that lived at the end of time, in the graveyard of reality.