The explosion rocked out from the science labs of INDRA Enterprises, Inc, consuming the scientists and engineers working on the modified Particle Accelerator. All living beings were gone before they could even stop to realize, to understand, what had happened. And yet, despite being swallowed in the ever-encroaching Event Horizon of their accidental design, still as they fell, as their bodies stretched to impossible lengths, and an understanding pinged across some of their rudimentary mammalian minds before it could be snuffed out. Dr. Elliot Grange, head researcher, had a flash of insight, as he suddenly understood that Black Holes were possibly, probably, not the result of collapsing Stars - but, rather, the inevitable consequence of developing civilizations' experiments with quantum physics.

Dr. Mellisa Ragnar, on the other hand, felt as though she were in a thousand, a million places at once as she fell. Her primitive mind being overwhelmed as an infinite number of possibilities, of quantum potentialities, were swallowed in the gravity well she had created. And, for a millisecond, before her consciousness was wiped from reality forever, she was overwhelmed with horror. The understanding that not only had she destroyed her world, destroyed her solar system with her random fumbling, but she had also removed any possibility of any other result ever having occurred—all free will, all quantum potential, drowning in the collapse and being swallowed forever.

Had Steven Hawking still been alive, he could have understood the profound implications of this event. The Fermi Paradox being suddenly and unequivocally explained by the existence of Black Holes. For, based on this tragedy, it could be understood that any civilization advanced enough to create such a black hole might conceivably do so. Furthermore, the mere possibility that such an event might occur has such a weight across time and space, such a 'gravity,' one might say, that the very existence of the possibility renders it a certainty - all other potential realities being then consumed by nature of what now is.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

But, sadly, Steven had passed long, long ago, and the remaining scientific minds did not even have the luxury of understanding the full horror of what they had unleashed before being consumed by the Void.

Yet, existence in this universe is not so forgiving as to let consciousness be genuinely extinguished, not without suffering the full and terrible consequences of our actions. Without even having to suffer the understanding, to be destroyed forever was much too kind a fate to be authentic. And so, even as they fell, as the last vestiges of life on Earth and in the Sol system disappeared from this reality, a new one was created within the boundaries of the consuming Void.

Potential states of being were given form and discarded as any possibility that could not exist with the strange physics of the new universe winked out forever.

Seconds, millennia, a timeless eternity later, the swallowed world finished its rebirth. 'Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed': this was the eternal law of our exiled world, leading to the contradiction that gave birth to our new forms, our new reality. And yet, even as that law required that we continue to exist, expelling us into an artificial universe of swallowed worlds much like our own, that law itself no longer continued to apply to our newfound universe.

So our story begins. Not with the madness of Dr. Ragnar as she, eventually, awakes to discover what she had done, and not with the projections of Dr. Grange, blaming some unknown god for the results of his actions. Instead, we begin with individuals swept up in that ending, that awakening, none the wiser as to what had occurred.

And, while the apocalypse was to be a marked ending to the dominance of our species, to all that we knew and all that we built, for some, it came just in time to offer a second chance at life.

For me, the apocalypse turned what was to be a brief, unexceptional existence into something higher, something grander. And, it turns out something far, far more terrible even than the end of our world.

Well, terrible for everyone else, I would suppose. But, for me, the new world whispered a siren song of blood and vengeance.