If we speed forward billions of years to the far future, when Space will be veritable Swiss cheese with all of the wounds – which in this future will be barren, gray, and devoid of the shiny whirlpool at their centers that had been a feature of the wounds in the distant past – from an abusive Time who will only become more cruel, we can observe a pinnacle of sentient advancement within the universe.
In this future, there will be one dominant species of sentient beings. They will have both horns and wings and each will be such a deep and rich shade of red that they will sometimes disappear against a dark backdrop. These beings will be much bigger than all of the beings currently in existence and they will have a short coating of hair that covers their bodies, like the hide of a deer. They will generally have brown coats, though some will be shades darker to jet black. Their horns will be unique to each individual though most of them will have at least two branches of horns that emerge from either side of their heads, or from either side of their foreheads, but there will be some with just one branch of horns, some with three, though one and three branches will be rare.
These beings will exist on an artificial world of their own creation. It will not revolve a star and at its start, it will exist in a barren section of space that had been known as the Banned Regions billions of years before all of the rocky material was harvested and cobbled into the planet that will be known as Top, home of the Ascendant, the last great race that the universe will ever know.
It is difficult to say where exactly Top will be located in the far future. In order to keep it safe and ensure its longevity during the last great universal skirmish that will leave the Dru-Earthlings extinct, the Ascendant, utilizing advanced physics that outpaces even the greatest minds in the universe of the relative present, will knock their planet Top out of sync with their physical realm with the hope of moving it into a different parallel of existence. This experiment will not be completely successful. The planet Top will vacillate between many physical realms, including the one from which it originated, so technically, the planet Top and the beings known as the Ascendant will exist in the futures of many parallels of existence. The Ascendant will exist long after the last great universal skirmish of the parallel of existence from which it originated, on their artificial and self sustaining planet well into the lives of many universes.
Because they are so efficient at surviving, the Ascendant will live long enough to see the end of a parallel of existence. They will survive in the ensuing void left over after the demise of the doomed parallel because of the technology of their planet and when they study the causes of the end, they will confirm many hypothesis about the impetuous for the demise and what follows after the destruction; the birth and destruction of a parallel of existence is cyclical. Though the planet Top will be capable of surviving the initial demise of a parallel of existence, the Ascendant will soon realize that their planet will likely be destroyed by the reverberations of the big bang that would start the cycle of the universe all over again.
The Ascendant will understand that the fate of the doomed parallel will be the fate of all parallels of existence; models prepared in the distant past of their home parallel (and coincidentally in all of the parallels that the planet Top vacillates through) had predicted an event that occurred less than ten billion years after the big bang that increased the speed of the universe’s life cycle, an event that was unknown to ancient scientists who could only deduce the happening and the subsequent consequences as they rippled throughout existence. The happening is the apparent start of the accelerated expansion of the universe over time, a stretch out that seems to result in the demise of the universe as it spreads to nothing, making way for another bang to start it all over again. The Ascendant assume that the very fabric upon which Space and Time interact can be best compared to a fountain. It explodes everything out and all of the materials fly out following a path that draws it back to the starting point to be reloaded and unleashed again, over and over like a constantly running fountain. But without the happening, the fountain would seem to flow much more slowly, and the Ascendant believe that it could even slow to a relative standstill.
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