The push of a button. That’s all it took to annihilate the entire universe. Well…two buttons if you count holding down the ‘shift’ key.
The experiment, briefly and forebodingly known as ‘ the Annihilatrix’ by it’s creators was initially conceived rather drunkenly as a means of scrubbing scientific equipment before, during and after highly sensitive exploratory missions. Most cleaning procedures involved introducing additional foreign elements, leaving some kind of residual matter or simply moving stuff somewhere else. There was of course radiation to neutralise organic material, but even that wasn’t ideal, or one hundred percent effective one hundred percent of the time. And although most safety regulations had largely gone out the window over the preceding decade in the name of marketing campaigns to make science cool again, an incident on Europa had left even the baddest of ‘bad boy’ scientists with a strong tendency towards caution when it came to polluting as yet unexplored planets.
So, as it happened, one ordinary Friday evening, in the middle of an ordinary college bender, a team of awfully clever and fabulously high folks at MIT came up with a new approach…
“What if…” they asked mistakenly “…we simply deleted stuff?”
The initial answer to the question that would ultimately end all of existence was perhaps the least stupid thought anyone had ever had — “That’s fucking stupid,” said an exasperated and only moderately stoned graduate physicist clutching a bong on the opposing sofa. “Besides, you can’t just delete stuff,” she continued sensibly before taking another hit “…and…and…” she coughed before concluding correctly, albeit a little less sensibly than a moment earlier “…like…everything is connected.” She stopped. Her point had been made. Attention was returned to the creepy wallpaper.
The terminally unfortunate individual who had first deposited the idea into the room like a fart into a balloon was a rather large software engineer sitting cushioned in between two slightly smaller software engineers and flanked by one completely blitzed PhD physicist appropriately named Kevin. Just how appropriate, Kevin would himself later discover as the first and last person to hear what sound the universe makes when it’s collapsing into the impossible void left by the sudden non-existence of a single carbon atom. But for now, he just laughed, having not fully heard or even partially comprehended the conversation taking place, and continued doing whatever it is he was snorting.
After a four hour squabble, most of which none of the participants could later recall, they were left with a challenge — a self imposed test of their bold collective genius. They wrote it down and left it on the coffee table for sober versions of themselves to later discover. Which they did. There, in barely intelligible ballpoint pen, on a packet of rolling papers, it read “Delete actual things!”. This was followed by the word “Bitches!” written using a sharpie Kevin had been saving for a special occasion.
One hundred and seventy four days after that fateful night and the five of them were once again sitting around on a pair of aged sofas not discernibly different from the previous two. Browner perhaps. There were however some other notable differences between occasions. It was quieter. They were the only five people in the room. And instead of being closed and caked in drugs, their laptops were now open and being actively tapped on.
“This goes beyond causal domains!” explained Alisha, the somewhat more sensible one from before, who had really only been participating up to this point for moral support and her own cynical amusement. “Not only are you breaking the laws of physics, you’re breaking everything in the universe” she said correctly. “They’re not laws if they can be broken” said Kevin with typically misplaced confidence “The universe will sort itself out”. “Well that’s just fucking stupid” Alisha responded, experiencing a flash of deja vu. “It’s against the law to murder someone, but that doesn’t stop people” said Patrick, the larger of the three engineers and godfather of the apocalypse. Kevin and Alisha both looked at him and groaned in unison. “It’s not the same thing buddy” Kevin replied with hesitating empathy. Patrick smiled as if he wasn’t offended. “Look, we’ve got a working theory. We have to test it!” Kevin continued, gazing around the room. “It won’t work” Alisha shot back, plunging daggers into her boyfriends face “…and if it does, it shouldn’t and we’re all fucked”. “It will work!” he said “And!” he paused, “…it will be fine!”
It wasn’t.
One hundred and thirty two days later. Kevin and Alisha had broken up. Alisha had poetically cited irreconcilable differences and taken a job with a tech company building matter converters. Kevin, Patrick and the other two had meanwhile continued developing their experiment. A feat of fantastic engineering and coincidentally brilliant physics that few if any of them had any real claim to. The idea was relatively simple in sci fi terms. First, a tiny Alcubierre bubble would be created around the target that under normal conditions would allow it to warp space time around itself, temporarily isolating it from relativistic inconveniences, but not the universe as a whole. Then, a weapons grade stream of photons and a small obnoxious tickle grade dose of antimatter would be used to effectively shroud the bubble in uncertainty before shunting it off to god knows where and collapsing the bubble in the process. In theory, instead of warping spacetime, the target would simply vanish from existence leaving a happy little void behind. It would become its own little universe somewhere…else, while the rest of our universe kept on keeping on. Kevin seemed particularly sure of all that. Patrick, less so. The others just did what they were told.
So it was that on the morning of July 27th 2052 at roughly 11:26, the experiment was ready. Jason, who it makes sense to name at this point because it was his parents basement in which their lab had been assembled, was putting the finishing touches on the code that would run the whole show. For a physics experiment that ultimately annihilates the entire universe, it may seem strange that roughly 80% of all the work that had gone into it had consisted of software debugging. Or strange at least to anyone unfamiliar with software development. In any case, Jason tapped his last key and slid back from the desk, nodding proudly at Kevin, who was busy in the corner pretending he knew how to play guitar.
He stood up. They all did. It seemed appropriate. They were, after all, about to do something truly momentous. Patrick used a butter knife to detach the standard delete key on his mechanical keyboard and replace it with a big red one he had found years earlier. The shift key, he left as is. “So, you guys ready?” he said. The others nodded. “Fuck yeah!” said Kevin.
They began. Patrick, Jason and the other guy sat down at the chairs in the rudimentary control room, while Kevin went over to the bathtub sized vacuum chamber assembled in the corner opposite the beanbag and guitar. “Ready” he said with a modicum of seriousness when the last iota of air had been evacuated. “Hey Kev!” Patrick called over. “Ya buddy?” Kevin responded. “You sure about this? What happens if the universe doesn’t ‘work itself out’”. “Push the button Patch”. Patrick swivelled back to face his screen. He held the shift key down and pushed the red button.
This is what happened next…
There was a brief flash and a hole appeared. Not a blackhole. It wasn’t supermassive or anything. It wasn’t even regularly massive. In fact it was completely without mass of any kind. Nor was it just a vacuum. A vacuum has stuff in it. Maybe not things, but definitely stuff. Light, radiation, neutrinos, dust occasionally. Lots of stuff. This was proper nothing. A kind of nothing that had never existed before because it literally by definition did not exist. It was the kind of nothingness that had previously only been hypothetical. And now it was sitting in the middle of somebody’s basement.
The universe panicked for a moment, unsure of quite what to do with itself. You see, since the beginning of everything — which, it should be noted, is a paradox and not really a thing at all — one thing had generally led to another. This had created a kind of causal relationship between every little kind of thing and every other thing that exists everywhere. Some clever people often refer to the area in which one thing can affect another as a causal domain, and usually that area is limited by the speed of light and the expansion of the universe. In other words if everything is flying away from everything else then eventually there will be a point where light can never catch up. Everything short of that is said to be a causal domain. But here, as far as this tiny spec of nothing in this tiny basement was concerned, nowhere in the universe was far away enough. The causal domain was all of existence. And that, was not very good. Like an infinitely long number with one of the digits removed, all the calculations changed and no longer made sense. And so, having encountered this abrupt and incalculable problem, the whole thing — every little piece of it — just kind of gave up and spontaneously retreated into a dot of nothingness.
For most of the universe, sudden non-existence barely registered. Trillions upon trillions of gaseous balls and dead worlds never really gave it a thought. The same was true for much of the intelligent life. Moderately intelligent as they were, most were too preoccupied with some such nonsense or another to notice that everything that was happening suddenly wasn’t. But then there was the poor unfortunate unintelligent or slightly less intelligent life. All manner of creatures. All across the universe. Creatures with no such predilection for navel gazing and self obsession, barring of course housecats. All were suddenly and very briefly stricken by indescribable terror. It would have been dreadfully sad had it continued to be anything at all.
Then of course there was Kevin. Poor Kevin. Average person. Adequate lover. Brilliant Engineer. Terrible Physicist. Largely oblivious to what had just occurred despite being the closest of all beings to the newly created point of non existence, he stood frozen for an instant in which it felt like the entire universe called out his name. “Kevin” it said, with the pleasant intonation of a quadrillion stars disappearing down a drainpipe.
“Wow” thought Kevin before following suit. “That was nice”