The End of the First Universe

First, you must understand that the universe you and I inhabit is the second of its kind.  I am not the right person to explain exactly how I realized this fact.  The ideal candidate would be a college graduate with a double major in poetry and thermonuclear dynamics, contemplating half a glass of red wine at two o clock in the morning while wearing most of a tuxedo.  I am sure that once someone has all the numbers worked out, in five years it will be the sort of fact that people memorize to make themselves seem smart.  I was more interested in what had happened to the first universe.
While I probably could have found my answer after a few hours on the computer, my first instinct in these matters has always been to visit the library, just a short bus ride from where I lived.
At the bus stop, I stood next to a rather large person.  We waited in silence, staring straight ahead for a few minutes before I ventured to look at them.  He was very tall, easily six and a half feet, and composed entirely of weapons.  Naturally my first instinct was to mention the fact, but I can’t imagine that he was unaware of it.  As I looked he scratched the gun of his nose with a hand made of knives.  By this point I had stared at him long enough that I needed to say something to prevent further awkwardness.
“Are you waiting for the number eight bus?” I asked.
He shook his head, which caused a number of clanking sounds.  “Number nine,” he said, in a voice like gunpowder being sprinkled into acid.
“Ah.”  I was silent for a while.  “I’m Theodore, by the way.”
“M’name’s War,” he said.
“Not the War?”
“Yup.”
I wasn’t sure what to say.  I imagine that either a proud veteran or a vehement pacifist, while no doubt uneasy to meet war in the flesh, would at least have something to talk about.  Being neither, I just asked where he was going.
“I’m seeing a play, actually,” he said.  “There’s a little theatre downtown, and a friend of mine is trying to become an actor.  The play’s called ‘Where is my Rabbit,’ it’ll be running all week,” he said in that embarrassed salesman voice people use when giving personal recommendations to complete strangers.
“Thanks, I’ll try to check it out,” I said, nodding.  He looked relieved.
“Anyway,” he said, “where are you going?”
“Oh, just headed to the library,” I said, shrugging.  “I thought I might see if they had an Agatha Christie novel I hadn’t read.  Oh, and I’m trying to find out what happened to the first universe.”
At this, War gave an embarrassed little cough.  “Uh, if it’s all the same, I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Why not?” I asked, confused.
He rubbed his hands together nervously, producing sparks and scraping sounds.  “Well… listen, if I tell you, would you promise not to tell anyone else?”
“Of course I wouldn’t!”
He shuffled in place, rubbing one wrist with his other hand.  “I suppose I might as well get it off my chest.  It’s all my fault.”
He sounded so distraught, I was compelled to comfort him.  “I’m so sorry to hear that,” I said.  “Please, if you want, I’d like to hear the whole story.”
    He took a deep breath.  “Well, back then, I was called Conquest.  I had a very nice system in place.  There’d be two groups, they’d fight, and the winners took over both groups.  Then the best parts of the losers would be sort of integrated into the whole, see?  That way the best of everyone got to shine through.  So then there’d be a time of peace, a little break for everyone to get used to each other and swap recipes or whatever, and then they’d all go out and fight the next group.  I admit, it didn’t always go ideally, but it was more... constructive? Yeah, it was a constructive approach to conflict.
    “So, I kept it going like that for a long time.  And the groups got bigger and bigger, until everyone on the planet was in the same huge group.  Then they’d go out and fight other planets, and it just kept going.  Then I made a dumb mistake.”  He sighed, and sat down on the little wooden bench.
    “I won.  I won all of it.  Everyone in the universe was part of the same group.  There was nobody left.” He rubbed his face with his hands.  “Conflict keeps everything going, you see.  If you just have something you should do eventually, most of the time you never really get around to it.  It helps if you’re fighting somebody.  I didn’t get it, so I let everything just smooth into place.  I guess, if you say that life is like a big wheel rolling down a hill, I took away the hill.
    “I got lucky.  The boss, the Celestial Administrator we call them, they gave me a second chance.  They made this one, the second universe, just so that I didn’t screw it all up again.  So long as I do my job right, the wheel keeps rolling.”
    At this point, I could hear the bus coming down the road, but I wasn’t sure I could just leave him like this.
    War sighed heavily.  “Everyone has been really nice about not mentioning it.  The other three especially, they let me back in the group like nothing happened.”  He glanced up as the bus came to a stop, and he broke into a massive grin.  “Speak of the devil.”  He started waving at someone on the bus.  “Theodore, was it?  This is your bus, right?”
    “Uh, yeah,” I said.
    “Well, anyway, thanks for listening.  I hope you manage to see that play.  Take care of yourself, all right?”
    “Sure.  Nice talking to you!” I called back as I boarded the bus.

    I glanced around for an empty seat, when I noticed someone gesturing at me from the middle of the bus.
    I sat down on the seat next to her.  She was very tan, more or less what I imagined whenever I heard someone described as olive-skinned, and she had buoyant, fluffy black hair.  She wore a white button-down shirt with a blue tie.
    “I saw you chatting with War back at the stop,” she said.  “What’s your name?”
    “Theodore,” I said.
    “Nice to meet you.  I’m Death.”
    “I see.  Sorry, I just need to check something real quick.”  I turned to the person sitting behind me, a round-faced girl with headphones and a sketchbook.  “Sorry to bother you, but am I sitting next to anyone?”
    The girl looked over at Death, who waggled her fingers and grinned.  She looked back at me with an odd expression, but nodded.
    “Excellent.  Thanks,” I said.  I turned back to Death.  “Best to check these things, just making sure you’re not a hallucination.”
    Death nodded her head toward the girl.  “But then, she might not be real either.”
    I gesticulated that it wasn’t worth checking further.  “If she was, then I’d have to ask someone else, and then I’d need to ask for a third person to confirm, and it just gets too complicated too fast.  As far as it really matters, I believe that you’re Death.”
    She nodded.  “Well, aren’t you going to ask?”
    “Ask what?”
    “Generally, people ask me one of two questions.  One, if they can bribe me for immortality, and two, how I can be in so many places at once.  The second one’s my favorite.”
    “Actually, I worked that one out when I was eight.”  She made an inquisitive noise.  “You’re secretly Santa.”
    Death laughed and clapped her hands.  “I love it!”  She gently poked me in the shoulder, almost a flirtatious gesture.  “So, I have to ask.  What were you talking to War about?”
    I twiddled my thumbs for a moment.  “I don’t know that I should talk about it.”
    She poked me again.  “C’mon, I know everything that he knows.  It’s okay, I won’t mention it to him.”
    “Well, if you must know, we were talking about the end of the first universe.”
    She withdrew a little.  “Oh.  He told you about that, huh?”
    “Yeah.”
    “It’s okay, it doesn’t really bother me.”
    The way she said that made me curious.  “But,” I said, “if it’s all the same, I’d like to hear your side of it.”
    She looked at me for a while, chewing her tongue as she thought.  “I might as well,” she said.  She stared out of the window for a while before beginning.
    “Then, like now, I traveled around the world, doing my job.  That’s actually how people can die at the same time everywhere.  So long as I’m doing my job, my job gets done.  And if I can do it anywhere, it’s happening everywhere.
    “But one day I found myself in a cell with somebody.  He was being tortured, tortured every day, but the people who kept him there were keeping him alive.  They fed him, they cleaned him, they healed his wound so they could hurt him again.  They could have kept him for years like that, and I couldn’t do anything about it. So I did something about it. 
    “I let him die, and after that, it became easy.  Whenever I found someone suffering, someone in unbearable pain, I let them slip away.  I took a new name.  Euthanasia.”
    She stopped.  “Euthanasia.  It’s a lovely word, isn’t it? Like Anastasia.”
    We were silent for a while before she continued.
    “I think that there was one point, one beautiful moment where it worked.  Where being alive meant being happy, that there was literally nothing worse than death.  But it’s like I said.  So long as I’m doing the job, the job gets done.  And suffering… well, there’s not really a clear line on what you can call unbearable, is there?”
    She shook her head.  “Everyone gets sad sometimes.  And if you die as soon as you get sad, you never get a chance to make things better.  That’s how the Celestial Administrator explained it to me.  So now I’m here, in a universe I haven’t killed, and I’ve got to do my job right.”
    I reached out to touch her shoulder, but she brushed me off.  We sat in silence for a couple minutes, until the bus pulled in to my stop.  I got up to leave, when I heard a voice behind me.
    “See you later.”  The farewell sent a cold primal terror up my spine.  I turned back to look at Death, and she gave me a little smile.
    “Sorry,” she said, “it’s just, that one never gets old.”  She smiled and waved goodbye to me, but I could see tears in her eyes.

    There is a park right near the bus stop.  I found a bench and sat down on it.  My thoughts at the time, organized with the benefit of hindsight, were thus.
    In the last half hour, I had met two different supernatural beings, both of whom believed that they were personally responsible for the end of the first universe in very different ways.  I am not a detective, but I have read enough mystery novels to understand that when two accounts of an event differ, someone is wrong.
    It was at this point that I noticed an old man shuffling along the park away from me.  I said that I am not a detective, and that is true.  I am, however, a physical therapist, and I know what it looks like when someone can or can’t walk, and even from a distance I saw that the man was faking.  But, more to the point, I noticed how the breeze was following the old man like a dog on a very short leash, and how the long sleeves of his coat faded out at the ends.
    It wasn’t hard for me to catch up to the old man.
    “Excuse me,” I said, “but you wouldn’t happen to be,” I glanced at the sun’s position and remembered a simple mnemonic, “The North Wind, would you?”
    He cackled at me, toothless and jubilant.  “Close enough, you little snot, close enough.”  I knew he was insulting me, but he did so in such an amiable way that it was impossible to be offended.  He gestured for me to come along, saying  “Walk with me, walk with me.”  I fell into a slow pace alongside him.
    “I wasn’t always the, well, let’s say The North Wind,” he said.  “I used to be just The Wind, you know.  And I didn’t walk like this, like some fat little sloth like you.  No, I ran.  Kid, you should have seen me run, I was amazing.  I ran as fast as I wanted in any direction I wanted, and nobody told me where to go or what to do. 
    “OI!” he yelled, making me jump.  This was directed at a small boy climbing an old oak tree a few yards from us.  “Get off that tree, you little toad!”
    I saw the boy’s mother glaring at us from her bench, and unfortunately the old man saw her too.  “Keep an eye on your little hellspawn, woman!” He turned back to me.  “Where was I?  Oh, yes. So I just kept going, faster and faster until I was going too fast, and I just kept whipping along straight ahead until I tore open the sky!”  He laughed madly at this.
    “You should have seen it, boy, it was incredible, with clouds dangling down from the vacuum like someone had punched through a sheet of paper.  So that big gash started to drag me and everything else out into the nothing, but the Celestial Administrator they grabbed me by the wrist and brought me back down, closing up the hole in the sky and they said that I couldn’t do it again.  So to make sure, they rebooted the universe, and they separated me into all the winds, all three hundred and sixty of us, each going in exactly one direction, and we’ve all got a schedule of exactly how fast we can go at any time.” 
    He pulled out a little book, which he handed to me.  “Here, take it, I’ve got it all down up here.” He tapped the side of his head with a finger.  “Now,” he said, “if you’ll excuse me, I’m due to speed up all the way to point oh eight knots.”  I watched, holding the book, as the old man shuffled away moving imperceptibly faster than he had been before.

    One can imagine that I needed coffee at this point.  Fortunately, there was a place fairly close to the park, which happened to have a delightful little bell set up to ring when the door opened.  The barista asked me what I would like to have.
    “If you don’t mind, I’d like a black coffee and… yes, a chocolate croissant, it’s been that kind of day.”
    “Oh?” she said.  “Why’s that?”
    “First, let me ask; what’s your name?”
    “Padma.”
    “Okay, Padma.  Have you ever had a surreal day?”
    She contemplated this for a while.  “Lemme think.  Well, the other day I ran into two people I hadn’t seen since high school.  Like, not at the same time.  I saw one of them in the morning and one in the afternoon.  That was kind of surreal”
    I nodded.  “Well, Padma, I’m here to tell you that that was dimestore surreality.  By the end of the day, I expect that a peguin will be offering me real estate on Saturn.”
    “The planet or Saturn the drummer I dated in college?”
    I nodded, impressed.  “I like you, Padma. We should talk sometime.”
    She smiled, then glanced at the clock.  “Not today.  I have a ton of stuff right now, but sometime soon.
    While I enjoyed the mediocre coffee and rather excellent croissant, I flipped through the book that the old man had given me, which turned out to be about half as interesting as the average phone book. Eventually, I noticed that Padma had written her phone number on the coffee cup lid.  When I was done, I put the lid in my pocket before tossing the empty cup into the trash.  As I should have expected, there was still some liquid in the lid, and so I left the coffee shop pretending not to notice the coffee staining my pants.

    The library was just down the road.   I was halfway there when somebody poked me in the back.  In the same way that one can feel the presence of an annoying ex-roommate, I knew that I was being approached by another personification of a natural force.  I was tempted to just keep walking, but the combination of politeness and risk that I would be hunted down by Pestilence forced me to turn around.
    Sure enough, there was someone who almost certainly wasn’t human, and who would have been terrifying even if she had been.  She was human-shaped, true, but I find that it’s more effective to imagine that she was a bull with chainsaws for horns.  She also was carrying too many large bags of groceries.
    “Please help?” she said, nodding to the bags.  I took one in each arm, smiling in what I hope was a friendly way.
    “Unmaker thanks you,” she said.
    “Sorry- ‘Unmaker?’” I asked.
    “Is name and job,” she said, with a professional stiffness.  “There is Maker, who makes things, and there is Unmaker, who takes things apart.  Not destroys,” she added with a touch of defiance, as if I would have dared accuse her.  “Not for fun.  Important work.  Celestial Administrator said so.”  She paused for a moment, then said “Sorry if Unmaker being wordy, attempting to clear up common misconceptions.”
    “No, no, it’s quite fine,” I said.
    She nodded towards some destination I couldn’t see.  “Unmaker lives in apartment building couple streets down.  Handy for the shops.  Not usually get this many groceries, but having guests later and needed hors d’oeuvres.”
    “I see.” Her politeness gave me confidence enough to keep talking. “I met Death on the bus down here, will she be coming?”
    Unmaker shook her head.  “No, she always working.  Busy busy busy.  Unmaker tells her the other day, going to work herself to the bone.”
    It went on like that for a while, the two of us making chitchat.  I didn’t ask her about the first universe, if only because I try to avoid embarrassing people big enough to block out the sun.  But if I had to, I could take a guess.
    I was tempted to think that she simply unmade everything, but if there was indeed a “Maker” figure constantly creating things, then they could probably have kept up with her.  I would imagine that Unmaker had simply stopped doing her job and let the Maker fill up the universe with stuff, until the Celestial Administrator came in and explained to her how important it was that she continued to unmake things.

    Now, yes, I had been delayed and distracted, but at no point did I forget that my destination was the library.  After helping the Unmaker with her groceries, and briefly saying hello to an acquaintance I bumped in to on the street, I finally arrived at the old stone building.  There I knew I would find my answer, or at least a book.
    The music building in the background, I pushed open the double doors like a child after watching a cowboy movie.  And there they were, standing behind the information desk.  The Celestial Administrator.
    Introductions were entirely unnecessary.  Once you know that such an entity exists, identifying them is slightly easier than exhaling. They stand out by fading into the background, a trick exclusive to master assassins and the terminally dull.  The key difference is that, when one is looking at the Celestial Administrator, other objects in your field of vision warp slightly to resemble religious symbols.
    I had to wait in line for a few minutes while they helped a young girl fill out her library card.  When that was done, I approached with unjustified confidence.
    “How may I help you?” they asked.  They gave me a look as they spoke, a look that said ‘yes, we have to go through the motions.’
    “I was hoping that you could help me,” I said.  “I came here wanting to find out what happened to the first universe.  On the way, however, I spoke with several personifications of concepts, all of whom believe that they caused that apocalypse. The interesting part is that they all believe that they did so in different ways.”  As I spoke, the Celestial Administrator was nodding with a teacher’s condescending approval.  “This raises several questions.  First, since many of the entities I met were unrelated to each other, I want to know if there is a personification of every individual thing.”
    “Certainly,” said the Celestial Administrator.  “Every species of animal or plant, every action that can be taken, almost every word in the dictionary has someone in charge of them.”
    “So each one of them believes that they personally ended the first universe by not doing their job correctly?”
    “Indeed,” said the Celestial Administrator, “and in each of their memories, I was the one who gave them a second chance.”
    “Right.  Of course, you had a reason to do it.  And if I had to guess I’d say it’s because you need them all to be grateful to you, or else they might band together and bring you down.”
    “Close,” said the Celestial Administrator.  “In fact, any one of them could defeat me by themselves.  Even a solid kick from the feeble king of dust could cripple me.  And then none of them would do anything, and within moments existence itself would end.”
    “That makes sense,” I said.  “But I have one last question.  What really ended the first universe?”
    At this, the Celestial Administrator coughed, and began shuffling papers around.  “If you must know,” they said, pulling a brown coat out from under the desk, “It’s still there.  I just lost the key.”
    I stared at them.  They walked out from behind the desk and headed for the door.  “If you’ll excuse me,” they said, “my shift is over and I’m meeting Breakfast for lunch.”
    And that was the last I saw of the Celestial Administrator, and the end of my journey to discover what happened to the first universe.   I checked out Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage, and I went home.