YOUR GUIDE TO THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

January 24, 2012

Every Traveler speaks of it in hushed tones, and many of them give it a cutesy nickname: “the Big Black” is currently favoured, but in the past it’s been called “the last,” “the swallowing dark,” and “Clarence Clemons playing flat” (and wasn’t that an annoying week). Most Travelers avoid it like the plague, which is understandable because it is very dangerous and, to many, extremely boring.

But there is something here at the end of everything, and that something is nothing. This isn’t just an abyss, this is the abyss, and there is value in letting it stare back into you - if only for a little while. Travelers who get drunk on experience will tell you that they have more perspective than average people who only go through time the one way, but when they say “perspective” they really mean “I have seen a lot of things,” which isn’t the same. But the Big Black forces perspective into you, because it gives you a focal point that you can see. For that reason, you should go. Once, and once only.

So how do you do it and survive? Well, needless to say, those who Travel unassisted need to consider other alternatives, because it is completely cold (what with the universe’s heat-death and all) and there is nothing to breathe. Worse, the moment you arrive the abyss will begin destroying everything that you are, as you are now at the point where your protons will immediately begin to decay. This is quite bad and it is strongly recommended that you do not let it happen. Therefore, Traveling here should only be undertaken via assisted means: something that can for five or ten minutes put up shields or some other sort of maintaining field, maintain an atmosphere and survivable warmth, and let you take it in. Don’t stay longer than ten minutes, because most shield generators will find themselves overloading at that point as they race to generate shield energy faster than that hungry darkness can decay it into pions, and then you will be in significant trouble.

Normally in a Travel article this is the point where someone writes the “things to see and do” bit, but the problem with the end of everything is that there is only nothing to see, and the only thing to do is look at the nothing -

- okay, there is the restaurant, but that actually exists in a bubble dimension and is strictly for poseurs and tourists who want to spend much more money than they should, and the food is mediocre French bistro style grub at the best of times. Worse, there is no sense of immediacy. You are not within the nothing: you are looking at it from an impossibly remote distance, and if you want perspective - really want perspective - then there is no worse thing you can do. That having been said, if you still want the “restaurant experience,” do yourself a favour and instead hit up one of the better supper clubs in Paris circa 1894, then pay them a lot of money to paint all of the windows black while you are there. It gives you much the same feeling, it will be much cheaper than the restaurant, and the food will be much better. Plus, you’ll be able to get really good absinthe, and that will be more fun than the restaurant any day of the week.

Anyway: the black. Engage with it. Sit down cross-legged, if you can, and look at it. We won’t describe it for you, because what’s the point? Each person’s experience is situational, and describing it just makes you sound like some sort of hippie. “No, man, the black, it’s intense. It’s, like, truer than black. Like all your life, you’ve been looking at black, but it was just that black construction paper you used to have in school, and you thought that was black, but then you realize it was all just the only way you could express the idea of black, dude.” That’s what we would sound like if we tried to describe it.

Some people have said that going there is a preview of death. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they were just on good drugs. But who cares? The point isn’t what anybody else saw when they stared into the abyss. The point is what you will see. The only thing we can be certain of is that you won’t know what it is until you go.