The interstellar lattice stretched some three hundred billion light years around the firmament, although the human eye could only fathom some few hundred miles in any direction. The face of the array appeared as an ethereal wall traversing infinity. From a more omnipotent vantage the wall appeared spherical. At its face, the hexagonal glow of photon panels twinkled in the ether, drinking in the traces of extinct supernova and distant solar flares. Cassius the Cosmic Guardian glared upward. In his immediate vicinity, the photon panels lay dim and translucent, an energy-less crater the size of a yellow giant. The guardian’s motionless form shifted with reptilian immediacy, then froze in an acute analysis of the nearest lifeless panel. The nostalgia of touch was enacted, as if rekindling the traces of farthest memory in a time prior to its obsolescence. In an illusory state of inertia, the guardian’s protruding finger spanned some twelve millennia before contacting the array, a blink of the eye to higher beings. Dark blue tendrils radiated outward as a web of veins, pulsing to the outer edges of the atrophy. The dark circumference expanded to galactic measure, leaving the original ring as but a speck in the star field. With the exponential flourish of decay, the central nodes of the array began to dissolve as black threads of gossamer. Without their vertices, the very structure of the apparatus was compromised, unhinging the cosmological constant and heralding the total collapse of the physical universe. Cassius was well aware of the peril. The milky translucence of the guardian’s skin darkened in the perpetuating vault of night, a form of shadow in shadow. Before the tear in the firmament could claim Cassius entirely, a tendril of neural matter spun high into the heavens. As it too was claimed with the existential layers of the being once named Cassius, a duplicate tendril divided to attempt circumnavigation of the final event. The new tendril was absorbed within apex null, the point of universal collapse, and a new tendril was born. While this paradox loop delayed the effects of total annihilation, the guardian Cassius and the surrounding universe were slowly engulfed in a churning sinkhole of anti-matter.
