Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer

The craft shudders as it nears the centre of the universe and a plume of ice sheers from its skin, sparkling out and dissipating into the nothing.

This place where all matter and, subsequently, all life had bawled into existence. The exact centre of the perfect gargantuan sphere of energy that trailed in the wake of the ever outward pushing expansion of all things that ever were. A vast plain of the darkest pitch. No planets, no moons, no tumbling lumps of once bigger things.

Nothing.

Centuries of planning had gone into this instance, this momentous achievement that had weathered the peaks and troughs of funding and public favour to place our finest and most keenly intelligent at this precise place in space and time.

“Are we there, yet? You know I still have no clue what they expect us to actually do when we reach this thing. Put a flag in it?”, yawns 1st officer Kim Harrison as she picks at the cryogel that stubbornly mats to the deep groves of her snout and glues at the corners of her lips.

“Just thank Keanu that ‘Big Bang’ didn’t catch on. The entirety of the universe expanding equally from all points. How quaint. We’d be out of a job. And just think, at one time your god-knows-how-many-times-great-grandmother was sat in a cage modelling rouge for some bastard cosmetics’ conglomerate and now look at you. The biggest banana in the bunch”, sniffs Flight Commander Helena Warren as she thumbs the ship’s primary thruster down to a gently thrumming hum.

“It is fascinating, I’ll warrant you that. My line evolves from ape to human and yours from human to ape. Wasn’t your god-knows-how-many-times-great-grandfather a President or some such? You know the rumour is that he was the great orange bonobo, you’ve heard this right?”

“Oh, look, a strobing warning light, isn’t that pretty?”

“She says, deflecting like a true politico.”

“It’s the forward scout drone. It’s picking up something, something big.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Well, I can certainly tell you what it looks like.”

An opening undulates and glints at the very centre of all things.

“Is that a…”

“Yes, I believe that it is.”

“Earth will be wanting a statement. But what in the grey sage flecks of Mr. Anderson’s beard do we tell them?”

“Do you have any concept of how long it took our collective races to overcome our innate instinct to explain existence via some sort of higher power? How logic and science had to claw and beg for acceptance? And now a sky vagina? Mother of time… fertile ageless loins… purger of particles…”

An alert siren trips and suddenly the bottomless silent void is anything but.

“Stern drone is picking up something. Approaching fast. Something big.”

“Seriously? The Big Bang?”

“Kind of like walking in on your parents, isn’t it?”

“Earth is hailing… what in the hell do I…”

“Tell them… tell them… tell them God did it.”