He was afraid of the color blue. Terrified. So much so that he painted the walls of his apartment a deep, blood red, and wore BluBlockers whenever he went outside.

“You look like the fucking Unabomber,” his friends would say, but he didn’t care; the world actually looked kind of cool with the blue light removed, almost like a sepia filter on everything. More importantly, the thought of beholding the vast blue sky overhead, extending indefinitely in every direction, was absolutely unbearable.

“He’s got a bad case of the blues,” some would joke, but he didn’t find it funny; he couldn’t even listen to the blues anymore, though he empathized with the sorrowful lyrics. The phobia had come on suddenly, resulting in him breaking up with his girlfriend for whom he had already bought an engagement ring.

“I can no longer look into those big blue eyes,” he had told her, as tears welled up in his. They were the last words he ever spoke to her. It was also unfortunate for him how much of Earth the human eye sees as blue—in daylight it is 70% of the surface alone. Pictures of island paradises that brought relief to others made him shudder.

On one occasion the high-pitched wail of an approaching ambulance nearly sent him into hysteria. Those around him were confounded by his behavior, but they would understand soon enough.

He worked as an astronomer at a prestigious observatory, studying distant celestial bodies. Ever since first reading Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question” as a science fiction-obsessed middle schooler, he had always taken for granted the knowledge that the universe would expand forever. This view was reinforced daily at his occupation; with few exceptions, such as Andromeda on its collision course with the Milky Way, every object he studied was redshifted. The farther away, the more so. The observatory even used the Amazon Redshift data warehouse to store this information. There were few axioms in which he had more faith than Hubble’s Law.

The end game of everything in existence was clear to him—a state of maximum entropy known as the heat death of the universe. A very sad state of things indeed. However, this was estimated to be more than a googol of years in the future. Perhaps there was time to find a solution. If not, at least it was so inconceivably far away to not be of much concern, even for those accustomed to thinking along astronomical timelines.

The James Webb Space Telescope was coming online soon, and he was part of the team analyzing the first data from long-range test operations. This telescope could see farther—both in terms of distance and time—than any telescope, and thus any human, had ever seen before. One day he found himself frantically checking and rechecking the preliminary results, as a feeling of unquenchable anxiety grew within him. Desperately he pleaded with the engineers to run more tests. Desperately he tried to convince them there must be some malfunction. But after exhausting all options, he was forced to accept the only conclusion that could be drawn from the data.

The galaxies just beyond those in the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field had lower redshift values than expected. The farther away, the less so, until beyond a point the unthinkable occurred—all the stars were shifted blue.