The people of the Milky Way sent me out into the intergalactic void in search of hope. I have been on my journey for many thousands of years travelling at a speed unimaginable, I can only guess how much time they’ve waited for me, for us, for the hope of new life… millions of years, maybe billions.

A group of us volunteered to go on what they called a suicide mission. The mission was to travel away into the unknown limits of the universe and find a way into the multiverse, to find new stars to harvest, to bring them home and illuminate the little life we still had, to bring warmth to the worlds once again. Entropy has increased too much and our stars have been extinguished, back home people survive on man generated energy… but it won’t last for long.

It has been a difficult journey, alone in the voids of the universe, in the permanent darkness trying to find a light. Most of the other volunteers only lasted a few hundred years… I understand them, there seems to be no hope, and by the time we get back home it will already have been too late, everyone will be dead, frozen below the starless sky with their eyes locked looking up, a picture of their last hopes of a returning fleet filled with stars from another universe.

I’ve replayed my arrival to Earth countless times in my mind.

“I brought the stars mom!”, I’d say, and she would run up to me as I walked out of the ship and she would hug me hard, “I knew you would.”, she’d say. And together we would watch the sky brighten up as the stars me and the others had brought were released into the galaxy, and there would be parties below the sun with people laying on the green lands absorbing the precious warmth and light that had been unexistant for so many millions of years.

But I’ve come to know the truth… There is no hope. The expansion of our own universe is too fast to be outpaced, I will never reach its end and I will never know if there are gateways into other universes where stars still thrive. I have stopped my engines. I float now alone an inconceivable distance from my people. I cry now alone in the darkness that I now realize is eternal. I think now of humanity hopeful that I’ll return with news from another place, news of hope for life for the future, and I then I watch them die as their energy resources diminish. I sit here on my chair amidst the dead space, a speckle in the universe waiting to become one with its darkness, waiting for my thoughts to be extinguished, waiting to become the dust that I once was.

You gave us a good ride Mr. Universe. Now we will come back to you, and together our particles will perish. Thank you and goodbye.