"End of Days": Short Story Excerpt #3

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The current models for black holes holds that they will absorb any matter that crosses their event horizon and that they have, in essence, an infinite capacity to absorb matter in their nearly infinitely compressed centers. So powerful is their attraction that light cannot escape them, and it is posited that crossing their event horizon will distort or perhaps stop time. With all due deference to physicists who can do the math, they are wrong; I have it on the best authority.
 
Black holes can amass incredible amounts of mass and energy and extend the reach of their event horizons—the pull of their gravitational force—outwards as they grow. The mass of a collapsed star may be compressed to a circumference of a few kilometers. Compress it further still, as when a truly massive star is involved, and at some point it becomes a black hole. In extreme cases, we know there to be massive black holes in the center of spiral galaxies, including our own Milky Way, slowly, inexorably sucking in stars, planets, and everything else into the cosmic drain that is their vortex and causing the spiral form of these galaxies just like water spiraling down a terrestrial drain.
 
But there is a limit to the amount of mass and energy that can be contained in any black hole. Exceed that limit, and the fabric of space time that is bent further and further under the stress bursts just like an over-stressed aneurism under the pressure of an arterial wall overcome by too much blood pumped under too much pressure, or a rubber balloon overfilled beyond its capacity by an overanxious birthday boy.
Matter cannot be compressed ad infinitum, nor can the mass and energy captured from thousands of stars and their accompanying solar systems be forever retained at the center of the singularity or converted to and expelled as radiation. Eventually, every singularity reaches critical mass and burst outward expelling in a few nanoseconds its retained mass and energy through the torn fabric of space time, giving birth to a new universe in a flash of fury, an unfathomable release of energy and mass, a new big (and sometimes little) bang. The energy is released not in our universe, but into a new one, disgorging the contents of the singularity outwardly to expand in accordance to the compressed matter and energy in its universe of origin. The rift in space time is then sealed and a new universe joins the omniverse.
 
If we could view the omniverse in a macro scale across all of space time, we would see an infinite fireworks display of cosmic proportions. The size of the singularity required to burst space time varies depending on the region of space time it occupies. The fabric of space is not uniform; there are infinite variations in its relative strength and stability so that some regions may be able to withstand singularities that have swallowed up billions of stars form multiple galaxies without rupturing while others may rupture upon the formation of a single singularity such as occurs from the collapse of a star significantly larger than Sol. The universe created by the rupturing of such a small singularity would be ephemeral and incapable of forming new stars from the matter ejected. Not so when massive black holes that have swallowed up thousands or perhaps even millions of galaxies reach the breaking point; these will eject their stored mass and energy in big bangs of their own that will generate new stars and planets in a new universe of seemingly infinite size to the average man, woman or amoeba observer.
 
When the universe reaches the maximum rate of its expansion, it will begin to contract as the weak gravitational force pulls back matter into an ever-decreasing space. As the fabric of space time compresses, it will be strengthened, allowing for truly massive black holes to merge before bursting forth into new universes. The process continues ad infinitum, with new universes expanding, collapsing, and redistributing their mass, spawning ever-smaller versions of themselves, replicating self-contained, self-replicating omniverses of their own. Like a fertilized egg, with cells splitting in half, growing exponentially into an organism that is greater than the sum of its parts. The universe is organic, a living, evolving, growing organism in which each universe in an endless number of omniverses is just a cell, replicating itself in an organic process we can no more understand than a self-aware electron, neutron or lepton in an atom within one of our body’s cells can understand us. The universe is a part of God, or the collective consciousness, and none of us can ever grasp the full organism any more than a cell in our body or its smaller component parts can hope to know us.
 
But we are more than the smallest particles in an unfathomably large universe. Self awareness links us to that unfathomable body—to the mind of God, or to the universal spirited element, if you prefer—in a way that is much more vital than our seeming insignificance within it. We are the universe. The universe is us. We are God; God is us, to borrow a phrase from Heinlein. We are linked to all the omniverses that ever were and ever will be by our consciousness, energy that flows from all the omniverses through us, and connects us each to it not just in the particular segment of space time we currently inhabit, but to the very fabric of space time itself.
 

[End of excerpt]
The above is an excerpt from the short story End of Days, one of the eight short stories in Book of Dreams 2nd Edition: Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction Short Stories. (C) 2011 Victor D. Lopez. All rights reserved.