Emily towered over the podium once everyone in the room had taken their seats. “Thank you all for your time,” she started, “I’m sure you’re well aware of the current phenomenon.”
A gentleman from the back row raised his hand. “Does your department have any theory?”
“Here’s what we’ve seen.” Emily turned on the monitor. Everyone pushed forward in their chairs to study the live satellite footage. One by one, stars were vanishing. No signs of any nova, just gone. Emily waited for a few moments in anticipation of their reactions. Not long, the entire room was on their feet in roar over what they were seeing.
“My god!” A man exhaled.
“That’s impossible! There must be an explanation!” Another insisted.
Emily moved over toward a white board causing the room to quiet. “There’s one explanation our department has come up with, which is why you’re here.” She started moving lines with a dry erase marker, drawing what one would consider an almost perfect circle. “For as long as we’ve documented the outer reaches of space, we’ve seen our universe expanding. However, each star recorded to vanish have the same distance in our belief. This means that our universe is no longer expanding.”
“What are you saying?” Someone asked.
“I’m saying that these stars vanished last Tuesday.” Emily plotted dots on the line of her circle. Then she drew a smaller circle inside the first one. She plotted more dots. “These are the stars that vanished yesterday. Our universe is shrinking.”
That did it.
The room was of science, but one would walk in and think it was opening bell of Wall Street. Emily attempted to calm everyone down, but the shouting took over.
“There has to be another reason!” Someone commented.
“We need answers!” Someone else had joined in.
Emily closed her eyes for a moment before drawing her next line from the outer edge of the first circle to the middle of the smaller one. One by one, everyone turned their attention back onto her. Emily punched a dot in the very middle. “That’s us. Given what we know, by the rate of traveling distance, our star will join among the vanished.”
An older gentleman, one of the senior scientists, fell down into his chair. There was no more shouting, or theory, or even the slight panic. Everyone looked at one another in awe. Emily stepped down from the front to sit down herself.
“It’s as if God’s abandoned us.” Emily told herself. It was a good thing no one heard her comment, seeing as the room was of science and not religion. Emily was a mixture of both. She had a habit of finding similarities between the two. This time, she wasn’t sure if this could only be explained from either side.
An explosion of life gave light to the universe Emily studied for years, but now a darkness was consuming it. The monitor remained live beside the whiteboard and everyone reacted when a distance ball of light disappeared. Everyone chimed in their thoughts. Emily rested her hand atop her forehead. She felt her breathing more rapid. Running her fingers along her hair calmed her for a moment.
“What do we do?” Someone turned back toward to Emily.
“There’s nothing we can do.”