[WP] Humans have finally reached the edge of the universe. Tell what they see.

Funny thing about the edge of the universe: it's subtle. Our human brains want to imagine a membrane or bow shock or wall or barrier or SOME goddamn thing to tell us we've made it. But after a billion lightyears of what looked like nothing, all we saw was...more nothing. Just a slow drop in the ambient particulate matter, until at some moment between seconds, we became the most distant thing from the center of the universe.

I'm not sure whether it was scientific curiosity or pure human stupidity that took us into the void. We looked out into infinity and asked ourselves "why not?" With the FTL drives running wide open, we committed our little crew to a lifetime of driving into nothing. At that point, we were literally dragging the borders of the universe with us.

We were at it for three days before anyone thought to pay attention to what was happening behind us. Gravimetrics didn't pick it up yet; only optics showed us what we'd done. A trail of explosions marked our wake. Infant universes were expanding before our eyes. We watched impossible amounts of energy bloom from nothing.

Understanding came fast. We began to experiment. We learned how the FTL affected this truly empty space in unique ways. It created "ripples" that caused the very dimensions to collide upon one another, releasing tremendous amounts of energy. Could our universe have been born in the wake of a passing explorer?

In time--decades, according to the ship--we learned to manipulate the universes we spawned. The constants that drove the most basic forces could be altered through careful manipulation of our drive fields.

What came next was inevitable. A member of the crew--we have elected to withhold names as it is irrelevant--became convinced we had achieved godhood. Their efforts to create a very specific universe led to conflict, and that conflict ended when our FTL was destroyed by an expanding waveform caused by when one group attempted to undo a creation of another. We are stranded in the Void now. This will be our last transmission. The details of our research will not be included. Humanity has no place out here.

/r/WritingPrompts Thread