The R. Tanassis drifted through the black, its captain looking anxiously upon the control panels, trying to discern the ship’s speed. But, as he would soon find, speed is meaningless if you’re the only object in existence.

A mistake, somewhere in his program’s code, maybe even something as simple a binary number left unconverted, had sent him here. A look at the chronometer and another round of calculations revealed the truth. He was in his desired location, but about fifteen billion years off the mark.

“I shouldn’t be here, nothing should be here.”

He stared at the viewscreens, straining his eyes until they filled with tears. Looking for stars—even just one. And it was then that a point of light, which he thought must be a hallucination, expanded into view, more intense than anything he’d seen before. He knew at once what it must be.

Spacetime’s unstable equilibrium had been ruptured by the presence of the ship. It was instantly annihilated, serving as the catalyst for everything that was to come.