A notebook at the end of the universe

There is a notebook at the end of the universe.

Its pages are pristine, its cover the deepest black, leather never cracked or faded. It sits in perfect orbit around a nearby black hole, and watches the event horizon the way a rabbit watches a nearby fox - wary, scared, and resigned to the fact that it could never move fast enough to escape.

Even if it could, there'd be no one left to read it anyway.

~

Once, there was a planet. It was blue, and green and brown and pink and contained a very unusual form of carbon.

On this planet, there was carbon that could think. It had been quite unintended really - an accident that grew unchecked and seemed to overcome whatever the universe threw at it. Eventually, it was a very complex little carbon, joined by many other little carbons, until it came together in a mass of atoms that could talk.

That was the first mistake.

Once there was talking, there was insulting. Once there was insulting, there was fighting, and after fighting, well. There weren't as many little carbons anymore.

Some carbons were called rabbits, and some carbons were called foxes, and other carbons were called humans. They formed a cycle - the rabbit would eat the grass (another form of carbon and phosphorus and cellulose and all kinds of little things) and the fox would eat the rabbit. The humans could eat all three, though they preferred something called McDonald's. This would lead to the second mistake - one so large that it really should’ve been the first, but that had been taken already.

The second mistake, as could be witnessed by the unbiased observation of a lonely universe, was money.

You see, sometime after the carbons banded together and progressed beyond what anyone reasonable could anticipate, they'd realised they needed a system. It was a very complex, pointless system that devolved into the notion of debt. Debt was a smaller, separate mistake, bullet pointed under the title of Money. After all, once broken down into its smallest pieces, all it really was, was the lack of money.

Money, when one had it, could be a great force of nature. It could create even more money, it could give a little carbon shelter, and sustenance, and other carbons to work for its shelter and sustenance.

When one had no money, they would borrow it from someone who had a lot of it. This led to debt. Debt could force even the nicest bit of carbon to do the worst things a carbon could do. In fact, they really wouldn’t have done any of it if they had another choice. It was a question the universe would ask, and the little carbons would answer.

For McDonald's, a Human carbon needed money.

This would prove to be the third mistake.

Money, you see, could be spent.

~

When one little human gave another little human two stones for one prettier stone, the universe thought nothing of it. It was a passing fancy, a trade of atoms for different looking atoms.

But then it turned into three stones for one stone, five stones for one hunk of metal. Ten hunks of metal for one shelter.

A thousand hunks of metal for a person.

A turn of the planet's rotation would pass, and a human could be given a hunk of metal for their time.

A coin (another word for a hunk of metal) could be traded for anything a human could think of.

Carbon was not made for such complex rules, so it is natural that this would soon prove unstable.

Words were invented so little carbons could communicate.

Numbers were invented so little carbons could invent bigger numbers, and if there was anything little carbons loved more than McDonald's, it was bigger numbers.

A bigger number of coins led to more coins, which equaled less debt, which equaled more McDonalds, which on a planetary scale, was both meaningless, and the most important thing in the universe.

For you see, no number was big enough to satisfy the little carbons, not even twenty thousand (a very large number indeed, until it was surpassed by twenty thousand and one) could satiate their desire. Numerous attempts at this had been made throughout the span of the planet's existence, whether through stealing or earning or giving. Twenty thousand hunks of metal given to a carbon life form would often spiral. Very rarely did a human spend all of it on something as innocuous as McDonalds.

Perhaps, the mistake was not spending. Or money. Or talking or thinking.

Perhaps the mistake was not even carbon itself, despite the evidence to the contrary.

Perhaps, the mistake was something the carbon humans discovered, called greed.

Greed was a natural force, like gravity. An election was greedy when it craved a proton. Light was greedy, when it chased away the dark. The black hole that would eventually tear apart a fragile notebook, was greedy as it consumed everything in its path.

It was just a shame, that for all the little carbons had discovered, like the sun, and love and art, that they had stumbled upon the universe's own secret.

Give a human twenty thousand hunks of metal, and they would look for a thousand more. Give the universe one star to devour in its endless expanse, it would hunger for another billion.

In this, there was little difference, between a little carbon like a human, and the much, much larger universe.

Eventually, the green and blue of that little planet would turn to brown and red. Then grey. Then black.

Humans would've left by then of course, sending carbon as far as they could fly, out into the galaxy only for the cycle to continue. Entropy was another secret of the universe the humans had discovered, and while they acknowledged its existence, they ran, like a rabbit from a fox.

A notebook from a black hole.

You can trade atoms for an eternity, until you run out of atoms.

A lack of atoms is technically a deficit. Which really, was another fancier word the humans had invented for debt. Once broken down into the smallest of pieces, the space of nothing that would encroach the universe would grow larger, which perhaps, was the worst and final mistake of it all.

You cannot run when there is nowhere to go. Little carbons cannot remain when there is nothing left.

This is not a mistake, but a sad truth.

There is a notebook at the edge of the universe. Its pages are pristine, its cover the deepest black, leather never cracked or faded. It sits in perfect orbit around a black hole, and watches the event horizon the way a rabbit would have watched a nearby fox, back when there were rabbits and foxes.

Soon, it too, will be torn apart, returned to its base elements.

It contains a list of mistakes.

And inside, words scrawled with haste, looping letters and numbers much larger than twenty thousand, it tells a simple story. Some recollection of a day's events - all that remains of a little carbon’s life. Maybe they had written it for another carbon. Or maybe they had written it for themselves.

Perhaps they had written it for no reason at all, simply tarnishing the pristine pages on a whim, before they went about the rest of their carbon life. The reason does not matter, because inside this notebook, there is no such thing called debt.

And that is how the universe intended it.