Callsign: King - Blackout

CAUSE/BECAUSE

In the beginning, there was everything.

From the first moment of existence, the first moment of time, the universe was complete.

Before that instant…there was no before. Time did not exist. Nothing existed. And then, the singularity…what scientists would some fourteen billion years later call ‘the Big Bang,’ brought everything into being.

All of the matter and energy that would ever exist began at that moment, as did the laws and forces that would govern their behavior. And because those laws were immutable, the very nature of reality and the ultimate destiny of this new universe existed as well. There was no other possible outcome. Everything that would happen-the changing states of matter and energy, the creation of simple elements from subatomic particles, the forging of the primary elements by gravity and atomic fusion and violent supernovae explosions into more complex metals, the emergence of molecules, even the arrangement of those molecules into living organisms-all of it was, from that incipient moment, inevitable. Everything that would ever exist, existed in that moment as an eventuality.

The final eventuality, where all that had been brought into being would return to the singularity, where even time and concepts such as before and after would cease to have meaning-the thing that Kushan villagers in the Bamiyan Valley had, with astonishing insight, imagined to be Angra Mainyu, demon of darkness and bringer of absolute destruction-had always existed as well, poised like the Sword of Damocles above all that had been made reality in the instant of the singularity.

But this awakening…this was something different.