FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Prologue

We see an old man, easily over one hundred and twenty. Wrinkles are etched into his face, their imitable topology telling the unmistakable life story of the man but with no words. He wears thick glasses and his skin is old and the whiteness has been tinted with the smallest hint of scarlet. He sits in front of a worn bookshelf in a cosy rural home. As he speaks into the camera, you can hear the warmth in his quavering voice, as though he reminisces about an old friend.

“Well," he says, “I loved her. She was always so eager to learn, so eager to love. I felt so wrong raising her like that during the short time I had her, but…" He pauses, as if to think long and hard on the subject, scratching his thin silver hair. “I knew she would grow up to do great things. You just look in someone's eyes like that, and… you know it in your heart. You always know."

Then we see a slow-moving image of the night sky. The Milky Way glows just as it always had, violet sploshes of plasma and the white fire of distant suns glowing beautifully in the blackness, in the middle of an indefinitely long night. Shooting stars streak through the atmosphere, adding more beauty to the already perfect scene.

Then we see an old woman, sitting in the same room as the man before her. Her hair, too, is silver and her brown skin is wrinkled, and she has a pair of thick glasses hanging down by her neck. She has a faint smile to her lips, clearly deep in nostalgic thought.

“Me?" she asks. “As for me, well, I was elated when I heard the news. I damn near didn't believe it." Then she chuckles softly, remembering the glee she felt so many years ago, knowing that, even if to some infinitesimal extent, she was a part of it. “But it sure didn't start out that way."

_ _

***

Space is cold, and black and lonely. It exists simply as that, space, that is. Beyond the tyrannical grip of the gravitational interaction of planets and stars lies the presumably-infinite nothing that forms most of reality. Colossal affairs, far larger than any planetary intelligence can fathom, go unnoticed here, for the universe simply doesn't care.

Colossal affairs, such as the merging of two black holes. In deep space, stars swirled about distantly around the vastly larger of the two singularities, light years away but still burning brightly in the blackness. The supermassive black hole was the core of a distant galaxy, what was once a quasar, but had since gone quiet for over a billion years due to a lack of material for it to consume. Black holes were ravenous, consuming everything they could and ejecting what they couldn't as jets of subatomic particles. Still, it possessed a flattened ring of diffuse plasma, remnants of the countless stars it consumed, hanging there and rotating slowly due to the time dilation.

The smaller of the black holes, only a few kilometres across, drifted into the extreme orbit of the supermassive one, which dwarfed it by several orders of magnitude, covering several astronomical units. It ran around the singularity at impossible speed, stealing energy from the rotating spacetime to add to its own velocity. As it neared the speed of light, its event horizon distorted like a lozenge, its ergosphere flickering as it swept up the plasma from the large black hole. Then, finally, it neared the other's event horizon, sending out unprecedented quantities of gravitational radiation through the cosmos, and then it drifted through.

The supermassive black hole sent out torrential shockwaves of gravity, as though it was screaming victoriously, powerful enough to distort the image of the stars as they passed through the cosmic neighbourhood at the speed of light. This region of space, however, was devoid of anyone to observe such a phenomenon. It would go on for millions of years, bereft of any observers to wonder why it occurred in the first place.

Space is cold, and black and lonely.