text: I recently found this subreddit and decided to share something I wrote a long time ago. Enjoy! &#x200B; &#x200B; The giant red sun illuminated the countless cities on the three most populated planets in the universe. Its already dim and weak light was even further weakened by the millions of satellites orbiting around the star and focusing the light onto artificial dwarf planets which saved up some of the energy into giant batteries that occupied most of their volume and reflecting everything else to smaller collection stations on all of the planets. There was no other light to be seen; there were no stars illuminating the void, partially because of the fact that they were all torn apart by the expansion of the universe and partially because there weren't all that many stars left; most of them exploded into clouds of gas or transformed into black holes. The cities on the planets were not normal cities, but tightly packed complex tridimensional structures, designed to keep in them as many people as possible, and there was not a single square meter of the planets that was not designed according to that principle. All the necessary resources were supplied by the countless artificial dwarf planets that contained aeroponic farms, oxygen synthesizers, nuclear fusion reactors and other complicated machinery necessary for keeping a population of hundreds of billions humans alive. Automatic spaceships roamed the dark universe in search of resources, bringing entire planets to be combusted and transformed into energy. The people lived in small apartments dimly illuminated by bluish energy-efficient lamps. Most of them were scientists trying to figure out how to make it so humanity can survive for just a little longer, as even though birth was made illegal thousands of years ago advances in medicine made humans live forever and the resources of the universe were very rapidly depleting. This was not the fault of an evil government, however, as everyone lived this way and it was the most efficient way of keeping humans alive. &#x200B; There were only a few thousand years left until the star keeping humanity alive would explode. Humanity had already found a potential new home, a yellow dwarf located around three thousand light years away with four planets, three of them in the habitable zone around the star. Spaceships with equipment and dyson swarm satellites were already flying towards the new home at speeds hundreds of times faster than the speed of light, quickly draining the energy saved in the last billion years. Special devices were harvesting the matter of the dying sun and transforming it into energy for the spaceships. After all of the preparations were completed, spaceships with humans in them started being sent, powered by the combustion of their old homes. They glanced back at what remained of the old sun before the superliminal engines were turned on; the light of the old star would never reach them in visible to the human eye form again. &#x200B; It had been already four billion years since humanity had moved to its new home. The yellow dwarf had transformed into a red giant, consuming the nearest planet to itself and leaving the second nearest inhabitable. There were ten thousand years left until it would explode and collapse into a black hole, but this time there was no backup plan. There was nothing, not a single star left. This was it. This was the last star in the universe. Sure, humanity could survive a few thousand years on the saved energy and on combustion of planets, but that is such a short time... The only hope left was finding a new universe. There were theories about the possibility of black holes being portals to other universes, but there was no way to check: light was not able to leave a black hole, and technology that allowed for superliminal travel relied on the deformation of space-time, and black holes already deformed space-time so much that there was no way for these engines to work. But it was the only hope. So when the star was about to explode, spaceships flew out of the radius of the explosion, and then flew into the black hole. There is no way to know what happened next; information about it cannot escape the event horizon.