Eventually the universe stopped expanding and started to contract. The net effect of this was the flow of life began to go in reverse. The elderly became younger and fitter and regained mental faculties. Babies got smaller and smaller before rejoining with their mothers at the end of their lives in the womb. It took awhile to realize that all the graveyards worldwide needed to be exhumed as the dead rejoined the land of the living. Their bodies were cleansed of embalming fluids or placed in special unbaking ovens and taken to hospitals where they sprung back to life and were greeted happily by their children, who were now more properly called their parents.
Despite this seeming blessing, many struggled with being reborn again and having to work their way through deadly illnesses. Others were faced with reliving choices they'd made years ago and would have to make again. A morbid pessimism hung in the air, as everyone knew the day they would exit the world and rejoin the womb. It was written on what was now ironically called the Birth Certificate.
People slowly lost their minds. We learn to accept our death in part because we have no idea when it will be. No matter how dangerous or foolhardy a situation we are in, we never really believe it's the end until it comes. Imagine what a burden it would be to know the year, day and minute when we would die. couple this with having to relive past horrors and not being able to stop them or even enabling them without realizing. Life became cheap and meaningless as more and more sought to take control of their destiny.
They would undertake daring stunts believing themselves invincible until they were babies again. This proved to be a false assertion and many foolhardy folks in their old age were once more committed to the ground.
Worse than the self-mutilators were what came to known as the past assassins. People who would hunt down and savagely kill the man who would rape them a few years down the line. Or they would cripple future bullies who had terrorized them as children. Everything became chaos.
No one knows who launched the first nuke. It was aimed directly at the white house, but the President had appeared increasingly unsteady the past few weeks and it wasn't impossible that he launched the nuke on himself as a surefire execution method. Whatever or whoever it was, it started a tidal wave of launches as every country that could emptied its mighty arsenal. The Earth was completely devoid of life within 56 minutes.
Still the universe continued to contract as the now lifeless Earth hung in space like a ball on string, swaying this way and that with the little gravitational and centrifugal force it still had. Systems and then galaxies began to disappear more and more rapidly until the entire milky way was reabsorbed into the ever thinning cosmos. it finally squeezed itself into an atom, then a quark and finally into nothing at all. The universe was gone.
A loud BANG and the whole thing started up again. Galaxies reformed and Earth once again was whole. When the first life began to appear in earnest, it begged the question: could everything happen again, as it had on this tiny blue ball? Would life take root again and thrive as it had before? Could we stop ourselves from making the same mistakes again? Would the whole universe just contract again anyway, making the whole thing moot? Maybe, just maybe, it was a second chance or us to get it right. Only time would tell.
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