The planet of the worms is a cold, barren, sunless place. The worms do not think. They feel nothing but hunger, and so they eat. They eat through the planet’s surface. They eat through the planet’s molten core. Over time, the planet grows speckled and spongelike, riddled with tunnels and holes.
But the worms don’t just eat rock. They eat distance. They eat space.
If a visitor tried to walk in a straight line across the planet’s surface, they would find themselves embarking on a strange journey with several unintended detours to the other side of the planet. But it’s unlikely that any visitor would ever stumble across the planet of the space-eating worms. Throughout the universe, the collective dream of faster-than-light travel remains a dream. No matter how many civilizations have looked yearningly or fearfully or greedily to the stars, every planet remains alone.
That changes when the worms evolve.
As the planet of the worms is whittled down into an absence of space, the first worm takes flight. It takes a big bite out of the atmosphere and just keeps on going. It chomps its way through the solar system and finally settles on an uninhabited moon, where it will have plenty to eat for at least another few thousand years.
Most of the other worms devour each other in their struggle for what’s left of their dwindling home world. But a few worms follow the pioneer worm into space, and as they eat, they multiply.
For millions of years, the migrating worms eat their way through a silent universe, through a vast expanse of lifeless space, through a sea of nebulae and stars and asteroids.
By the time the worms first encounter intelligent life, the universe is already a lot smaller than it used to be. The majority of sentient species have no idea this is happening, save for a few far-flung advanced civilizations.
The worms burrow into folklore. On the harsh desert world of Sutera, the traveling nomads tell stories of a strange oasis: a shock of lush greenery sprouting to life around the shores of an impossible lake. The lake is a jagged rip across the dunes, sand falling away into a pool of deep, clear water. But there are sleek, hungry, sharp-toothed creatures that lurk in the depths, ever-ready to leap from the surface to drag an unsuspecting desert-dweller to his death. The stories tell of star-crossed lovers banished into the desert. Near-dead from thirst, they stumbled across the oasis and leapt together into the lake. Legend says they swam through the horde of hungry creatures and emerged in a world where sweet, cold water stretches as far as the eye can see. Legend says they lived for decades on a tiny island amid a sea of monsters, and that they loved each other until their last breaths.
Generations pass. As the wormholes multiply, myth turns into fact of life. Scientists and philosophers search feverishly for a way to close the wormholes. Citizens are cautioned to report new wormhole sightings to the authorities without delay. Wormhole entrances are bricked up or sealed behind forcefields.
But not everyone sees the wormholes as a threat. Some see opportunity. The warrior-folk of Grirri conquered all other nations on their home planet after a glorious, bloody, century-spanning war. The wormholes must surely be a blessing from their gods, a divine confirmation that they are destined to spread their might across the universe. Their screaming hordes charge headfirst through the wormhole, armed to the teeth with electrified cannons and laser axes. Unfortunately, the entire army is soon crushed under the curious paws of the giant felines who live on the other side of the wormhole.
Planets die. Sometimes quickly, disappearing in a millisecond down the gullet of a particularly large worm. Sometimes slowly, when they are beset by a writhing swarm of smaller worms, gnawing their way through countries and continents. Survivors mass-migrate across disappearing land, fleeing in search of a sanctuary that doesn’t exist. Space-capable civilizations catapult themselves recklessly towards the stars only to die slowly on spaceships never designed to sustain long-term life. Heroic last stands and audacious military offensives are crushed between teeth.
The universe shrinks and shrinks. Once-impossible distances crumple into nothing. A million societies condense into one vast, fractured civilization. Now dawns an age of chaos, of confusion, of spectacular strangeness. Cities are built on the fragments of disparate worlds. Citizens wear protective suits carefully calibrated to their species’ physical needs and drive armored vehicles through streets that crisscross dozens of wormholes. Marketplaces sell a dizzying array of oddities and curiosities. Museums burst with mind-bending art and eye-popping colors from across galaxies. Children play in low-gravity zones, laughing as they bounce between pieces of planets. The remnants of civilization stagger in discordant harmony toward the end of all things.
The worms eat on.
Finally, there are just two bastions of intelligent life left, suspended in the last pocket of space.
The first is a generation ship, one of hundreds that set sail thousands of years ago from old Earth, taking with them the last remaining resources and the brightest minds. Since then, the ship has been repaired and rebuilt past recognition, evolving into a living, self-sufficient ecosystem.
The second is a house, miraculously untouched on an uneaten sliver of a long-gone planet. In that house, a young woman lives alone. By some cosmic coincidence, she too is a descendant of the human diaspora. From her bedroom window, she can see into a porthole window of a young officer’s living quarters on the generation ship. At first, she is afraid of such proximity to someone who might as well be an alien to her. She avoids the bedroom, sleeping on a couch downstairs instead. But one day, feeling very alone in this big house balanced on the pieces of what was once her world, she goes into the bedroom and pulls open the curtains. The officer is sitting on her bed, reading a book. She looks up and waves. The woman in the house waves back.
From then on, the two women spend a great deal of time gazing at each other across the warped and shattered space. They do not share a common language, for their people have diverged too far from their common ancestors, but they act out little charades. They are both eager to smile and quick to laugh.
When the worms converge on the ship and the house, they stand with their hands pressed against their windows, their eyes fixed on one another. The woman in the house mouths something in her language. The woman on the ship has no way to hear or understand her words, but what else can it be but a wish for something that never was?
They do not look away from each other until they have no choice but to.
When nothing else is left, the remaining worms turn on each other. They fight in a vicious flurry of teeth and shreds of flesh, growing more and more entangled until they are a writhing ball of worms squeezed into the last speck of the universe.
A great bite, a huge chomp—
A squelch, a crunch—
And that’s it.
© 2024 Megan Chee
