The day the stars began to drift away, no trumpet sounded; no sky cracked. Astronomers at Maunakea noticed it first — a faint, persistent recession of the galaxies, as though the cosmos had exhaled and decided not to inhale. Within a week, every telescope on Earth confirmed the impossible: the Hubble flow had accelerated overnight, and the acceleration was uniform, deliberate, polite.
Mara Ekwueme, theoretical cosmologist and reluctant insomniac, was alone in the control room when the pattern emerged. The redshift data were not random: they formed a lattice of avoidance. Every spiral arm in the local group was nudged outwards along vectors that, if drawn on a chart, spelled a single word in the angular alphabet of gravitational equipotentials: Go.
She whispered the word aloud and felt the room cool by several degrees. The air itself seemed embarrassed to carry the sound.
“Dark energy doesn’t have syntax,” her postdoc, Jonas, said when she showed him. “It’s a scalar field, not a postcard.”
“Fields don’t accelerate with manners either,” Mara replied. “This is curated. Someone is curating us.”
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They published a two-page note in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The world shrugged. Markets dipped, then recovered when no asteroid followed the memo. Priests debated on television; late-night hosts made eviction jokes. Humanity, as usual, was too busy to be terrified by subtleties.
But Mara kept watching. She found that if she binned the recession velocities by galactic metallicity, a second message appeared — fainter, encrypted in the jitter of Type Ia supernovae. Translated into human language, it read:
We are the remainder, the unseen scaffolding. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Dark matter. Not particles of supersymmetry, not sterile neutrinos — civilizations. Vast, slow, ancient polities that had traded light for longevity, electromagnetism for serenity. They lived in the cold between stars, content with gravity’s whisper. To them, baryonic creatures were loud children with radioactive toys.
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