Once upon a time, there were three boring, totally normal planets lazily circling their sun.
One was too hot. It spewed out venomous flames like a firebreather with something pokey stuck in her teeth—dangerously unpredictable, even for the daring.
One was too cold. It was so cold even the ghosts got trapped there, growing more and more sluggish as their memories turned to ice. The lucky ones escaped off-planet into the relatively warm, radioactive embrace of space before they completely lost what made them cling to this mortal coil in the first place.
The last one, as they say, was juuuuuuuuuust right. Or at least, just right if you breathe ammonia, like surfing fifty-foot tidal waves every day, and don’t mind a little volcanic activity now and then, just to mix things up. But for the sake of argument, let’s call it “just right.”
“Ammonia, hey?” said Aunt Mildred, as she pulled up to the edge of a tall, chalky cliff in her hot pink, retro-style spaceship—you know, pot-bellied, pointy-tipped with a submarine-style porthole on the side—something straight out of a cartoon on the back of a cereal box. (Except for the pink part, because Everyone Knows spaceships are for boys.) As Mildred stepped out to take a look around, her breathing crackled over the sound system a little. Ammonia, famously, smelled like piss. She’d wisely decided to keep her helmet on.
“You get used to it,” said Aunt Ethel with a not-small touch of pride. She had once been human and now called herself an adopted Zerosian—the planet was called Zerosia, or at least Aunt Ethel called it that, who knows what it called itself—since she’d been there longer than anything else alive. Ethel, unlike her sisters, was not afraid of getting “attached.”
“I suppose that first hundred million years weaning yourself off the old oxygen just flew by, hey?” Mildred said, but good-naturedly, and clapped Ethel on the back in a hug that bordered on aggressive. Not in a mean way. That was just Aunt Mildred—loud laugh, wide hips, big hair, and about twenty times smarter than anyone else in the room. Mildred was a woman who Took Up Space, and regretted nothing.
Ethel squeezed Mildred back, tucking her chin over the bubble helmet, but just as quickly let go again. “Come on, come on,” she hurried. “You’re late!”
Ethel was a head taller than Mildred, with permanently damp hair and a face full of lines that competed against each other to see who could crinkle around her eyes or her mouth in the most friendly way possible. She wore a glittering long-sleeved gown of diamonds (from Neptune, of course) that contrasted delightfully with Mildred’s sleek, one-piece spacesuit, which was covered in the kinds of hooks and clamps and belt loops that came in handy when you spent your life tripping around in a rickety tin ship.
“Oh, I can’t possibly be later than Phyllis,” said Mildred. “I swear, if we hadn’t learned how to master time that woman would be late to her own birth and early to her funeral. You remember that time she brought out the fried carbon cakes when everyone was side-stepping to the polka? Didn’t even notice what millennium she was in.”
“I heard that,” said a voice that pretended at crotchety so well it fooled even itself sometimes. “Is that any way to greet your big sister?”
Mildred, who’d only taken a few steps forward on this crumbly, dark-soiled, rainbow-sheened planet, pulled up short. Aunt Phyllis appeared beside her from where she’d apparently been hiding out with the quarks. Maybe she’d been a few centuries early.
Mildred shone out a smile like a song. “Phyllis!” she cried and went to press happy palms to either side of Phyllis’s cheeks, careful not to smudge her plum lipstick. Aunt Phyllis lived and died—many times over across the ages, in fact—by her plum lipstick. But Mildred needn’t have bothered to be careful. Her palms swished right through.
“I’m going non-corporeal mostly, these days,” said Phyllis gruffly. “Easier on the joints. But it does mean you two pups are going to have to do the heavy lifting, if we want to stop the end of the world.”
“Which world? This one?” said Mildred, and looked around. “I mean, the purple clouds are pretty enough, don’t get me wrong, but worlds do need a good wallow sometimes—”
“Will you two cats get herded already?” Ethel burst out, pushing Mildred forward and waving impatiently at Phyllis.
Impatience was not Ethel’s usual style. The worry must really be settling in. “I have not spent the last billion years or so babysitting this place just for it to go pouf. You know the universe is in a precarious enough position without you two sitting out the whole show.”
That got Mildred moving, and Phyllis pursing her lips.
Because the thing was, they did know. They’d just been leaving Ethel to deal with this on her own for too long, and Ethel knew it.
The universe was dying. Of course, the universe was always dying in one way or another. A planet here, a star field there. Destruction was the first step to rebirth, and all that. But not everything was supposed to die all at once. And the universe was not supposed to fly into chaos like a soup-filled blender with its lid blown off because one little world couldn’t find its groove. (It was failing spectacularly to find any kind of rhythm at all, actually. Had the magma scars to prove it.)
But for some reason, Ethel insisted—some kind of stickiness with the rules of the universe, perhaps—the fate of this world, which was not too cold and not too hot, but also not too much of anything, really, was hitched to everyone else’s.
As Aunties of the Known Universe, they really did not want to see the entire universe die. There was only one; it was right there in the name. Mildred, Ethel, and Phyllis had all gotten rather fond of it over the eons.
Which meant allegiance to Zerosia or not, it was time the aunties got to work.
They set up shop on the equator, beside what seemed like a comically accurate illustration of this planet’s woes—a giant crevasse, couple of thousand miles long, splitting the volcanic planet along its seam like a bashed-in tennis ball. They pulled out their tools under the weak orange sun—drills and a wrench for Mildred, a vessel of never-ending water for Ethel, an imagination big enough to think away any barrier for Phyllis. Then they got to work.
They patched a few holes, plugged a few others. Mildred mud-jacked islands and drained tsunamis; Phyllis thought up new ways for birds to swim and fish to fly. Ethel’s water soaked parched earth aplenty. But the problems kept coming. The CO2-ridden oceans were too acidic. The sun’s light was long past anemic. The planet’s core was constantly shifting magnetic poles, which wreaked havoc on the natural rhythms of the few birds and insects that had managed to evolve on this truly turdish planet. More and more problems came fast and furious, growing faster and furiouser as the decades blinked by.
“None of these problems are unique to Zerosia,” Ethel shouted over the lengthy complaints of the thin soil, which was so unused to having an audience it rattled on about every stray gamma ray that ever dared irradiate away its growth potential. “But as things get worse here…”
So did other worlds, a metaphysical Phyllis reported, in all corners of space.
Alien civilizations that used to get along great suddenly turned on each other. Galaxies spun off-kilter, crashing into one another. Drama queen stars went supernova over the tiniest thing, and supermassive black holes were sprouting up everywhere. The more they grew, the more they kept disintegrating the fabric of space and time, slowly sucking the colour out of the universe like black mould on bread.
A few million years later, the aunties were exhausted, still trying to fix three problems while another three thousand sprung up around them. Meteors showered around them, mountains rose and fell, and Zerosia’s oceans flooded, then dried, then flooded again, as this Very Important Planet held the fate of the universe in its clumsy grasp.
Aunt Phyllis fell first. Her mind was sludge, and all she could think of was The End.
“Why hasn’t this fucking planet died already?” she finally gasped, when every solution she could possibly imagine had been swallowed by fog.
Aunt Mildred trussed together her last earthquake tear, then sat back on the silty earth with numb fingers and shaking hands. “It should have been destroyed so many times over by now, even with our best efforts,” she said. When Ethel first asked for their help, it seemed almost laughable. An Auntie of the Known Universe, unable to raise one planet? She should have known better. “And let’s be real. Our efforts have not been our best for a few millennia already.”
Aunt Ethel was the last to stop stirring up new vats of microbial life in as many bodies of water as would have her. She had loved this place the longest. Mildred and Phyllis liked to gallivant around, but Ethel put down roots. It was who she was. And this smelly, belchy, thrashing planet, so hostile in every way, had seemed like just the challenge she loved best.
Secretly, Ethel thought she’d keep fighting for Zerosia forever. She’d wrestled fate this long, hadn’t she? She could last a little longer, until—
She set her diamond pitcher down. She could feel it in the rest of the universe, too. The gradual diminution of even the possibility of new life.
All three of them were dirty, weary, and bruised.
Time was up.
“Well, we’ve outrun death before,” said Phyllis, the veins standing out in her thin wrists even as her projection flickered. Her signature plum lipstick had almost entirely worn off.
“Not while the rest of the universe died with us,” said Mildred, voice crackling faintly over her helmet’s ancient sound system. “This might be the real deal this time. For everyone.” Her hair drooped, and she’d lost so much weight she might have blown away on a stray solar wind.
The three of them looked at each other with blinking eyes. Despite their cosmic career choices and far-reaching powers, none of them really knew what lay On The Other Side.
Who would they be? Who would they even remember?
“But why this place? Why did death want to set up on this planet, like this?” Ethel couldn’t help but ask these questions, one last time. They’d all asked them a million times before. Literally.
“Death,” mused Mildred, on an out-breath.
Then she sat up straight.
“Death!” she called again, this time in her loudest you-better-get-out-here-now-or-your-hide’s-gonna-be-tanned-six-ways-from-Sunday voice. It travelled faster than the speed of light to the four corners of the universe and back again.
And Death’s blonde head peeped up, as if playing at being sheepish.
Not from out in the centre of the universe, where she should have been, where endlessly hungry black holes epitomized the undoing that is the end of one thing before the beginning of another. Not safe in her own state of ultra-powerful subconsciousness, like all good rules of the universe. But right here. In front of them, and personified no less. Emerging from the crushing depths of the seam of Zerosia’s own endless fault line.
“Did you know she could do that?” Aunt Phyllis croaked. “I didn’t know she could do that.”
Death’s wispy hair was matted with mud, her blue eyes crusty with grime. But she smiled a deeply self-satisfied smile.
“What,” growled Ethel, in a voice that leagues away shattered glass mountains, “are you doing in my own house?”
“That was the longest game of hide and seek ever,” said Death, her voice high and piping. “I gave you so many clues and you still took so long!”
Phyllis lunged for Death’s throat. It wasn’t a good idea—the Known Universe didn’t work so well without the counterbalance of Unknown Ends; the aunties should know, they remembered the incessant chaos that came before—but her fingers passed right through, since she was still incorporeal anyway.
“DHUMAVATI ETERNA ALLANI TUCHULCHA HECATE!” Aunt Mildred shouted.
And when Aunt Mildred shouts, you LISTEN.
Death froze, one foot raised to step out of Zerosia’s fault line like she was stepping out of a tickle trunk.
“PUT IT ALL BACK RIGHT NOW!” Mildred yelled. “IF I COUNT TO THREE AND IT’S NOT BACK, SO HELP ME, ONE—TWO—”
“ALRIGHT!” Death shouted back, deftly standing up straight and seeming to care nothing for the fact that her once-blue dress was stained black with blood. “You don’t have to be that way! It was just a game!”
She snapped her dainty fingers, nails sharpened to points.
Suddenly, Aunt Ethel drew in a barrel-sized breath of ammonia all the way down to the bottom of her lungs. Warm water ran down one cheek, and the creases around her eyes relaxed for the first time in millennia.
Aunt Phyllis blinked several times and her whole image sharpened, plum lips popping, as if a long-lost astral cable somewhere had finally been snapped into its socket.
And Aunt Mildred. Aunt Mildred’s curly brown hair bounced back against the confines of her cloudy, much-battered helmet with a fierceness that rivalled the ghoul-cats of Sector Four, whose screeches rendered galaxies asunder.
“Ooh, that is better,” she said, like she had just sunk into a salt-spring bath.
Then she grabbed Death by the nape of the neck with one hand, and wrapped strong fingers around the newly awakened entity’s wrists with the other. Death gasped, but her claws only grasped, useless, while her eyes burned like ice.
“Don’t you ever do something like that again, you hear?” Mildred whispered into her ear through the thin bubble of her visor. Dead serious.
Sometimes, Aunt Mildred was the scariest one of them all.
“Fine,” Death whined, and Mildred let go. Even the neutrinos around them felt lighter somehow. Smelled better, too.
“You have to admit,” Death said before she flounced off into dark matter, leaving only a glint of blonde behind. “It was a great hiding spot, wasn’t it?”
“Entropy better not learn that trick,” was all Aunt Phyllis managed to say. The other two Aunties of the Known Universe didn’t answer.
Ethel paused for one moment, then whipped back to her poor planet. She was already caught up in planning the next rain cycle. “Cypress trees!” she gleed as she wiped away sparkling tears. “And the plankton will be so pleased!”
Phyllis poked her head into the neighbouring galaxy, one that moments before had been about to tango with some explosive gravitational waves strong enough to rip it to shreds. She called back in tones that could almost be called happy, “All clear!”
And Mildred finally, finally, pulled off her battered bubble helmet. Took a breath. Looked around with fresh eyes.
The ammonia was still sickly sweet, but it no longer burned going down. And the sounds of crashing tidal waves in the distance were actually rather soothing. Even the dim orange sun, useless for actually growing things, painted pretty pastels in the sky. If you looked just right.
She surveyed their cursed little planet—which wasn’t so bad after all; oil-slick rainbows in the dark earth around them glittered madly in the early morning light—and tried to remember where she’d parked her spaceship.
