John Avery had been a research scientist, investigating a way to achieve the holy grail of technology: faster than light travel. He had been running an experiment with hard light, attempting to compress light into a solid in order to decompress it again, rocketing a theoretical ship through space at many times the speed of light. But something had gone horribly wrong.

For weeks, the coalition of allied faiths had protested his research labs, decrying his research and experiments as an affront to god. “Only god” they said, “should be able to manipulate the universe at will. Only god can be in all places at once.”

Like all superstitions, John had paid them no mind. He was pursuing the secrets of the universe. What use had he for those obstructionist luddites that would stand in his way?

Then the coalition set the bomb off.

Just as John was initializing his final experiment, a massive explosion rocked his lab to its foundations. Time seemed to stop. John could see the very photons hanging motionless in the air, and for the last time in his life, he felt true unbridled terror. The terror of an animal cornered by the dreaded predator, the terror of the specter of death.

When that eternal moment, that fleeting eternity, finally passed, John felt power surge through him like never before. Boundless. Infinite. Every particle of ever atom of every cell was a universe of energy, sparking with power. As he lost control and his subatomic particles flew apart, transformed into pure light, he directed himself up and out.

Yet still, his consciousness refused to dissipate. He watched, eyeless, as he left the planet behind. Stars wheeled in the universe, planets spun and revolved in their orbits. Before his very eyes, the universe itself unfolded.

He saw the impossible spark of creation, the moments before all things. The pure light coalescing into solid forms. Coalescing into hydrogen, into helium. He saw these rarified gasses coalesce into pruning furnaces of heat and light, saw them flash into existence, grow, age, and explode.

In the hyper accelerated time he now experienced, he saw them dance. He heard their music. Each star had its own personality, it’s own unique eccentricities that were characteristic of itself. He saw the heavier elements form in their hearts, to be dispersed with their deaths like dandelion seeds.

Planets formed, paying obeisance to their ruling stars. In the blink of an eye, life as we know it sparked, bloomed and was extinguished on planet after planet after planet.

He watched as the stars began to age, their nurseries gone. The stars began to wink out, leaving only scattered particles and black holes. This, too, passed in the blink of an eye.

The black holes themselves began to drift ever closer, drawn by their own immense mass and gravitational pull. The collected mass of a universe.

In the end, a single one remained, slowly shrinking as it emitted Hawking radiation into the ever shrinking universe. Finally, with a quiet whimper, that great beast also winked out of existence.

All the universe had come from light and passed into darkness.