The Room at the End of the Universe

While digging through some old notebooks of mine, I found the moleskine (grid-lined paper FTW! \o/) that I took to the hospital with me when I had my gall bladder taken out. I don't remember writing this at all, but I found a story scribbled into the back of the book in my handwriting. This was very likely while I was under a little morphine haze, heh.

The Room at the End of the Universe

Once, long ago, a man was sentenced to his doom. Rather than remove the man from existence through conventional methods, the leaders of his society constructed a machine to rent his body asunder at the molecular level so as to be completely, utterly, entirely rid of him.

Whether or not his crimes merited such a sentence -- or if he committed a crime at all -- has long since been forgotten. All that is certain is that the man still remains, regardless of this machine.

It is a little known fact that if one were to travel to the end of the end of the universe, to the place where time falls apart, the place that only the most fanciful minds can dream of and only the maddest of minds can comprehend, there is a door.

Behind the door is a room, and the room is infinite. It is devoid of light, sound, color, air, good, evil, silence, and all other things we as mortals simply cannot exist without. Still, this room is populated by two things: a single mortal, and the Strings of the Universe.
It is unknown how the mortal arrives in this room, but it is certain how long they stay. They remain mortals when they enter the room at the end of the universe, and so their term there is limited by their mortality. When the mortal's time is expired, a new one is brought in to replace them.

It is further unknown whether the Strings of the Universe are indeed multiple strings, or if it's a single string infinitely overlapped upon itself. The strings are likewise as infinite as the room they occupy, and they control the universe, as their title suggests.

The Strings of the Universe are time, space and circumstance manifested in a malleable form. They can be formed, plucked, gathered, tangled and combed; and when they are, they change the known universe. They are the nerves and tendons that put every that was or ever will be into motion.

I've been here for eighty-seven years, in the room at the end of the universe.

I didn't know where I was when I first arrived. I doubt anyone does. I was surrounded by countless sinewy pillars that reached into nothingness with the same grateful stretch that a tree makes for sunlight. They were the Strings, twisted into familiar shapes and resonating memories of the previous mortal who formed them. Touching them explained everything, and the feeling of the Strings beneath my fingers made everything clear.

Morphine's one helluva drug, kids! Only use under medical supervision~