Jon was back in his room, with the stone. The risks were scary, but the potential upside was so great that it was worth it. If he was careful.
So what should he ask for? The most innocuous answer seemed to be information. How could that go wrong?
"I wish for a laptop computer, on which was a detailed map of our galaxy, with every star system having intelligent life noted, along with information about them."
And there it was. But it only took a few moments of looking to see that something was horribly, horribly wrong.
There was a graphical display of our galaxy, the Milky Way. But it was mostly gone. No, it wasn't just due to an uneven distribution of stars. It was supposed to be a disk, 100 thousand light-years in diameter. But it looked like a slice of a pizza that had a secant sliced through it by a pizza cutter, dividing its area into about 20% and 80%, and someone came along and ate one of the pieces, and what was left was the 20%. Outside of that slice was just complete emptiness. Oblivion. And the really worrying part. The part that was terrifying, was that Earth, in the portion remaining, was very close to the edge. About 4 light-years from it.
"I wish I knew what happened to the rest of the galaxy."
And then he did. Jon was chilled. The answer was astonishing and soul-crushing. It was the end of the universe. The entire universe, it was coming to an end. About two billion light-years away, about two-billion years ago, an advanced civilization in another galaxy had made a device. The ultimate weapon of mass destruction. A universe destroyer. A device that set off a change in the vacuum of space itself, changing it to a different state of vacuum, where the constants of nature were different. The result was a bubble that expanded in all directions at the speed of light, snuffing out of existence everything it encountered. Nothing could stop it. Nothing could survive it. What was left in its wake was space where the gravitational constant was inconceivably strong. Life was impossible inside the void, because inside it, even an electron would have as much gravity as a galaxy does now. Death was coming. And nothing could stop it. Except, maybe...
"I wish the universe would be restored to its state before this universe destroying weapon was set off."
The stone grew too hot to hold. Jon dropped it. It grew white hot, and it burned into the carpet in the floor of his room. Jon rushed to the bathroom to get a palmful of water but when he got back, it was cooled of, and there was a little black spot on the floor, with the stone in the center. Jon tentatively tapped it. It was cool.
"I wish I knew if that worked."
It didn't. The stone wasn't powerful enough to destroy a 4 billion light-year diameter chunk of the universe.
He tried stopping the progress of the exapanding bubble. He tried wishing for space to be created outside it, to warp spacetime and make its expansion effectively slowed. None of it worked. He thought about wishing to move it back away from the Earth, but decided against it since that would kill civilizations on the other side of it sooner, and that would be selfish. He tried wishing the solar system to be moved a million light-years away, out of the Milky Way galaxy. He couldn't move it at all. The stone just wasn't powerful enough to do that sort of thing.
"I wish I knew if there was anything I could do to stop this, or delay this, or to save the Earth."
There wasn't. There was nothing that could be done. In 4 years, a wave of death would wash past the Earth and everything would be snuffed out of existence. Well to hell with the Earth. Maybe everything on it could be moved to a different planet.
But a few wishes proved that was beyond the stone's ability as well. It could move things faster than the speed of light, it could collect data faster than the speed of light as it did with the map of the galaxy to know about this thing that was approaching them at the speed of light, it could even send things back in time a few microseconds, but it had a sphere of influence of a few miles, and time travel abilities over the duration of time it took light to travel that distance. The only thing it could do outside the sphere of influence was collect data, as it did with the star map. Nor could he wish for faster than light ships. As faster than light was not physically possible without magic, the ships would need magic to operate, and they would use up more magic than the stone had, before traveling even out of the solar system. The only thing that was possible was to flee the bubble at just under than the speed of light, to delay the inevitable. But not for very long.
Jon started to cry. Maybe it would have been better not knowing. The end would be so fast. It would just be there one moment, gone the next. It would literally hit at the speed of light and everything would be erased from existence. Nor could he do a thing to save all the other life in the galaxy, or in other galaxies. It was all doomed. It was a doomed universe. It was already dead.
The Earth had a clock. The clock had 4 years left on it. At that time, everything would end. Jon was the only one who knew at this point. What should he do? What should he do with this knowledge? Should he tell Karyn? His mother? The scientific community? Should he keep it to himself and life his life like normal? He still had a magic rock, which could do amazing things. And 4 years to live. For life on Earth to live. What should he do with that? What should he do for the world?
