Stories / The History of the Universe

Prologue: The Beginning

In the beginning there was nothing, absolutely nothing. Not a single thing existed in any shape or form. No plants, no animals, no stars, not even a single penguin, nothing at all. This nothingness went on for over a trillion billion million years; of course this is just our estimate since the nothingness refused to keep track of time. Eventually the nothingness got rather bored of the whole thing and decided to retire. It had lived a long life, raised a very nice family of nothing and was quite happy with the nothing it had accomplished. The nothingness’s retirement lead to the rather complex problem of what was going to replace it. The universe organized committee after committee, planed numerous extensive and in-depth focus group sessions to discuss the problem. All the nothings in the universe worked together and after many years had come up with nothing. The universe started to get really worried when suddenly four penguins blinked into existence.

This event occurred with a complete lack of warning or justification and really pissed off the nothingness. However the universe was quite pleased with the event as it had finally found something to replace the nothingness. Now this could be interpreted as a magical or mystical event but you have to understand these are only penguins. Getting penguins out of nothing isn’t amazing and in fact it is a very common occurrence in many parts of the universe. Now if a mouse or kangaroo suddenly appeared out of nothing there would be some cause to be amazed. Kangaroos and mice are very complex things, and are much harder to create out of nothing compared to penguins, of course it is in very poor taste to tell a penguin this.

Part 1: The Beginning of Time.

At first everything was going wonderfully, the penguins were having long intricate conversations (By penguin standards) and were enjoying themselves greatly. However after a few millennia they started getting bored. The nothingness was still refusing to talk to them because of their uninvited intrusion and they had run out of things to say to each other. So there they were, 4 penguins sitting in a vast expanses of nothingness without a thing to talk about. Billions of years past and they started to grow quite hungry and rather annoyed about existing. Although this was likely the most amazing event in history (It’s very hard to find a penguin that doesn’t love living let alone four), it went unappreciated as there were no non-penguins around to take note of it. After an uncountable number of years went by the penguins decided that they needed a plan. They needed something to do and they definitely needed something to eat.

It took many more years of constant thought to construct a plan but eventually one penguin came up with one. He had decided that they needed to run into each other and do so at an extremely high speed. It is not clear how this was supposed to help, some experts believe that the penguin was simply suicidal. They started quite slowly and were doing incredibly well. They tried doing it faster and faster until eventually they were attempting to run into each other at 3 times the speed of what would be light if there was any. However on their last attempt they all missed and ended up running around in circles at really incredible speeds. The nothingness started spinning with them and a whirlpool was formed from nothing. During this the penguins had managed to collide at such incredible speed that they combined into one super penguin which was then ripped apart in the expanding whirlpool of nothingness. The whirlpool of nothing was clogged by these penguin particles and started to become unstable. The speed of the whirlpool kept increasing and increasing as more of the nothingness was pulled in. The penguin particles started spontaneously multiplying from all the energy in the whirlpool and then the whirlpool erupted throwing all the particles around the universes. These particles were still hungry but they had discovered how to make thermonuclear weapons so they were no longer bored. Thousands of intra-penguin wars erupted with nuclear bombs of tremendous power being exploded all over the universe.

As the wars raged on the penguins started banding together amassing larger and larger collections of nuclear weapons. In a very unusual act of strangeness the nothingness sabotaged the weapons so that they would all detonate at the exact same time. This detonation is what some people call the “Big Bang”. The explosions spread fire and penguins across the entire universe. Slowly the fire swelled into balls that we now call stars. The penguins being rather tired from all their fighting just laid back and became planets, moons, asteroids, and everything else in the universe that isn’t on fire. Time started a few days later when one of the planets said to its moon, “its lunch time”.

Part 2: The Beginning of Life

The penguins were still very hungry. Many penguins died of starvation leaving giant corpses floating in space. The penguins had decided that they were really tired of being hungry and needed something to eat. So they started throwing corpses at other corpses in hopes of making a new species that they could eat. After many years of doing this they had gotten nowhere and really had to pee. On one specific corpse planet all of the penguins started peeing at once creating massive lakes of urine. The urine started eating away at the corpses making small free particles. These free particles became bacteria and slowly evolved into large fishlike creatures. The penguins spent another billion years starving and shrinking before they were small enough to eat the fish. The penguins had retreated to a small section of land near the south pole of the planet where it was cool enough to give them limited hibernation. The penguins were too few in numbers by this time to be able to fight off the fish people and were forced to stay on their small island. The rest of the planet had been taken over by the fish.

Part 3: Evolution

After several years the fish discovered that they all looked the same. This depressed them greatly as it made it impossible for them to tell each other apart. Fearing that they would never be individuals the fish started jumping into any chemicals they could find in the hope of gaining some sort of mutation. At first everything was going well, now there were different coloured fish, different sizes of fish, different shapes, but soon it started to go wrong. The fish started to grow legs, and lungs and other things that a self respecting fish shouldn’t have. The other fish were quite unhappy about this and banished these fish to the land. The fish being the technological minded sort build giant robotic super fish to guard the sea. These Sea Hunter Advanced Robot Killing Systems (or SHARKS) were designed to attack anything that entered the sea ensuring the mutant fish would never return.

However the fish being rather forgetful and slow forgot to exclude themselves from the SHARKS attacks and found themselves being eaten by their own creations. While the fish where making attack robots the mutant legged fish were busy developing weapons of their own. Only a short time after their exile the legged fish managed to design advanced pointed sticks that were devastating against the small squishy fishies in the deep blue sea. The fish, now at war with both the legged ones and SHARKS, started writing angry letters to the penguins. The only result of this was that the penguins started expanding their territory and attacking the fish as well. Too this day the fish are still fighting wars on multiple fronts. Currently they are in the middle of the twelve million and forty second aquatics wars.

Part 4: Language

The next big event in the history of the universe was the development of language. Actually the next big event in the history of the universe was the pan-galactic Garploxian civil war but since all Garploxian names are impossible to pronounce without sounding like you’re about to vomit we will skip it. By this time the mutant land-fish had forgotten that they were fish and started thinking of themselves as “Apes”. The need to develop language came out of the need to exchange ideas. Up until this point all communication was done by pointing at something and making loud noises. This worked well for some things like “Holy shit a lion” or “Get the hell out of my house because you really need a shower and I have to bake a cake” but could also cause confusion. Ideas like “That girl is really cute, I like her” were often mistaken for “That girl stole my bike, please help me get it back”.

The earliest forms of language involved the apes drawing pictures of things in the sand with pointed sticks. This quickly resulted in the second form of language, artistic criticism. Some of the apes worked to expand the number of concepts that could be represented by pictures. First they developed symbols to represent various ideas and then they worked on developing a set of symbols that could be used in various combinations to represent any idea. These pictures became what we now know as the alphabet and writing. The other apes worked on developing new ways to criticize these pictures. Lacking the skills to draw pictures of their own they had to settle for making random sounds. As the pictures became more advanced the critics had to think up more and more sounds to describe them. Eventually the graphic artists got tired and started abusing the critical sounds by connecting them to the symbols they were used to describe. The critics were soon forced to start using the sounds they had invented to represent ideas related to symbols and eventually forgot the original critical meanings of the sounds. There has since been several attempts to revert this process and reapply critical meanings to sounds but all of the attempts so far have ended in failure as none of the apes could agree on which critical meanings to use.

It is important to note that the Garploxians actually had language before this (This is how they were able to have names and civil wars). The Garploxians started out as a small colony of space mites in a distant part of the universe to the ape planet and were well on their way to developing sophisticated philosophical ideas when a gang of time traveling hoodlums altered the course of evolution so that they all talked out of their rears. Most historians ignore the Garploxians for this reason.