Deep in the Department of Universal Maintenance, the visitor Desk e3 93 sorts through data. Their primary function is to maintain the black hole shredding reality at the designated speed, thus avoiding cosmic indigestion. Recently, though, something has gone wrong.
"Earth," mutters Desk e3 93, the syllable quivering on waves of sheer annoyance. An attendant, the form of a regret closely aping, quivers nearby.
"What's wrong?" the clerk inquires, already knowing the reply.
The world resists disintegration.
This is a problem. Matter in the Great Consumption prefers to work the system: stars stretch out, planets collapse, and time stutters, erasing histories before they're even recorded. Earth, though? Earth just exists. Stumbling along awkwardly like the party-crasher who got to the party at the wrong place but refuses to leave.
Desk e3 93 receives the new news:
Tried to squash gravitationally: Earth resists stubbornly
Started temporal deconstruction: Residents still complain about Mondays.
Used by the masses: Resident inhabitants still baffled regarding purpose of life.
Unacceptable. Desk e3 93 sighs in frequencies that neutron stars alone can hear. Only one option is left: a field inspection.
Desk e3 93 crash-lands on Earth in the guise of a vending machine. S/He picked this disguise, you see, because their studies indicated that lifeforms worship food-giving objects in exchange for arbitrary tokens. Unfortunately, s/he gets it slightly wrong and manifest as a machine that sells nothing but expired mayonnaise packets. This arouses suspicion.
One lifeform believes the world is poorly designed, approaches the machine. S/He inserts a coin. The vending machine clunks. Out pops a packet of mayonnaise.
"You're stuck," Desk e3 93 tells The lifeform, directly in their head.
"So, that mayonnaise," The lifeform checks the date on it. "What does 'stuck' on the label mean?"
“You, your life, your presence. You are trapped in a black hole, and yet persist, as an error on the computer that refuses to shut down.”
The lifeform frowned. "And?"
"And that isn't right," grumbles Desk e3 93. "All the other ones go towards disorderliness. You don't."
The lifeform thinks about that. "We might be really stubborn."
"That isn't a scientific solution."
Nor turning into a mayonnaise machine, the lifeform keeps on piling
Desk e3 93 flashes with annoyance. For an instant, the illusion momentarily dissolves into a broken-down fax machine, but returns to mayonnaise. "You should be crushed, stretched, wrecked. And yet you continue to create reality television and invent new potato chip seasonings."
"Do you really think the universe is broken?" The lifeform suggests.
Desk e3 93 goes haywire. The awful notion crosses the mind: What if the Great Consumption isn't functioning properly? What if, rather than consuming reality, it's kidnapping it?
"That would require a lot of paperwork," Desk e3 93 admits.
And so, if reality is an error, possibly we do the best we do and move on.
And that is?
The lifeform smiles. "Being in denial."
Somewhere beyond the edges of spacetime, a black hole tumbles, confounded. Its singularity aches with the bloating of a planet that refuses to be devoured. Within it, somewhere, lifeforms continue their ununderstandably lives—are quarreling over pineapple on pizza, rediscovering quantum physics through accident, and declaring that Monday mornings are a violation against the universe.
