Galactic HOA Episode 1

GALACTIC HOA

Episode One: Greg Lets One Go

a short cosmic comedy

The Local Group is a quiet neighborhood, as these things go. A few dozen galaxies, give or take, drifting in loose formation across a few million light-years of nothing in particular. Nobody's in a hurry. Nobody needs to be. When your neighbors are measured in millions of light-years away and your conversations take place over geological epochs, you learn to let things happen at their own pace.

Greg Galaxy had not made a new star in three billion years, and he wanted everyone to know it was a choice.

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Greg Announces His Retirement

It started, as these things tend to, with Greg clearing his throat. This took eleven million years, on account of Greg not technically having a throat, but the gravitational ripple traveled clean across the cluster and everybody felt it.

Greg: I am entering my twilight years with dignity.

Milky Way: You just expelled enough superheated gas to make three dwarf galaxies.

Greg: Age comes for us all, Way.

Milky Way: It came for you like four billion years ago. You've had time to process this.

Greg: I'm processing on my own timeline.

This was, to be fair, the only timeline available to him. Greg's central black hole had spent the last several epochs feasting on everything within reach — gas, dust, the occasional unlucky star that wandered too close — until it had, by any reasonable measure, simply had enough. The outburst that followed was not subtle. It was not quiet. It blew the remaining star-forming gas clean out of Greg's spiral arms and into the intergalactic medium, where it would drift for the rest of time doing absolutely nothing for anybody.

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An Aside, For The Record

Astronomers, many eons later, would call this process "quenching" — a clean, clinical word for a galaxy that had, in essence, blown its own future out the airlock in one dramatic gesture and then never grown another star again.

Greg preferred a different term.

Greg: I had an incident.

Milky Way: What kind of incident?

Greg: ...a wind-related incident.

Milky Way: That's it? That's the whole explanation?

Greg: It rarely needs to be more than that.

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Meanwhile, Andromeda Is Walking This Way

While Greg processed his twilight years, Andromeda had begun, almost imperceptibly, to drift closer. Not quickly. Nothing in this neighborhood does anything quickly. But closer.

Milky Way: Andromeda, why are you getting closer?

Andromeda: Perspective.

Milky Way: You were two-point-six million light-years away last time we talked.

Andromeda: I walked.

Milky Way: At two hundred fifty thousand miles per hour.

Andromeda: Health journey.

Milky Way did not find this reassuring. Milky Way had not found much of anything Andromeda said reassuring for the better part of a billion years, and yet here they both still were, drifting through the same small patch of an indifferent universe, bound by gravity and a long history of suspicious small talk.

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A Conversation, Repeated With Minor Variations, For Several Billion Years

Milky Way: Andromeda, are you planning to crash into me?

Andromeda: No.

Milky Way: Then why do you keep approaching?

Andromeda: To talk.

Milky Way: You are two million light-years away. We are talking right now.

Andromeda: Conversation takes effort.

Greg, who had been quietly venting the last of his star-forming gas into the void this whole time, did not look up.

Greg: She's gonna hit you.

Milky Way: She says she's not.

Greg: I've been retired a long time, Way. I've seen this before.

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Four Billion Years Later

It happened, as predicted, exactly the way Greg said it would, which was to say: slowly, inevitably, and with absolutely no acknowledgment from Andromeda that anything unusual was occurring.

Milky Way: YOU CRASHED INTO ME.

Andromeda: I said I wanted to talk.

Milky Way: YOU ATE HALF MY SPIRAL ARMS.

Andromeda: Communication is important.

Milky Way: THIS ISN'T COMMUNICATION, THIS IS A MERGER.

Andromeda: Same thing, at our scale.

Stars that had orbited peacefully for billions of years found themselves abruptly flung into new and unfamiliar trajectories. Gas clouds that had minded their own business collided with other gas clouds that had also been minding their own business, and in the chaos, against all reasonable odds, new stars began to ignite — a sudden, violent burst of star formation neither galaxy had asked for and both would, eventually, take credit for.

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Greg, From The Cheap Seats

Greg: Called it.

Milky Way: How?

Greg: I'm old.Zz.

Greg: It rarely needs to be.

And so the two galaxies merged, slowly, messily, and with great reluctance on at least one side, into something new — a single sprawling structure that future astronomers would, with characteristic flair, name Milkomeda. Whether this counted as a wedding, a hostile takeover, or simply the inevitable result of one party's complete inability to take "no" for an answer remained, like most things in this neighborhood, a matter of perspective.

Greg, for his part, just watched it happen from a comfortable distance, having long since run out of anything left to lose.

Greg: Should've seen this coming, Way.

Milky Way: I DID see it coming. You told me.

Greg: Then I really don't know what you're so upset about.

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END OF EPISODE ONE