February 14, 2026

The images came back wrong.

Dr. Abagail Silvestri stared at her monitor in Palomar Observatory, coffee going cold in her hand. The James Webb Space Telescope had sent back deep field observations, and where MoM-z14 (Mirage or Miracle) should have been, there was just… black. Not noise. Not corruption. Absence.

She picked up her phone. Called Jenkins at JPL. “You seeing this?”

“Yeah.” His voice sounded thin. “ESA’s reporting the same thing. Multiple instruments. Always the deep field stuff first.”

“Software bug?”

“That’s what they’re saying.”

“You believe that?”

Silence on the line. Then: “No.”

By evening, every major observatory had confirmed it. Distant pulsars missing from their eternal spots. Not just one, but everything beyond 12B light years out. What seemed like instrument static first, soon felt geometric, intentional.

The news covered it for exactly one day. “James Webb telescope having technical difficulties. Solar storm to blame.” Then moved on to normal things. Elections. Celebrity scandals. The weather.

No one panicked because there was nothing to panic about yet.

February 28, 2026

An amateur astronomer in Chile called it first. “Quasar J0529-4351 is gone. Not only that but it looks like we can’t get a reading on the CMBR anymore. Some of it’s just gone.”

Abagail checked. He was right.

Not obscured. Not dimmed. Just no longer visible through any wavelength. She ran the calculations, mapping every disappearance they’d documented. Perfect sphere. Centered on Sol. Radius contracting at approximately 0.3 light-years per day and accelerating.

Within forty-eight hours, mainstream outlets picked up the story. “The Wink” they called it. Scientists scrambled to measure, predict, understand. Governments issued statements about “monitoring the situation closely.”

People watched the sky with binoculars and asked questions on forums.

No riots. No religious fervor – just the usual “The End Times are here” folks on the corner.

A strange curious calm like no one even cared.

April–August 2026

The sky went dark in stages.

First the distant stars. Then closer ones. The Milky Way faded like someone dimming lights in a theater. Streetlights felt brighter. The moon became the brightest object in the sky besides the sun.

People adapted faster than anyone expected.

Someone started a website tracking which constellations remained. Someone else opened a bar called The Last Stars. Amateur photographers documented the changing sky, comparing images week by week.

Life went on.

Markets stayed stable. Grocery stores remained open. Abagail’s neighbor complained about his property taxes.

His property taxes.

She didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.

August 18, 2026

Proxima Centauri winked out at 14:22 UTC.

Humanity’s closest stellar neighbor, 4.24 light-years away, simply ceased to exist. Abagail watched from three different observatories simultaneously. One moment there. Next moment it wasn’t.

Her daughter asked that night if they should be scared.

“I don’t know,” Abagail said.

Her daughter nodded and went back to her homework.

What else was there to do?

September 3, 2026

Voyager 1 went offline mid-transmission.

The probe had traveled for forty-nine years, reaching 24.9 billion kilometers from home. Then its signal cut. Not hardware failure. It had hit the boundary. The edge of where things could exist.

But the silence afterwards wasn’t empty.

With stellar background radiation gone, instruments could suddenly see everything inside the bubble with perfect clarity. Every comet. Every asteroid. Every grain of ice in the Kuiper Belt rendered in absolute detail against pure nothing.

And there it was. Against that infinite matte black, a surface so dark it didn’t even reflect the sunlight hitting it, was a single spark of gold. Voyager. It wasn’t gone. It was coming back. The invisible wall was shoving it inward at impossible speed. And it looked wrong. The High-Gain Antenna, which had been locked on Earth since 1977, was now twisted sharply to the side. Skewed by the force of the collapse, pointing uselessly into the void. It was beautiful. God help her, it was beautiful.

October–November 2026

What we first thought would take a day, turned into months.

The collapse slowed as it hit the heliosphere. It was struggling against the sun’s influence, buying us time, the tiny Voyager probe marking the visible boundary.

But even with the sun’s eternal pressure, the planets started disappearing.

Pluto on October 29th. Neptune on November 2nd. Uranus on November 8th. Saturn on November 15th.

Each disappearance was documented with precise timestamps. Observatories coordinated viewing. People threw parties, counting down like New Year’s, watching as the little Voyager kept bulldozing its way back home.

When Jupiter vanished on November 23rd, thousands gathered in parks to watch. They cheered when it winked out.

Cheered.

Abagail stood among them, bottle of whiskey in hand, and realized she didn’t understand humanity anymore.

Maybe she never had.

December 1, 2026

Mars disappeared at 03:22 UTC.

The red planet. Humanity’s next frontier. All those settlement plans and terraform dreams. Gone.

Abagail watched through the main telescope, passing whiskey with her colleagues. Half the staff was there, drinking on shift. Nobody cared about protocols anymore.

They were alone now. Earth, Venus, Mercury, the Moon, the Sun. That’s all that remained of existence.

The bubble boundary stabilized exactly where they’d calculated—just 200 miles outside lunar orbit.

And then something strange happened.

The barrier became hazy.

December 3, 2026

The escaping atmosphere from the vanished planets, the solar wind, all that gas that normally dissipated into space—it was accumulating at the boundary. Building up. Creating an invisible shell around them like a soap bubble made of air.

They sent a probe.

The readings came back impossible. On this side: breathable atmosphere. Oxygen, nitrogen, argon. Pressure equalizing across the entire inner completely frictionless surface of the bubble. Temperature stable.

The gas wasn’t filling the system, that would have de-orbited the moon. Instead, it was clinging to the barrier. A pressurized, habitable skin ten miles thick, wrapped around the inner solar system.

The probe touched the barrier and bounced. Not because it hit something solid. The engines kept firing, but it couldn’t move forward. Like trying to push through a wall that wasn’t there.

Beyond the barrier, sensors showed absolute nothing. Not vacuum. Not darkness. Nothing. The absence of space itself.

They were in a snow globe, and outside the glass was the pure absolute void of La Nada.

December 15, 2026

The sun changed.

The stellar physics team confirmed it. Fusion rate stabilized. Output locked. Perfectly consistent. It would burn like this forever, apparently.

Stars didn’t just stop aging.

But theirs did.

Soon countries scrambled to set up observation posts and planning colony landings along the Shell, they were already calling it that, capital S. Permanent habitats at the edge of existence, staring out at nothing.

Why not? The air was breathable. The shell looked stable. You could live your whole life pressed against the void.

Venus was cooling. Might be habitable in a few decades.

They had room to expand now. The whole inner bubble.

People were already making plans.

December 31, 2526

Five hundred years after the Wink.

Amara Silvestri stood outside the observatory, the same one her great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother had worked in, watching fireworks burst against the Shell. New Year’s Eve. The tradition continued, even now.

Humanity had spread like ants across every available surface. Earth, Venus, Mercury, the Moon. Shell mega-cities dotted the barrier like jewels on a necklace, millions of them, whole cities suspended at the edge of nothing. Trillions lived there now, born and raised with the void pressed against their windows.

Nobody thought about it anymore.

The Wink was ancient history. Buried. Forgotten. The only thing anyone remembered was: we’ve always been here.

And maybe that was true now. Five hundred years was long enough to forget. Long enough to stop caring about what came before.

They’d built a civilization in a cage and called it home.

Someone set off another round of fireworks.

People cheered.

Amara raised her glass to the Shell, to the darkness beyond, to whatever cosmic joke had brought them here and kept them here.

“Happy New Year,” she said to the void.

The void, as always, said nothing back.

But the sun would rise tomorrow, exactly when it should. Just like it had for 4.8 billion years. Just like it would for billions more.

And that, somehow, was enough.