An underweighted portion of space, where the photons are a little more diffuse, here lives the Blurbs. The Blurbs occupy no one planet, but rather, are occupied by one planet. Across their ten-billion arms, they hold it high to the sky. And it doesn’t run, no water falls off, or rocks crumble away, for gravity does the work there. Blurb A, the planet is called, and it is not frustrated about its situation. Yes, to be the civilian rather than the civilized is not common for a planet, but it makes do. As with any planet, Blurb A experiences day and night cycles, but this time relative to how the Blurbs spin. Packed together, the flat Blurbs make the shape of a carpet or a rug, and Blurb A rests on top, like a toy ball. It rolls around when the Blurbs feel playful, but they don’t push too hard for fear it might drift away. This Blurb carpet orbits not one sun, but three, a trinary system, whose solar flares are mostly the result of one large red giant, the other two mere grilled peas of stars in comparison. For eight Earth-hours, half the Blurb carpet is lit, and then it will have done a full half spin and now on the other side it is day instead.

The Blurbs do not call their occupying planet Blurb A. To them it is Long Wheezy. From where the Blurbs sit, above them the planet is a long tube, like a flute, rising high to the sky. Having deep retinas and wide eyes, the Blurbs perception is highly oblong, stretching anything ahead of them off far like the infinite rails of a railroad track. In terms of noises, Long Wheezy is as loud as they come. It is not mere volcanoes or tectonic rubs that create the sounds – Long Wheezy has plenty of these to make a great rumble – but its wind. Driven through spires and tunnels of rock, eroded by splashes of its mercurial oceans, the wind whistles like a million kazoos set aflame.

It is important for sanity of their sentience that the Blurb carpet has assembled religion around the whistling of Long Wheezy. Sentience without belief is only filled with despair, hence evolution always builds into intelligence the yearn to idolize correlation. Long Wheezy, the spherical mound of correlation that the Blurbs hold in their sky, is therefore the centrepiece of many Blurb fabrications. The wheezes, they speak. The meteorological fluctuations of its cloud layer, they describe. The drift of its eleven continents, they portray. This reading of the Blurb planet is called planetary arbitration, and it is one of the three testament of Usperation.

One day the spacetime around Blurb took it upon itself to put to rest this none sense. With a fold and a whip it built a wave that first rippled and then crested, until it hit the Blurbs and Long Wheezy and sent them apart. The Blurbs off to Andromeda, Long Wheezy into the centre of the sun. “That’ll show you,” said the spacetime as it watched its work unfold. It then went to sleep, curling up under a thin layer of gravity waves, but kept one eye open just to see that the matter was dealt with.

The matter of Long Wheezy was certainly smelt with, for it cooked for ten years in the core of the red giant and was eaten mountain to river until it was a nut made of iron. This was then melted down with laps of solar flares, dripping away long hot teardrops of metal until the core of Long Wheezy was a puddle and the sun slurped it up like custard.

As for the matter of the Blurbs, well they hung on tight to each other, arm in arm, for the centripetal forces were trying hard to tear them apart. They resisted first by strength, and then by song, which served to rally them all together and use more of their strength. They knew they needed to find a gravity field to slow their spin, otherwise they risked becoming exhausted and the angular momentum would win. By democratic vote, the Blurb carpet organized into five regions, North, East, West, South, and Middle, each when given the instruction would fold their region in or out and change their spin. At the helm was the Middle, which looked far ahead and navigated stars and gases that were too hot to get near. Finally a globular was on the horizon and they were overjoyed, but the Middle did not account for gravitational lensing effects when they saw it so far away, and they missed the chance to nest in this star crib by a whole forty-thousand miles! But the Blurbs were persistent and the Middle now had ten years of navigational experience. When a solar system reared its elliptical head and there was a gas giant with a cool red glow, they knew just how to bark the North, East, South, South, West, North, North, and East, controls until they were in a steady orbit around the planet. They all took a breath and another, and then got to work debating how best to lift this heavy beast. By it being gas, they thought it would be much lighter than Long Wheezy, but it was densely packed, and Argon and Methane can be heavy when there is so much of it. They were forced to give up and settle on being in the unusual situation of their occupying a planet.

With its one unsleeping eye, spacetime saw the Blurbs were stuck, and it smiled and went to sleep, rippling a steady snore through space. It awoke a few spins of the galaxy later and was so upset at what it saw that it instructed twelve suns to supernova at once. This satiated it for a second, but it was still broiling at the sight of the Blurbs. They had the gas giant on their back and they were flying right off with it! This would not do and so the spacetime sent a tsunami this time, intent on tearing the Blurb carpet right apart. But as it lifted its fabric and threads and began to drop them onto the fields of the universe, it caught a sneeze from a few passing neutrinos, and it missed by a hair. Only the tip of the wave bumped the Blurbs a bit, but they held onto their planet and themselves.

For the Blurbs, the push was convenient. The star that the gas giant had orbited was far too blue, so being pushed away by this sudden force was an aesthetic improvement. Free of orbit, they moved to greener pastures: a nebula maw. This mouth of gas was like a doughnut, but sealed at one end, with walls made of hot green gas rather than rich dough. The purpose of this nebula was the same a Venus Flytrap: consume unwitting planets and stars that flew by. That maw was mixed with a beautiful concoction of Lithium, Methane, Hydrogen, and the right amount of Magnesium, so that it sparkled like a gasoline bubble under torchlight. Helpless to its majesty, the Blurbs flew right inside and loved the warmth of the maw so much they settled in a crevice of gas.

But too late! One Blurb tried to shift their weight a little and realized they were stuck. When they tried to tap their neighbour all they could do was try, their arm was totally glued to the gas wall. Help!, they called out, Help!, called out the other billion Blurbs. These were the very sounds the nebula maw enjoyed hearing, for it meant it was time to digest. By moving about the stars inside it, it turned that crystal maw into a cooking maw, one that baked at degrees ten-thousand and melted atom to atom. The Blurbs first were flames, then, when the oxygen was depleted, became a goop of electrons and atoms with their orbits all muddled. The gas giant had been long let go because the arms of the Blurbs had been melted away. The Blurb carpet folded and crinkled like an aluminium sheet, until it was a ball. And if there was any gaps in that ball, the hot maw made sure they were squeezed out. Without any cries, the Blurbs were compressed to the point of a pinhead, all their atoms in such a tight space.

The end.