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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN the trolley problem
⋆*✧･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:
KUGELBLITZ. NOUN. A GERMAN WORD with the literal translation 'ball lightning', a kugelblitz is, in theoretical physics, a black hole that is formed from radiation instead of matter. When an incredible mass of energy is trapped within itself—an event that might occur, for example, from seven consecutive grandfather paradoxes—a kugelblitz is produced, and it is enough to warp time and space. Although it might start small—perhaps the size of a golf ball—it will rapidly grow until it is large enough to swallow everything in existence. By the time it's finished, both time and space itself will have ceased to exist. Nothing will remain except for the devourer itself.
The presence of a kugelblitz would not just mean the end of the world. Nor would it even mean the end of the universe. It would mean the end of everything—parallel timelines, places outside of time and space, everything that has ever existed or will exist. It would mean stopping the Big Bang before it even got the chance to occur.
When Five explained this to the remaining members of the Umbrella Academy, spelling out just how fucked up their presence in this timeline had gotten, Nadine struggled to breathe. Really, this wasn't anything all too new—she'd known ever since she'd learned about the grandfather paradoxes that they would potentially bring a universe-ending event—but back then, she hadn't quite understood what that event would be. People and animals were disappearing. Someday, she might disappear, too. That was about as far as she'd gotten.
But hearing Five's grave description of exactly what would happen to all of them—and everything in the past, present, and future—made it all the more real. Before, Nadine had thought that she was nonchalant about this new apocalypse because there was so much she was dealing with on the side, but now she was realizing that things had just been too vague before. Well, they weren't anymore. And she was definitely going to freak out again.
She sat at the bar with the others, taking the shot Five offered her. She wasn't trying to get drunk; she merely wanted the burn that accompanied the slide of alcohol down her throat. It was something that distracted her, at least temporarily, from the now ever-present knowledge that everything was fucked.
"So, this kugelblitz, it's...?" Viktor trailed off. Five filled in the blanks himself.
"The end of everything. Every rock, every star, every atom sucked into a radiant black hole."
"Randomly collapsing matter every moment in time across all existence 'till nothing's left," Lila added. It really did seem that she'd become allies, if not partners, with Five, and had chosen to stay even when Diego had departed.
