BY Ruth joffre
The universe has to be rebooted—there’s no getting around it. Asteroid storms pummeled
Earth’s moon to dust, a black hole somehow traveled through a wormhole and is presently eating
the Big Dipper one star at a time, and that stellar nursery in the famed pillars of the Eagle Nebula
has started spawning what can only be described as “space eagles,” with talons that crush planets
and wingspans as wide as a dwarf star. Best to start over, she thinks.
This will be version 12379.6 of the Sandbox Universe™. One version prior, a hostile goo
capable of surviving the vacuum of space coated the full Milky Way and ate anything that wasn’t
a gas giant or a hot star in the time it took her to take a shower. When she returned, her hair up in
a towel, the whole galaxy had been dissolved and the goo had moved off to Andromeda, much to
the dismay of the players and volunteer developers who had gotten invested in this version of the
game. Sorry, she told them. Has to be done.
It will take thirty minutes to reboot the universe. Enough time to get a snack.
PB&Js have always been her go-to. Ground peanuts, gelatinized fruit, wheat mixed into a
dough and baked into a mechanically sliced loaf. All of this reminds her of the building blocks of
the universe; how in the fiery heart of a star atoms get formed and reformed into the elements we
know and assemble one by one into being. She is eating a form of life. Why?
In another version of the universe, she toyed with evolution to produce humanoids neither
carnivore nor herbivore, neither hunter nor gatherer, capable instead of photosynthesizing rays of
sunlight through pores in their skin. How wonderful it was at first to see them wandering around,
needing nothing, consuming nothing until the day, five billion years into Earth’s existence, when
the Sun Wars began, when humanity’s population glutted the surface of the planet and required a
secondary source of sun energy, then a tertiary, a quaternary, and so on until finally she could not
justify the sacrificing of civilizations for the experiment, and she pulled the plug. Version 8491.3
of the Sandbox Universe™—a mistake, never to be repeated.
One of the volunteer devs pings her after reboot: what was wrong with that one?
She responds: did you not see the moon get destroyed???
yeah but something like that happens in 1% of all scenarios. nbd
well it felt like a big deal to me
At first, he does not respond, then: the perfect universe does not exist
Her immediate thought is, how dare he!! but then her frustration subsides and she admits,
yes, true. When she first released Sandbox Universe™ to a beta audience, it was only intended as
a tool: for astrophysicists to explore exoplanets closely or study a supernova, for exobiologists to
marvel at the intricacies of possible silica-based lifeforms, for bullied kids like her to disappear a
while in the ruins of ancient Keranian civilizations or watch cooks on an agrarian world discover
for the first time how to combine water and milled grains to bake unleavened bread. Nothing had
been idealized, nothing manipulated. Just the universe in all its ugly and glory destroying itself in
thousands of ingenious ways, like a baby.
She hates it. It’s her responsibility. She has to protect it from itself.
Finally, she writes back to him: okay well next time I’ll let the space eagles eat you
He reacts with a laugh emoji and writes: ngl that would be a badass way to go
Boys, she thinks, and closes the chat window.
Already, version 12379.6 of the Sandbox Universe™ is racing through a few billion years
of Earth’s existence—erupting volcanoes, drying up rivers, bulking up mountains, recreating five
mass extinctions and the beginnings of a sixth—just to set up the moment when she presses enter and unleashes the universe on itself, yet again. It doesn’t have to be perfect, she thinks. It just has to survive for as long as it possibly can.
Ruth Joffre is a Bolivian American writer and the author of the story collection Night Beast. Her work has been shortlisted for the Creative Capital Awards, longlisted for The Story Prize, and supported by residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Lighthouse Works, and The Arctic Circle. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in more than 50 publications, including Lightspeed, Nightmare, Fantasy, TriQuarterly, Reckoning, Wigleaf, and the anthologies We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2022 and 2022 Best of Utopian Speculative Fiction. A graduate of Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Ruth served as the 2020 - 2022 Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House in Seattle. She was a Visiting Writer at University of Washington Bothell and George Mason University in 2023.