The observed It was a time where people knew about the stars, what they were, the names they had been given, and why they were there. It wasn’t long before the majority of people noticed the disappearance, when 4 of the 7 stars that made up what they called The Cross constellation vanished. Children with their new telescopes had them permanently positioned on porches. People with binoculars would sit out at night, bringing their radios out with them. Others would rush home from work and sit where they could and just watch. They didn’t all disappear at the same time, and people would talk about where they were when the second star disappeared, or the third, a few months later. I was washing up and gazing at the sky when Alioth went! Now people had been learning the names. I was watching from when Dubhe disappeared, I knew it wouldn’t stop with one, and I’ve seen them all vanish since! The news gave coverage of what was known purely as a ‘Phenomenon… of interest to those intrigued by the night sky’ and nothing more. Behind huge white caution-stickered and triple-locked doors, heated discussions went on. The feeble government-funded telescope and spectrometer equipment they had was telling them very little. Luckily, thanks to poor education, people were generally only familiar with only a few constellations, but actually large clusters of stars in that region of space were disappearing. They had been over the past year. The first thing that the scientists had noticed was that the longer it took for the star to disappear, the further it was away. The light from the furthest of the stars were taking longer to reach our observation. The stars were being lost at the same time. This situation was of course a far spikier one. With stars light years apart from each other blinking out at the same time, there was something going on of a magnitude that technologies hadn’t yet calculated. Perhaps its a super-massive black hole? Dark matter annihilation? Nothing seemed to fit. Then the stars started to pop back into view, in the same order they’d popped out, and with the same gaps in between. Calculations were made. The stars had been blacked out for almost a year. The first thing the government thought of doing was to contact any possible civilisations in that part of the universe for answers. That is when this story reached us here on earth, and there was a global panic. This was the first time we had been contacted by another civilisation, and there were still arguments for us being alone in the universe. We were told the stars around us were disappearing, and that it happened on approximately the 12/12/2012. This threw us right off our meals, especially when we heard that it had been a year… We all remembered the 12/12/2012, as this was only a couple of days ago, certainly not a year. The sceptics and the not-so-well-educated among us put it down to there being such a huge gap between our two systems that sometimes time actually stops. They were almost right. The messengers from the distant civilisation had taught us all sorts of things: new technologies; ways to better consume pure energy from soil; renewable energy that amazed us completely, too. We now had telescopes. Well, they did what telescopes used to do, but they could see far-reaching systems of biomass and type 0 civilisations. One messenger had become over-friendly with humans and had apparently told us a little too much. He got into a great deal of trouble when he mentioned the final third. The messengers had contacted us after a major discovery they had made into the division of the universe. We were in one third, contacted by others in another third. There was a further and final third region. The messengers had left our region for a while (but were always welcome back). One of their kind had stayed here, convincing his kind it was necessary for observations. He was the first to notice the messengers region of space disappearing. Time had passed, and the region the messengers had come from had started to go quiet. It was a difficult region to pinpoint, but a few days passed and he had become certain. Exactly the same thing had happened where he had come from. It was then that he decided to spill the beans. You weren’t the first area we saw fade out. We watched the other third disappear for a period; and the second time they did, you disappeared simultaneously. What is happening is that time is stopping for a period. Time stops, and so light can’t escape, and so it looks like a vanishing. It works much like a black hole: time stops, with a massive surge of gravity. So with the three regions in the universe, one is stopping every third period, you are stopping every sixth. We enthusiastically sat and learnt a lot from both of your stoppages:, what happens to matter at absolute zero; what happens to light, and gravity. You don’t feel a thing too, once the stopped period had ended, you carried on as if nothing had happened. I’ve just witnessed my region disappear, and it is the fourth period now. This means that four periods ago we stopped too. There’s going to be a point when all thirds of the universe are going to stop simultaneously. This time will mark the end. The messenger didn’t make it back by the 12th period.