An opening shot of an infinite, lightless void, in which a single point of pure energy and matter explodes into brilliance then expands outwards with great speed. 13.8 billion years later . . . John “The Hammer” Johnson wakes with a gasp. The pale dawn light reflects off the cold beads of sweat that pattern his forehead. The clock reads 5:32 am. He looks towards the far side of the bed and finds it empty. The camera lingers on a framed photograph placed on the nightstand, of a glamorous brunette woman and a smiling eight-year-old girl standing either side of a then-proud John “The Hammer” Johnson. With an exaggerated sigh, he rolls out of bed and starts his morning routine. Press-ups, sit-ups, and body curls hanging upside-down from a chin-up bar braced in a doorframe. Then, through the steamy glass of the shower door, John “The Hammer” Johnson soaps his muscular body and runs his hands over his smooth, shaved head. He dresses in a tight shirt that accentuates his biceps and drapes a corporate-looking lanyard around his huge neck. In the kitchen of his high-rise apartment, he frowns at a small pink backpack hanging from a coat peg. A blender whirrs as he makes up an oatmeal and raw-egg smoothie, which he drinks by the large window overlooking the Los Angeles skyline and, beyond, the ocean. A blimp rises into the morning sky. On the radio, a man talks about a mystery that’s come out of Caltech: a few galaxies have gone missing. But John “The Hammer” Johnson isn’t listening. No one is. Not yet.

The director calls cut, cut and approaches John “The Hammer” Johnson, who is still staring out the window at the Los Angeles skyline. The view is not dissimilar to the view from his own apartment, albeit a little further from the ocean. Production asked to film the scene at his place, to turn his smaller second bedroom into an entire open-plan living area of a size commensurate with his character’s middling salary, but he’d flat out refused, he can’t remember why exactly. The director, fifteen years his junior and about half his size, squeezes John “The Hammer” Johnson’s shoulder as he gives him some acting notes. He ends the instruction by asking him how long he’s been doing this in a rhetorical sort of way. John “The Hammer” Johnson accepts the advice, and the needling question, with something between professionalism and tiredness, then gears up for the next take, in which he will attempt to drink the smoothie with a little less melancholy and a bit more solemn determination.

The screen is at first almost blindingly bright as an overexposed shot of the sun pans down to show John “The Hammer” Johnson waiting outside a pleasant primary school. He is carrying that tiny pink backpack from the earlier scene. He looks somewhat comical, but mainly confident, an unashamed father. A shiny SUV pulls up. That little girl from the nightstand photograph, a bit older now, springs out of the back and runs towards him shouting, Daddy, Daddy. Behind the little girl walks the brunette woman, now with short, sensible hair. She says, You can’t keep turning up like this. He hands over the tiny backpack and says her inhaler is in the front pocket, as if to suggest the mother hadn’t noticed it had gone missing and doesn’t have spares. A man with a cowardly face winds down the tinted window of the SUV and calls out for Marguerite, honey. We’re running late for the architect and he charges by the minute. As John “The Hammer” Johnson is about to leave, he hears his daughter chatting with her friends. They are talking about their daddies, all of them wealthy bankers or highly reputed brain surgeons. My daddy’s an IT project manager, his daughter says, a little disappointedly. The light dims noticeably as if a cloud has passed over, but when John “The Hammer” Johnson looks up, the sky is clear.

In a cramped trailer outside the filming studio, a stand-in makeup lady applies concealer to John “The Hammer” Johnson’s forehead. When she’s finished, she asks for a selfie with him. She’s been a fan ever since his wrestling days, she tells him. As she maneuvers the phone to get them both in the frame, he thinks of the time he beat Black Heart Sam, the cries of shock as he crashed the prop chair over the man’s already braced shoulders, the cheers as he pinned his falsely unconscious body to the ground, the sense of triumph he had felt back then. The makeup lady inspects the photograph she has taken, her mouth slightly open. With her thumb and forefinger, she zooms in on a somewhat flaccid vein on his triceps. She looks at the image of the vein then at John “The Hammer” Johnson, as if seeing him properly for the first time. Then she asks for another picture, this time with more pop.

The shot zooms in through a porthole window of the International Space Station. Astronauts with various accents discuss the strange readings they have obtained, namely, an unusual increase in the distance between the Earth and the Sun. An alarm sounds as they are fractionally pulled out of orbit then hit by another satellite. A wide angle captures the space station silently disintegrating against a cosmic background. Meanwhile . . . a close-up shows John “The Hammer” Johnson’s bespectacled face lit up by an ethereal glow, before the camera zooms out to reveal him staring at a computer screen in an office filled with gray furniture and potted plants. His officious boss drops by his desk and asks for a long list of reports and whatnot. Later, he sits at a bar with his best buddy, Kevin, who tells him he’s thinking of rejoining the Air Force. Kevin asks him whether he ever considers going back to NASA. John “The Hammer” Johnson takes the last sip from his beer. Come on, buddy, Kevin says, the past is the past, you’ve got to start believing in yourself again. John “The Hammer” Johnson tries to catch the attention of the barman, who is polishing a glass while watching the TV. It’s a more detailed news story about those Caltech nerds losing galaxies. The anchor jokes that she thought she was bad for misplacing her car keys. John “The Hammer” Johnson watches the news with building interest, before the television picture is disrupted by static. The barman hits the TV and the picture returns with a baseball game, where unseasonal snow starts to fall. Kevin orders two tequilas and says, Here’s to seeing stars. John “The Hammer” Johnson declines the drink, his mind obviously elsewhere. 

John “The Hammer” Johnson isn’t due on set today but he turns up anyway. They are filming a scene at a cold and remote observatory, in which a team of scruffy-looking scientists lays the narrative groundwork for runaway universal expansion. Between takes, the actors shrug off their arctic coats and mop sweat from their brows; they ask for makeup and demand complicated coffees. John “The Hammer” Johnson watches them at work. He’s been doing this for a long time now and finds that these days he understands it less and less. The making up of stories, that is, of these stories in particular. The inevitable victories over terrorists, sea serpents, volcanoes. The satisfying character arcs and continual redemption. The easy romance and camaraderie. A runner disturbs his thoughts by bringing him his favorite sandwich without him asking. She is wearing a name badge, probably for his benefit, or at least for people like him. He is on the verge of saying hello Denise, but stops himself, wondering whether using her name might be intrusive, whether she would later reflect on their interaction and deem it a pathetic power play. By the time he’s got his thoughts together—he has decided to say hello but not use her name—she has long since walked away. 

A framing shot of the stars, before the camera swings down vertiginously to show John “The Hammer” Johnson on the roof of his apartment block. He dusts off a box, takes out a telescope, and aims the barrel at different patches of sky, taking notes on a small pad. The Andromeda galaxy appears to have shifted three parsecs east of Cassiopeia and has dipped in luminosity, he mutters to himself, his breath steaming in what is now a truly peculiar coldness. A breeze picks up and a new light appears in the sky, getting closer. It’s a helicopter. A man in army gear tells John “The Hammer” Johnson he’s going to have to come with them. On whose authority? The President of the United States of America.

They take a day off from shooting to attend the premiere of his penultimate disaster movie, Sugar Rush, in which John “The Hammer” Johnson had to maintain his blood sugar above a certain level or a terrorist, monitoring him via a sophisticated bio-implant, would blow up the White House and his family. The director had ordered him to eat dozens of real doughnuts on camera but also stay in impeccable shape; fingers down the back of the throat and hours of extra workouts. He still can’t tell if it was meant to be a comedy or not. After the premiere, lying on the sofa of his penthouse apartment, he scrolls on his phone, past his own posts, fashioned by someone else, to videos the algorithm has selected for him, of cheesy, bread-heavy recipes and sped-up men building luxurious swimming pools out of the jungle mud. Eventually, the internet funnels him to a forum discussing the potential ends of the universe. When the sun rises and a square of orange light falls across his stretched-out legs, he’s still scrolling through the Big Crunch, the Big Rip, and other terms he’s heard on set. Best case scenario is the Heat Death, in which everything will simply run out of steam, but even that seems pretty depressing. 

Panicked operators call out astral distances across the floor of an underground crisis center: 20.4 lightyears to Alpha Centauri and rising; the Pillars of Creation have slipped out of sight. A dozen or so men and women sit in a glass-walled meeting room too small for their number. John “The Hammer” Johnson is ushered inside, where a man in military dress with too many medals is asserting himself. The man simply cannot swallow more doom-mongering from hysterical scientists: the millennium bug, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, climate change. What’s next, man-eating space aliens? A scruffy-looking scientist from the earlier scene says he’s not talking about a bit of unseasonal cold; we’re not even talking about the next ice age or the end of the world; this is the end of molecular physics. This causes everyone to shout all at once. A handsome man in his mid-forties sits at the head of the table. By his posture and poise, it’s abundantly clear he is the President of the United States of America. He gives John “The Hammer” Johnson a familiar, respectful nod then quiets the room with a raise of the hand. The President modestly asks the scientist to explain it all to him like he would his ten-year-old kid, and the scientist finally gets his science in check. The Universe is expanding much faster than previously calculated, he explains. We’re no longer heading for the Heat Death far, far in the future, but for an imminent Big Rip, whereby the universe expands so quickly it literally tears itself apart. For once, the room is quiet. The President asks about timelines and the scientist starts babbling about how because of the speed of light, astronomy is an act of looking into the past, and a quirk in the quantification of the cosmological constant and the current epoch means that . . . Under the stern but kind gaze of the President, the scientist calms himself again and says, Mr. President, it’s already begun; in a sense, it’s already happened.

John “The Hammer” Johnson loiters in the fire exit out back of the studio. The heat of the day melts his makeup and the runoff stings his eyes. They have just finished the scene in which it is revealed the President and John “The Hammer” Johnson were in the Air Force and later NASA together. The twist is obvious: he was the best of the best, but he dropped out of NASA when during a test flight he had to jettison his crewmates to avoid their failing aircraft hitting a housing estate and only just survived himself; plagued by nightmares and guilt, he drifted away from his wife and daughter and ended up in IT. He reckons the same lines were lifted from a movie in which he dropped out of the Navy SEALS after accidentally blowing up a hostage and later went on to win back his estranged family by saving them from an Afghani terrorist called The Hand Harvester. Probably some internet sleuth will pick up on the duplication and plaster it across social media. It’ll be John “The Hammer” Johnson who looks stupid. A cleaner puts out some trash bags. She doesn’t speak much English but they manage a short conversation. Her husband is a long-distance truck driver, coming home tonight, and her boy is doing well at school, she’s proud of him. It’s apparent she doesn’t know who John “The Hammer” Johnson is, or at least doesn’t care. A cool breeze picks up then drops away. And you? she asks, her hands thrust into her pockets and her head tilted in what he deems a motherly fashion. I’m doing all right, he replies, things are going good. From inside the studio, the director shouts for him in an irate tone then calls him something unmentionable. The man is usually nice to his face.

They sit in a room filled with dust-sheeted terminals, just the scientist, the President, and John “The Hammer” Johnson. The scientist explains that it won’t be long until the Earth drifts away from the Sun and the planet freezes over, the atmosphere evaporates, then tectonic mayhem, the planet torn apart until it eventually explodes, and that’s the good news . . . After that comes Atomic Dissolution, whereby the fundamental laws of physics are stretched to breaking point and then beyond. Atomic Dissolution, the President says, that sounds like my kind of cocktail. But there is some hope, the scientist continues. There is a missing piece in their calculations, an incalculable constant. If it transpires the constant is a certain value, expansion should stabilize and we might never reach Atomic Dissolution. Expansion acts strongest over large distances and less so over small distances, so micro-habitations in space could continue to exist. The President butts in now: this isn’t just a matter of science, it’s a matter of faith; we have to believe expansion will stabilize, we have to trust in the Universe and in ourselves; we have no other choice. But what has John “The Hammer” Johnson got to do with all this? Operation Life Arc, the President explains. Their only hope is to launch an old space station built during the Cold War to bankrupt the Soviets. Nuclear-powered, its support systems can last practically forever, and the engineers are busy retrofitting the cargo bays with artificial incubation pods filled with thousands of frozen embryos with which we could repopulate whatever is left of the Universe. Due to the catastrophe on the ISS and sweeping space-exploration budget cuts led by Republicans, who control Congress, John “The Hammer” Johnson is the only person left in the world trained to pilot this thing. He would lead a team of engineers and scientists into deep space, where humanity would survive, at least for a while. The President rises to his feet and stares out of a small, thick window: as long as there’s a living soul in this Universe, he says—a beating heart, intelligence, love—there’s still hope. And where is this space station? The scientist pulls back a dust sheet to reveal a complex-looking control panel: you’re sitting in it. 

A power failure at the studio gives everyone the day off from filming. The director hosts an impromptu barbecue at his Beverly Hills pad. John “The Hammer” Johnson plans not to go. He used to enjoy the parties, but more recently the parties have become difficult, or he has become difficult at parties. He gets the vague sense everyone is laughing at him. But at the last minute, he decides to show his face; it’s something he should be doing, putting himself out there. The first hour is okay, and he enjoys the company of the actress who plays Marguerite. She is cynical about Hollywood in an inclusive sort of way. She asks him if he’s pursuing anything romantic at the moment, but in a manner that is totally clear she is not interested herself. He says he is not, then finds himself recounting his last relationship, which ended eleven years ago. Ten months with his love interest in Hard Day’s Night, in which a bout of global insomnia turned everyone mad and he had to protect his attractive neighbor from a group of men already converted to cannibalism, while being totally exhausted himself. He liked her in real life. She was fun, a little younger. He assumed they would marry, but, strangely, they’d never discussed anything beyond the next two weeks. Looking back, there was something vaguely promotional about the whole thing. When it all fell apart he slept through three whole days. They haven’t talked since, due to a legal reason he can’t quite remember. The actress who plays Marguerite makes sympathetic noises, but after a couple of uncomfortable silences, John “The Hammer” Johnson gets the idea he is boring her, and that he might, if he stays any longer, become an object of her cynicism: a lumbering industry dinosaur bemoaning his privileged existence, which he guesses is true. He excuses himself to the director’s huge, marble bathroom, where he remains for almost half an hour, drinking calorie-heavy beer and feeling guilty about it. A couple of people turn the door handle then retreat. Eventually, he emerges, a little light-headed from the beer. He approaches the director, who is lounging in the seating area of the garden. This, he realizes, is what he’s come here to say. He tells the director a plot point is troubling him. According to his online research, the stabilization of the Big Rip has absolutely no scientific basis. Once it starts, it won’t stop. Only when he’s finished talking does he realize the director is surrounded by a dozen of the cast and crew, his young actress girlfriend lying in his arms. Ladies and gentleman, the best pilot and astrophysicist the United States of America has ever seen, the director says, and the group laughs a little. Later, the sky now purple with dusk, the fully drunken director finds John “The Hammer” Johnson staring into a flaming brazier. The man pats his shoulder and tells him in a roundabout way to stick to what he knows. You do you, Hammer, he says, you just keep doing you.

An opening shot of the sun, now small and dim in the darkened sky. The clock of the stolen Hummer reads 2:00 pm. John “The Hammer” Johnson has temporarily shirked his duties to save his family; he won’t leave without them, and the President of the United States of America, though concerned about the future of humanity, respects that. Only when John “The Hammer” Johnson believes in himself can he believe in the Universe, so this is a sort of test. Basically, John “The Hammer” Johnson needs to shake off all his personal baggage for humanity to endure. He drives through the frozen streets of Los Angeles. Looted shops and burnt-out vehicles. That blimp from earlier crumpled on the ground, its sign still flickering—something about low, low prices. What a shallow life we lead, John “The Hammer” Johnson is obviously thinking. As he slows down to negotiate a pileup, a man wielding a knife tries to force his way into the Hummer—it’s his officious, now desperate, boss. Some fast and clever driving jerks him off the bonnet, the selfish man of low character left to his deserved fate amongst the trappings of his superficial existence.

Sitting on a weights bench in an empty gym, John “The Hammer” Johnson checks his phone every couple of minutes. His agent said she would call him this week and now it is ten to midnight on Sunday. Still, he is somehow certain the phone call is coming. Not that he is expecting any particular news. Movie offers have dried up, that’s no secret. One moment he could reach for pretty much anything, within reason, and the next it was all wrenched out of sight. Last month, he did his first auditions in years, the first for a movie called Hunter, in which a respectable man turns vigilante after some villainous brothers rape and murder his wife and the local police won’t listen. In all honesty, the role was too dark for him, and they wanted someone smaller, more agile too. The casting director did wonder out loud if John “The Hammer” Johnson could play one of the brothers’ friends, a mute henchman for whom there is some sympathy, or at least pity, when he is unceremoniously executed. It would be John “The Hammer” Johnson’s first on-screen death, the first without him being revived or reincarnated, that is, his cranium irreversibly decimated by a point-blank shotgun blast. But they decided his presence would be distracting; that he would make the film unserious. Then there was Sight Screen, for which he auditioned to be a down-and-out, coke-addict porn star, but he lacked internality, apparently. He lies back on the weight bench and completes a set, the last of the reps causing his muscles to quiver and shake. He is hoping to be out of breath when his agent rings, to sound busy. He could act being out of breath, he supposes, but he doesn’t trust himself to be convincing. At one minute to midnight, he is still hopeful—even more hopeful now—that the phone will ring imminently. When the digits of the clock flick to 00:00 he feels a small shock of something, which dissipates into numbness. He stands in front of the wall-length mirrors and absentmindedly navigates to his camera. Holding his reflection in the frame, he looks at his body, the outsized clumsiness of it all, the empty gym in the background, then puts his phone away.

The scene opens with a shot of a parasol prodded into the surface of a frozen swimming pool outside of a swanky suburban house. John “The Hammer” Johnson pulls up in the Hummer then gets out cautiously. Inside, Marguerite and his daughter huddle around a fire fueled by burning books, held there at gunpoint by her cowardly partner. He’s not afraid to use his gun, only, he is afraid—of basically everything. He’s certainly too scared to leave the house. He’s seen the news. All is lost. When the cowardly partner enters a long, semi-religious diatribe about the end times, John “The Hammer” Johnson disarms him, at one point helped by his wife who hits his opponent with a flaming book. The cowardly partner jumps out of the window and impales himself on the parasol. The daughter and Marguerite look at John “The Hammer” Johnson glowingly, any complex feelings Marguerite might have felt for her former lover instantly forgotten. John “The Hammer” Johnson gazes out over the burning landscape and says: Everything is never all lost.

After filming, John “The Hammer” Johnson takes a wrong turn on the way home and ends up in the quieter roads above Los Angeles. He doesn’t try to find his way back and instead keeps driving, imagining on every other corner his headlights shining out across the city and the ocean beyond. He once drove his father up here, the one time he plucked up the courage to take a flight from Colorado. They went for lunch at a hilltop restaurant and shared a huge seafood platter, a strange ambition his father seemed to have. Looking at the huge plate of lobster, langoustines, and a whole fish, his father shook his head and said how proud he was of his son. But John “The Hammer” Johnson suspects his father lost track of what he actually did for a living. When in the movie Base Runner, he defused a stadium bomb with only a second left on the clock, his father had asked him: how did you know which wire to cut? That was when he realized his father would become old and die, as would he and everyone else. He pulls into a rest area with an expansive view and watches the sun dip into the ocean, the air growing cool around him. 

The picture has an ashy hue now, the sun a distant star in the sky, the shattered landscape lit up by the magma that explodes through the earth’s crust. The Hummer has died, so they commandeer an abandoned fire engine. The atmosphere begins to evaporate and the asthmatic daughter struggles to breathe. The cowardly partner maxed out her inhaler while having a panic attack. John “The Hammer” Johnson finds two oxygen tanks in the firemen’s kit, which he gives to his wife and daughter. He will just have to hold what’s left of the Earth’s precious atmosphere in his huge lungs. They burst through the gates of the now deserted crisis center. A fight has happened here. That egocentric military man from earlier is dead now, along with the carefully selected team of engineers and scientists who would have joined them in space. They reach the control room, which is hermetically sealed and filled with oxygen. The President is slumped in a chair, having been mortally wounded defending humanity’s last hope. Still, he manages one last monologue. He always believed John “The Hammer” Johnson would return; he has complete faith in him; if anyone is going to save this Universe, it will be John “The Hammer” Johnson; this isn’t a test of our battle tactics, our ingenuity, our science, it’s a test of our spirit, our soul; the scientists couldn’t figure out the missing constant in their equations but the President knows exactly what it is—it’s hope, it’s John “The Hammer” Johnson. It transpires that to launch the space station two people need to descend into the basement of the crisis center to simultaneously turn two keys in separate panels spaced a few yards apart. His fate already sealed by his grave wound, the President volunteers to turn one key, but they need someone else. For a moment, a false dilemma arises in which it seems John “The Hammer” Johnson must choose between his daughter and wife to help the President—to go himself would doom them both—but then from the bathroom comes Kevin, who says, Here’s to seeing stars.

At a Vegas movie convention, a greasy man in his mid-twenties asks John “The Hammer” Johnson how he remembers his lines, and his equally greasy friends start to snigger. An ironic drinking game exists for Stealth Mission, for which every time John “The Hammer” Johnson says a line you have to down a beer. You’re still fit to drive by the end. He signs the man’s book and then moves onto the next and then the next. Eventually, he comes to a father with his young, skinny son. The boy tells John “The Hammer” Johnson that he wants to be just like him. What the kid really means is that he wants to save the world, rescue helpless people to win over attractive scientists, roundhouse kick a grenade out of the air and straight down a monster’s throat. John “The Hammer” Johnson says he’s no hero, a response he regurgitates with more gusto lately. He signs the boy’s autograph folder. He is the fiftieth entry, he notices, one after Jorge Mustopolis, who once led a popular series of boxing films and now voices a lump of CGI slime in a commercial for toilet cleaner. As he is handing the book back, he reiterates to the boy that he’s never saved anyone in his life. The father clears his throat and gives a polite smile, then leads his boy to the next desk.

Large clumps of concrete fall to the Earth as the space station breaks away from the buildings and launches into the sky. John “The Hammer” Johnson wrestles with the controls. Flashbacks to his last failed launch, in which his crewmates died. By succeeding here he will somehow honor their sacrifice and banish his demons once and for all. The space station judders and lurches. Only his muscular strength applied to a tiny joystick can keep this huge machine flying straight. Back in the control room, the President salutes Kevin as magma gushes in through the door. A disaster montage plays out to slow, sad music. The Statue of Liberty lifts into the air then crashes down onto the Brooklyn Bridge; Inuits eskimo-kiss under a disintegrating moon; Everest crumbles to a chalky substance and drifts off on the astral breeze; a spear-carrying tribal man dances under the black heavens. Flames lick up behind the rising space station, and an instinctive swerve evades a floating mall. For a heart-stopping moment, the space station is totally lost in the smoke, until it reappears like a bullet from a gun, leaving the Earth behind. When the shaky flight stabilizes, the family looks mournfully back at the Earth as it is artfully torn to pieces. Marguerite kisses John “The Hammer” Johnson on the cheek then presents two options for dinner: rehydrated noodles or rehydrated noodles. His daughter looks at him with newfound wonder. My daddy’s an astronaut, she says, my daddy’s a hero.

In a high-end Beverly Hills private clinic, John “The Hammer” Johnson undertakes a full body scan for no particular reason. Lying in the pod under express instructions to remain as still as possible, he drifts off. When he awakes to the humming electromagnets, he is struck by a paralyzing fear of something that feels half space launch, half live burial. He struggles a little, so they have to take the scan again. This time, he fixes his eyes on the cream-colored plastic of the scanning pod and quashes every instinct to crawl out. The scan shows there is nothing wrong with him. He stares at the pictures, the outlines and cross-sections of himself. He’s still here, so it seems. Well, don’t look disappointed, the doctor says. It’s not that, he replies, but he can’t explain himself. In the car on the way back, he cannot think of whom to call. He dials the number of the actress who plays Marguerite, but she doesn’t pick up.

In the space station dining area, the daughter wins a game of cards. John “The Hammer” Johnson gets up to playfully chase her, and she drifts away in the low gravity, giggling. But then, an alarm. A breach to the hull. John “The Hammer” Johnson checks some readings and swears. A fizzing in the cabin and a loss of pressure. It’s happening, the final stages, atomic dissolution. He looks at his wife and daughter, who are huddled together, crying. John “The Hammer” Johnson seems at first panicked, then less panicked, then eventually calm. Tenderly, he takes his family in his arms. The cabin shakes around them. He closes his eyes in a sort of reverie. Is he praying? It’s ambiguous. The voice of his old friend the President of the United States of America emerges from the ether. His words about the survival of a living soul, love, hope etc. John “The Hammer” Johnson fixates on that. He pours all his faith into it and into himself and the Universe. He is trying to hold together the Universe and the fundamental laws of physics with no more than the strength of his arms and the strength of his character. This is the biggest challenge of his life, his career, and he is . . . succeeding. Gradually, the shaking subsides and the alarm stops, as though a giant mystical hand that once threatened to destroy them has found John “The Hammer” Johnson worthy and let them be. The expansion appears to have stabilized, John “The Hammer” Johnson explains for the avoidance of doubt; in this huge expanding Universe, the smallest hopes have survived. That’s the most I’ve heard you talk since we first met, Marguerite laughs. The camera pans out through a porthole. In the infinite, lightless void, the space station is tiny but optimistic.

John “The Hammer” Johnson sits alone in the back of a limousine as it drives away from the premiere of his last disaster movie. The movie received a standing ovation, but the audience was mostly friends, family, and investors. It’s fallen flat with the critics. Five out of ten, which is obviously worse than six or higher, but also somehow worse than four or lower—not even ironically enjoyable. Internet-forum dwellers have already launched a campaign to debunk the science. Although the movie hit most of the key points, albeit at an accelerated speed, John “The Hammer” Johnson was right, there is simply no legitimate science behind the stabilization of the Big Rip; once it starts, atomic dissolution is inevitable. All that stuff about faith and the human spirit—about his spirit, faith etc.—has been totally panned. It’s laughable. Feeling somewhat numb, John “The Hammer” Johnson requests the driver drop him off at the Observatory, where people gaze at the jeweled lights of the city. No one approaches his huge, shadowy silhouette, and so he is left to sit quietly on the wall, where he imagines not for the first time an ending to the film of his own imagination. His daughter wins the card game, but as she celebrates, droplets of blood emerge from her nostrils and float in the air. It’s not long before Marguerite doubles over in agonizing pain. Realizing what’s happening, he pulls them both tight to him, but even John “The Hammer” Johnson cannot compete with the fundamental laws of physics. Against the vast and violent power of the Universe, he is no more than a spirited breeze. Slowly, then quickly, his wife and daughter dissolve in his arms. The space station evaporates and John “The Hammer” Johnson is left floating in the void, his body pulled apart atom by atom, his soul too. The sky over the Observatory is clear. A couple sitting further along the wall huddle together against the evening cold while a father and son turn a small, cheap telescope to the stars. John “The Hammer” Johnson looks up towards the heavens. He doesn’t know the names of the stars and he’s unable to recognize the constellations. He counts their number four times over and fails to reach the same total. It feels like his vision is failing; not his eyesight, but his perception. He feels suddenly tired, weak, stretched-out. He turns over his hands, inspecting each one, and for a moment wonders if he saw a clump of matter lift off and drift away. It’s already begun, he thinks. In a sense, it’s already happened. ■

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