Eviction notice

The day the stars began to drift away, no trumpet sounded; no sky cracked. Astronomers at Maunakea noticed it first — a faint, persistent recession of the galaxies, as though the cosmos had exhaled and decided not to inhale. Within a week, every telescope on Earth confirmed the impossible: the Hubble flow had accelerated overnight, and the acceleration was uniform, deliberate, polite.

Mara Ekwueme, theoretical cosmologist and reluctant insomniac, was alone in the control room when the pattern emerged. The redshift data were not random: they formed a lattice of avoidance. Every spiral arm in the local group was nudged outwards along vectors that, if drawn on a chart, spelled a single word in the angular alphabet of gravitational equipotentials: Go.

She whispered the word aloud and felt the room cool by several degrees. The air itself seemed embarrassed to carry the sound.

“Dark energy doesn’t have syntax,” her postdoc, Jonas, said when she showed him. “It’s a scalar field, not a postcard.”

“Fields don’t accelerate with manners either,” Mara replied. “This is curated. Someone is curating us.”

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They published a two-page note in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The world shrugged. Markets dipped, then recovered when no asteroid followed the memo. Priests debated on television; late-night hosts made eviction jokes. Humanity, as usual, was too busy to be terrified by subtleties.

But Mara kept watching. She found that if she binned the recession velocities by galactic metallicity, a second message appeared — fainter, encrypted in the jitter of Type Ia supernovae. Translated into human language, it read:

We are the remainder, the unseen scaffolding. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Dark matter. Not particles of supersymmetry, not sterile neutrinos — civilizations. Vast, slow, ancient polities that had traded light for longevity, electromagnetism for serenity. They lived in the cold between stars, content with gravity’s whisper. To them, baryonic creatures were loud children with radioactive toys.

Mara understood the implication first: the dark energy ramp-up was not aggression but insulation. They were turning up the cosmic thermostat so the children would wander outside and stop touching the furniture.

She tried to imagine the physics required. A Kardashev Type Ω civilization able to modulate vacuum energy at will, sculpting space-time the way potters shape clay. Their cloaking had always been perfect; only their mass had betrayed them, tugging gently at galactic rotations like fingerprints on wet paint. We had mistaken entire ecospheres for inert matter.

Jonas asked, “What do we do? Send a radio ping? A gravity-wave sonnet?”

Mara laughed, a sound like glass breaking in slow motion. “We can’t even shield our nuclear waste. They’d hear us long before we spoke. No — this is a notice to vacate, not an invitation to negotiate.”

Still, she tried. She spent three months encoding a reply into the orbital perturbations of a dozen Kuiper belt objects, nudging them with ion drives into a pattern that spelled, in gravitational Morse, We hear you. Are you safe?

The aliens’ answer was courteous silence.

Meanwhile, the sky thinned. By the end of the year, the Andromeda galaxy sat 20% farther away than textbooks predicted. Amateur astronomers complained that their telescopes couldn’t resolve the Triangulum nebula anymore. Power grids flickered; migratory birds flew in confused spirals, deprived of stellar landmarks.

Mara received an invitation to address the United Nations. She stood before the General Assembly beneath a hologram of the receding Universe and told them the truth. “We are being evicted with exquisite politeness. The cosmos is not expanding; it is stepping back, drawing its skirts away from our mud.”

The delegates asked if surrender was an option. She explained that surrender implied a war, and there had been no war — only the quiet rearrangement of reality. They asked if prayer would help. She said the aliens were already beyond any god we had imagined.