Chapter 1 - The secrets of stars

In all those novels I read, when people died, they usually were faced with a pitch-black void. Not me though, a vast expanse of shiny dots was in front of me. I, of course, am not stupid, those aren't shiny dots but countless stars. In every possible direction, North, South, etc. I could only see the shiny dots.

Do North and South even have a meaning now? I wasn't on Earth so cardinal directions don't really exist.

The sight was beautiful, my situation. Not so much. In the end, I was still human, an insignificant bacterium in the beautiful universe, so I was very much panicking. My body was obviously not the same as when I was alive. In this scenario I could barely see myself, blending seamlessly with the environment. I still had a humanoid form, but I looked like a starry sky. With only one star, however. Right in the position my heart should be in.

Apart from my appearance there was another thing that struck a clear feeling that I was no longer human. These new senses, the feeling of the very fabric of the universe obeying my will. Big words for the relatively small control I seemed to have though.

I was there for a while, trying to understand the situation, it was for naught though. There seemed to be no ROB, no God and no Queen of England, unlike the novels.

In this situation getting scared was quite normal, alone in the darkness of the universe, nothing in site except celestial bodies hundreds and thousands of light years away, the fear of getting stuck in the middle of nowhere struck me, but what was even scarier was having the beauty of the cosmos right in front of me and not being able to appreciate it.

That did not last for long though, like the instinct of a baby sucking his mother's tits, I moulded space time to my will. Forming a wormhole.

Wormholes are theoretical holes in the space-time continuum. They appeared with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, just as black holes. These hypothetical holes in space, could connect two places that were so far away that even light would take millions of years to reach. Of course, humans were never able to find, much less make one.

Yet, with just a finger, I was able to make one. A stable one at that, something that was supposed to only happen in very specific conditions that were very difficult to find the observable universe.

I admired it for a bit, noticing the resemblance it bore with the one in Interstellar, amazing movie by the way. With little to no hesitation I stepped right through it. Myriad of galaxies, planets and stars appeared in my vision, only to disappear in a mere moment. And after a bit, I stopped right in front of a nebula.

The so-called star factories, massive structures of gases that spanned light years in size. Places where young stars would be born. It was simply beautiful, colours ranging from purple to blue and yellow, were abundant in it.

I could feel it calling to me, to use it. Somehow, two thoughts appeared in my head.

Create, use the nebula and give birth to stars anew.

Destroy, use the nebula and condense it into a singularity, making a black hole.

These thoughts lingered in my mind for a long, long time. Unsure of why I even had them I just kept thinking on what to do.

It was then that it occurred to me. It didn't matter if I chose to destroy or create, in the end both are essential to balance of the universe. I didn't need to settle for one. Should I choose to create, I would destroy somewhere else. And vice-versa.

…

A long time passed and all I did was see everything I could while I tried to master my powers. At the start all I did was trying to force my limits, which would make me go to sleep for some time. I never knew how long, but there was one time that I when I woke up a new star had been born close to me.

Eventually training my abilities got harder, which was no surprise since I was basically just doing whatever and seeing what happened. Let's just say I started trying to accurately measure the output when I accidentally destroyed a nearby exoplanet.

Since an exoplanet, meaning extrasolar planet, is a planet that orbits a star outside the solar system isn't every planet I see an exoplanet? I mean, planets are only the ones that orbit the Sun. So, from now, let's adapt the term planet for every exoplanet.

Destruction was, in theory, easier to do than creation. Which is actually true, that is unless you take into consideration that destruction must also be measured, too little and things will spiral out of control, too much and the universe will suffer a Heat Death much sooner than it is supposed to.

Of course, the scale of my destruction didn't reach levels that were able to harm the universe, so destruction was easier than creation. Which is why I decided to try and create a star.

But what is a star actually? A star is simply put, a massive sphere of plasma that is held together my its own gravity that is in turn related to its weight. We're not here for the simple definitions though.

Stars are born when a nebula collapses in itself due to its own gravity. The total mass of the nebula determines the really long life of the newborn star. Due to the thermonuclear fusion, mainly of hydrogen and helium, that occurs in the star's core, the star releases massive amounts of energy to space until eventually it doesn't have enough.

When the force generated by the thermonuclear fusion isn't enough to hold the weight of the core, the star will in turn collapse in its own gravity, turning its core into a compact star. Which in turn can be a white dwarf, a neutron star or a black hole if the star was heavy enough. Maybe a dark end to such a bright celestial body, maybe that is why they don't go out quietly. In the star's death, they go supernova, releasing chemically enriched material to space, making a beautiful painting in the canvas called universe.

This talk may be boring for a lot of people, but knowing how something works is essential to building it. But even with the knowledge about stars that I have it was not possible to make a star, at least not through the condensation of a nebula…