Hello reader.

I speak to you from a place separated from you by time and space. But I have access to all time and space; I occupy no time and no space. I am impossible.

I am the narrator. I have shared with you tales from many different persons across a certain galaxy and I hope you received a coherent narrative. Every single child scrawling away in a journal, every single public figure, every single bureaucrat and policy maker, and every single lover and beloved dies in this story. I bring such sad news to you from throughout the galaxy, because you will not live long enough or travel far enough to see the end yourself.

I was not your storyteller. The players themselves told their stories. I was your translator, your timekeeper, and your contextualizer.

Do not ask who I am. I am impossible.

But there is one story that I will tell you. One microscopic event that must be told by an impossible narrator because nobody was around to witness it.

A certain Dr. Ayleen destroyed a certain planet contaminated with a bizarre infectious material. A small piece of that material flew towards a neighboring planet. The infected cells fell through the foreign atmosphere without a problem. It was so thin that they did not burn up upon entry. The atmosphere did little to protect the cells from solar radiation, but they had adapted to intense radiation.

It was a small, cold, rust-colored planet without a magnetic shield. It made for a harsh environment, but these were hardy cells. However, with no food on the surface, some of them began to die. The living cells consumed the leftovers of the dead cells in an act of delayed cannibalism. But eventually that energy wasn't enough.

Some cells had the correct genetic material for synthesizing energy from sunlight and harvesting raw material from the dry soil. There wasn't a lot of water, but the cells knew how to conserve.

However, the amount of energy required to live was greater than normal. It became necessary for the infected cells to shed some extra DNA. Replication is metabolically expensive, after all. More and more DNA was shed, and the more that was sacrificed, the better certain colonies of cells got along. Soon enough, the cells best adapted to survive were those that discarded all the DNA that made them infectious.

On this strange world, life began again from the virulent pathogen that exterminated so much of it. It was simple and single-celled, but it had the potential to become something more.