Ornectai doesn’t exist any more. Perhaps it never did.

The mathematics are these: It was 17 billion times the size of earth, and its sun was commensurately larger still, as is ours.

One orbit of its sun took 10 billion earth-time years, hence that was the length of one Ornectai year. A long wait for your Easter egg.

The height of an ulg – the planet’s nearest equivalent to a dog – was 14 earth miles. Its master was, as on earth, seven to eight times higher than that, something like 100 miles tall. Try reminding him to kindly use his poop scoop.

If you reached for the salt at a hypothetical breakfast on Ornectai, the action would take you 3.6 billion years. Shaking it over your hypothetical bacon and eggs, a further 7 billion.

Just to complicate matters, time on Ornectai ran backwards, a state of affairs not unknown in the physics of the cosmos.

Ran backwards, that is, until the explosion that ripped the world apart. It wasn’t a blast born of hostilities or terrorism: there was no war on Ornectai, nor anything like it.

The entirely natural, spontaneous phenomenon, which lasted 42 minutes in Ornectai’s sudden forward-running time (and is actually still going on in earth-time) totally devastated the entire planet and its gargantuan solar neighbour.

Both were splintered into trillions upon trillions of tiny atoms, and as they exploded outwards into a surprised cosmos, many of those atoms found themselves temporary host to whole new life-forms that continually prospered and died, died and prospered.

It was all in the mere blink of an ulg’s eye in Ornectai terms, but breathtakingly long drawn out aeons from earth’s perspective. Earth had a vested interest in this situation, as it had itself spawned on one random particle in the detritus thousands of the literally uncountable swarms of micro-sized species that lived and foundered in an (Ornectai) instant.

By the time the dust of the explosion settles, 15 billion earth years will have passed. Then it is believed time will once again commence to run backwards at that point of singularity in the heavens.

Ornectai doesn’t exist any more. Perhaps it never did.

But, on the other hand, when time is reversed, the end is merely the beginning. So it may well be reborn again some time very soon.

Very soon relatively speaking that is.

-Ends-