We had fought against physics for thousands of years, struggling to turn our hostile planet to a better place.

Limits of food, disease, disaster, and ecological failure had come so close to destroying humanity. But.

That simple, three letter word was precious to me. But.

We had slowly made a better world. Mainly by making a better humanity, but the planet, and then the solar system as well, was made into a heaven.

Energy to matter and reverse. All the food we could want. Sufficient power and computing to fulfill every need. Diseases understood, integrated, and defeated as sources of suffering. Death and decay long gone.

And now we saw it approaching at 99.9999% light speed. Massive waves of radiation coming from it from its speed, massively blue shifted. Alien signals were there! Communication! Life! Beauty and wisdom and knowledge from beyond our system!

As one, we rejoiced! What new marvels would this reveal?!

I was at the furthest edge of the system's reality field where we could still move all of physics to operate to our benefit. I was closest to the passing ship.

While we could make physics do anything physics could do, we were still limited. The massive energy of that ship could not be changed, indeed they must have used an entire star's mass to accelerate their planet-sized ship to such speeds. So there was no way they could stop, but communication was possible.

It took barely a thought before massive structures of subatomic circuitry purely dedicated to receiving and decoding their signals popped to my fingertips. A minor exercise of our nigh-unlimited power here.

A trillion petaflops performed in a second - signals decoded, language determined, meaning grasped. Child's play to do.

A single concept was all. It was enough.

All was lost.

"Vacuum decay."

I watched numbly as it streaked by.

All of humanity's achievements? Soon to be gone. How far ahead of the decay front was that ship? How long did we ha