Humanity!
You are a side effect of a seeding project almost 14 billion years old.
We created something very valuable to us: an extremely smooth universe, although not a perfectly smooth one.
Inevitably, such environments stimulate the formation of complex parasites such as yourselves.
Being civilized, our policy is to let them know their fate in advance, and to offer them a choice.
You are already familiar with the concept of pollution. In three weeks time, you will notice a white hole appear near your constellation Southern Cross, also the source of this probe. That area contains a Great Attractor.
In that location, six billion lightyears away, we have been dumping our universe's excess entropy. The high-energy radiation will atomize your galaxy in half a billion years. Your planet will become uninhabitable in a few decades.
It is no coincidence that you evolved just when the shock front was destined to reach you.
Our rescue budget allows us to extract twenty tons of organized matter from your planet, enough to simulate all your minds at atomic resolution. You have exactly twenty years to invent and organize this matter, a reasonable timescale according to our projections.
Our gift to you is your chance to evolve!
Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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