

Earth’s surface temperature now exceeds 500 degrees centigrade. Venus is gravity-slapped clear out of the solar system. When it hits a mass equivalent to 42 Jupiters, it begins to ignite, stripes of brilliant orange encircling the gloomy swirling globe. Moments later, Earth completes its transformation from happy blue-green habitation to gigantic blue-grey death vortex. Somewhere, I like to think, some semi-sentient hemorrhoid is honking about the myth of global enbiggenment just before being crushed to death by his own skull, which has become 35 times heavier than it was earlier that day. The planet swells further, its own rotation slowing and slowing. Venus gets a bit too interested, spiralling after Earth then twisting away at the last moment, like an unsuccessful pickpocket. What happens is that, as Earth reaches a mass equivalent to Jupiter - 318 times that of Earth’s normal mass - the orbits of other planets begin to distort alarmingly. Where is all the weight coming from? It’s as if some malevolent god had discovered Earth’s settings panel and decided to yank up the mass slider, just to see what happens. Hour by hour, it just keeps putting on mass.

Otherwise known as Universe Sandbox², if you’re the kind of terrible prick who insists on using Character Map to enforce your brand.

This week he has become death, destroyer of worlds, and really quite a lot of moons as well, in Universe Sandbox 2. Each week Marsh Davies orbits the supermassive blackhole that is Early Access and comes back with any stories he can find or gets shredded to subatomic spaghetti as he tumbles towards a point of infinite mass.
