It took about ten days after the invention of magic for the world to end.

Not particularly fast as far as things usually go, but still too fast for the majority of dead humans to really understand what killed them. You know, one minute it’s “I’ll have a cappuccino with almond milk,” and the next it’s “Huh, the sky is so bright everything around me is spontaneously catching fire/melting/oh god my eyes.”

Molly Richards was an ordinary person until she just so happened to waggle her fingers in precisely the right way while spouting nonsense. Suddenly, the fire pit she’s looking at sparks and catches fire, and her astonished friends drop their beers. Some drunken experiments later, she’s figured out the exact phrasing and finger waggles, and her friends have joined her as the Earth’s first fire mages.

A quick drive, a couple YouTube shorts, a few hours, and now several million English speakers are also setting tiny fires in their living rooms. (And, thanks to the bilinguals, a rapidly growing number of non-English speakers). And then the physicists get involved.

Fuck physicists. Seriously fuuuuck them. They’re the first to really try to optimize magic, and they’re good at it. It doesn’t take long to admit maybe this whole thermodynamics thing is broken and start looking for exploits. How is waggling my fingers and saying gibberish lighting things on fire? How far away can I set something on fire? How hot does it get? Can we make it hotter? How does the spell know what to set on fire? Is a human required?

It turns out messing with the gluon binding energy – even briefly – to create thermal energy isn’t a great idea. Protons in the affected area decay into pions and positrons, and now physicists don’t need a particle accelerator to make antimatter. The attention of the majority of particle physicists on the planet leads to fast advances in widening the spell’s affected region and more efficient capture of antimatter into Penning-Malmberg taps.

Next thing you know, every government is in a negotiation trying to figure out (1) what the FUCK is going on, (2) how to negotiate some sort of mutually-assured destruction treaty to keep the world from ending. The more powerful nations are moderately successful at eliciting promises from everyone to play it safe in hopes of not immediately exploding the world. Naturally, more than a few of these governments are dirty liars, and not every one of their citizens is totally on board with the idea of “playing it safe.”

There’s a critical threshold for planetary species – if the required number of sentients cooperating to produce a biosphere-ending device becomes small enough, the end is all but inevitable. You cannot unring a bell.

The story repeats throughout the universe I’m watching for billions of species. Most reach an early level of spaceflight before utterly obliterating themselves. This particular Creator’s spell appears obscure enough that its discovery is a numbers game, and that number appears to be around a few billion sentients.

Surprisingly, some species actually do survive to become galactic powers. These are mostly non-hearing, but a few have sufficiently anomalous prehensile appendages unable to make the spell’s required dexterous movements. They grow through a graveyard of a universe, uncovering myriad long-dead civilizations that ended in catastrophic flame. At this stage, even when these species do uncover the fire spell – via deep investigation of the properties of the universe or chancing upon a soon-to-be-self-extinguished race – their presence is solid enough that they can survive early mistakes.

I sigh, end the universe, assign it a barely passing grade, and turn to the next one in the pile.