Dark Energy and the expansion of the Universe

In the original incarnation of VIRUS 5, all I had was the "villain" being the Stareaters. It never occurred to me to ask why they wanted to eat stars. I really just wanted them as raw material for the VIRUS units to get out of hand and cause a cliff-hanger because of their mutations.

But after I wrote the story, I was compelled to write Part 2 which was when Rei and Rome got to Deucado. Simply writing that story dictated that I had to write Part 3 which was supposed to tie up loose ends.

But what of the Stareaters? It was a really neat idea to have a double climax: Rei and Rome confronting then destroying MASAL and then the Stareaters come to the Solar System. But it was depressing to think that everyone had to die.

So I "asked" the Stareaters, what was your motivation? Why do you eat stars? Their answer was shocking and made complete sense. There is a force called Dark Energy which seems to be implicated in the accelerating expansion of the universe. Once the universe gets too big, it will collapse upon itself and cause the Big Crunch. And it has been proposed that supernovae and hypernovae shed so much Dark Energy that they accelerate the acceleration.

So at last, I had a motivation of why the Stareaters eat stars. They are trying to prevent supernovae and hypernovae and retard the acceleration of the universe. If they stop this, the universe would remain in its current state until all energy in the universe goes to absolute zero. In other words, they were simply trying to prolong the life of the universe.

Thinking about such questions hurts my head. What came before the beginning? What comes after the end? Ultimately, the Stareaters' mission would fail. In the Epilogue to the final section of the final book, entitled The Milk Run, Rei and Rome and OMCOM must address such questions. The answer will surprise you but it won't be ready until 2014.