It is there. Always ‘is’, nothing else. A thousand years ago it had been spotted in the stars from the Plutonian base where the unlimited expanse could be seen and heard without any interference from all the space junk reflecting light and sound. There was no way to know what it was, for it never changed in any way. It held steady in the swirling cosmos, which made it easier to shoot for with calculations and projections. Usually the computers had to hum away at full speed to keep a ship in the correct direction of its destination as everything twirled and rotated or was buffeted by a million solar winds. But not this thing, constant, steady—-it had become known as: The Invariable.

No one knew if it was Alien built, a civilization so far from ours in Time and Knowledge that we could not yet understand what they had done. Or had they only done it as their last work, of science? Of art? A last gasp as they died out or decided to inhabit another dimension? Philosophers and scientist of all kinds had pondered it for more than a millennium and no answers came. Many who held onto the old beliefs of a god, said it was made by his or her hand, to show his or her eternity and omniscience. Whole religions had arisen and fallen with that idea. Almost all of them were gone, the ever changing weft and warp of the Universe. Everything changed, went on but for The Invariable.

Their hearts beat wildly as they approached. They were the first of humankind to make it there. It was a perfectly shaped orb, slate gray with a soft luminescence. It did not react to their presence, it didn’t even have any kind of weight, not one tiny bit of gravity of its own. That was against all laws of the Universe, such a large object should have some pull. It was nothing, but it was there.

After the first expedition, expedition after expedition followed. Scientists, philosophers, artist, theologians came in mass. But no theorems or abstract analysis, poem nor scriptures could solve The Invariable. Next came the hotels and amusement parks for the tourists with their wide windows ever turning to show the object that puzzled everyone. But then over a century the fad wore off, the rooms and tours became emptier and emptier until literally the last light was turned off and the last crew headed back to their lives on more interesting planets or in interstellar space.

The object,whatever it was, hadn’t changed anyone in any way. It itself had not either. It simple remained: The Invariable, the one invariable in the Universe until its collapsing, dying day.