Here's the first submission for round 3. Sort of a mind bender.

Lonely

Tom J. Ferguson
 

  I finally made it! After three years of intense training and preparation, and then another two years in flight at ninety-nine point nine percent of light speed- so fast that relative and actual time are different- I finally made it. I had been in flight for what seemed like two years to me. A couple hundred- thousand centuries had passed in real time back home on Earth, which is fine by me. The only family I had was an abusive father who drove away any friends I ever made. By the time I got home, four hundred thousand centuries or more will have passed for Earth, while only six years passed for me. I would be here for two years, then Universal Aeronautics and Space Administration would give me another assignment. If I can help it, I will never return to Earth again. I was excited to be here, even though there is not much to see besides one frozen gas planet with no star to orbit. It just kinda drifted through space over the eons until it got here about a century ago. Where is here you might ask? That is a great question. The answer is that ‘here’ is the defined edge of space. For thousands of years on Earth, and even throughout the galaxy, the accepted theory was that there was no edge to space. It just continued on forever. But the truth is, there is actually an edge. And there is this really strange force-field there. Using modern imaging technology, UASA has been able to map this barrier completely. It encompasses the entire universe. We now know a definite size of the universe. If we say that one Galactic Measurement Unit, or GMU, is one-hundred thousand light-years, then we can use that to give a size of the universe. It is over nine-hundred trillion GMU’s across. It is a perfect cube, so that is a pretty accurate measurement. Freaking huge, isn’t it? Well, anyway, my job here is to collect molecular samples of any form from the force-field, or energy samples if there is no molecular structure, and figure out what it is made of. Seems simple enough, right? Yeah, nothing is ever as it seems. If it was really as easy as collecting a sample, and analyzing it, we would already know what it was made of. For some reason, our scanners and analyzers always show that there is nothing there. The programs always ask us to put a sample in, and so we try again, and it still shows nothing. We do know something is there, though, because even a G-bomb (a nuclear weapon powerful enough to destroy an entire galaxy with one blast) had no effect on it. It hit it, and detonated, but did nothing to it, and neither the shock wave nor the blast went beyond the barrier. It just kinda absorbed it. It was weird. I have analyzed that data over and over again. So, they sent me out here to try and figure it out. Apparently, I am UASA’s top physicist, which many people find hard to believe, considering my age. I am seven years old. By Earth standards that is. If we take away my space travel and assume that I’d never left Earth, I’d be seven. But I understand physics better than anyone else in the universe. You know the Energetic Bend technique? Where you take a beam of light and make it bend without using any physical barriers? No machines, no prisms, nothing like that. Just the light itself. It was me that discovered that. I figured out that if you understand physics at enough of an advanced stage, you can manipulate light simply by whispering to it. Almost like controlling it with your mind. You can summon it. You can command it. It turns out that light itself is a living thing. Weird, huh? You just have to know how to talk to it. People think it’s amazing when I walk into a room, and command all the light to condense into a small orb the size of a golf ball, and to stay there, and stay visible, but not to cast the light outward. It is like looking at a yellow golf ball in the exact center of a dark room, and that is all that is visible. I tired to explain this, but no one understands. At any rate, everyone thinks that if anyone can figure this out, I can. And I intend to. I want to try something. I am stepping off the shuttle that just landed on the barrier. I am standing in my space suit on the barrier. I am walking away from the shuttle. I am looking up at the weird, starless planet. I am kneeling down.
“Hello. I am Allison,” I whisper to the barrier.
“Hello, Allison,” It whispers back.
“How are you?” I ask it.
“I am good,” It responds.
  It feels shy. No one has ever spoken to it before.
“Are you lonely?” I ask it.
“Yes. No other creature besides you understands me. The race that created me went extinct billions of eons ago,” It says.
“Are there others like you?” I ask.
“No. I am the only Universe there is. My creators were going to create another one, but they went extinct before they could. They used the last of their energy to create me,” It tells me.
“I am sorry. I know what it is like to be alone,” I tell it.
“Indeed you do, Allison. You are the last of that race. Sleeping for billions of eons, finally awake,” It tells me.