The Final Element

20251029

Written for Bradley Ramsey's "First Indulgence" event.

At first everyone assumed it was a readings artefact. Equipment glitching. After all, elements got increasingly unstable the further you went, and this new element was number 144. It should’ve vanished in an instant.
But it didn’t. The atom was sitting placidly in the reaction chamber.
There’s no excitement quite like a horde of research scientists whose results defy all known paradigms. The moment they realised that the element was somehow stable the room became electrified.
More readings! Push the equipment to its limits! Could the atom be extracted for further analysis?
It could! Soon the atom was in a vacuum storage tube and the team was thinking of names.
If only it had remained in a vacuum, perhaps things would have been fine. But naturally they wished to test its reactivity. Oxygen was the first test, and the new atom was found to be highly reactive, forming a bond to multiple oxygen atoms at once.
Then, as the data was being crunched, a technician noticed that there were now six of the new atoms.
What? How? The amount of energy required to make one had been enormous, how could it spontaneously happen at room temperature?
But it did. Exponentially.
“I… think it’s converting the oxygen?”
Ludicrous. The energy requirements to break the bonds within a nucleus would-
“Yeah. It’s using up the oxygen, and… making more of itself.”
By the time the oxygen in the container was used up, there were hundreds of 144 atoms. The element’s working name was jokingly “Hungrium”.
“It eats and makes more of itself. It’s practically alive.”
Though intended as a joke, this turned out to be an unheeded warning.
Hungrium was vastly more reactive than other elements, managing to rapidly bond with even inert gases. And everything it bonded with, it converted. Smaller elements took longer, since it had to ‘collect’ more of them. But it always got there in the end.
Excitement turned to unease when they realised that Hungrium was converting the treated glass of its storage, a substance considered utterly inert. The process had been too slow to perceive with the original, small sample, but now there were hundreds of atoms forming a crystalline lattice the mass was passing collected atoms along. Pooling resources.
Acting like an organism.
How did they keep it contained?
Could it be destroyed?
If they could just fission it down to one of the unstable elements the problem would be solved… right?
So they loaded it into the chamber and set the laser running. Pour enough energy into the atoms and they’d split. Basic physics.
Not that Hungrium had bothered with such concerns before.
As the laser ramped up the sample started humming. Glowing.
And growing faster than ever, devouring the glass tube and the metal chamber and speeding along the path of the laser towards this delicious new source of energy.
“SHUT IT OFF! SHUT IT-”

Prompt was “Scientists discover a brand new element, one that defies everything we thought we knew about the universe. Not only is it unlike anything they’ve ever seen, it’s also sentient and hungry…”