The Minotaur and the Monopole

In a moonlit glade of an enchanted wood, the Minotaur of Sirius-A sat and mourned the loss of his beloved Medusa, caustic tears burning a crater in the mossy ground betwixt his feet. The last survivor of a dying species, it was centuries since Daedalus-A's labyrinth had crumbled to ruin, and millennia since the Minotaur had feasted on the final consignment of virgins from Athens-A.

Such was the solitary intensity of his grief, the Minotaur resolved to be re-united with his partner by any means possible, and began furiously researching cosmology in the deserted library of Athens-A. There, he discovered that a universe just like our own - and therefore containing his dearest, alive again - could be created, without the need for an initial singularity, if one could only find a magnetic monopole.

The Minotaur, however, had no idea where to begin searching for such an item, and immediately lapsed into a pit of mythological depression, hurling himself out of the colonnaded library, and back to his friendless forest dell. There he lay forlorn in supine agony, and many days passed until, by providence, he descried above a lofty flock of migrating birds, and pondered anew the basis for such navigational feats. Thus it was that the Minotaur commenced a five-year effort, harvesting the magnetite from a billion birds, slowly implanting the precious ferrimagnetic mineral within his bovine skull.

Eventually, the harvest complete, the Minotaur tuned his magnetoreception to the faint magnetic fields which permeate the galaxy, and embarked on a thousand-year odyssey, pursuing hidden Teslatic paths between sparkling spiral arms and gigantic dust lanes, seeking hints and traces of the fabled monopole.

Finally, the grieving beast alighted upon a dark, brooding planet where magnetic field lines converged in densely-packed radial spokes. There, in a dark sulphuric cavern, between rivers of roiling magma, the Minotaur cleaved his monopole from an obsidian peninsula.

Summoning forth his cumulative, concentrated sorrow, he crushed the pulsing topological defect within his hand, compressing it until a black hole was formed. At once, a Reissner-Nordstrom space-time effloresced within, and a bubble universe blossomed with false vacuum energy inside the double black hole horizons.

The Minotaur was instantly sucked inside his own creation, his mass-energy converted to surface tension in the bubble wall. The child universe expanded and cooled, stars and galaxies formed, planets coalesced, life evolved, civilisations waxed and waned, and after billions of years, in a moonlit glade of an enchanted wood, the Minotaur of Sirius-A sat and mourned the loss of his beloved Medusa, caustic tears burning a crater in the mossy ground betwixt his feet.