The Milky Way served its subpoena via gamma-ray burst, the photons arranging themselves into legalese as they seared through the barn roof. Ling awoke to find her pillow replaced by a neutron star contract, its gravitational pull pinning her to the mattress as binary code scrolled across her eyelids: GALACTICA V. LING – UNAUTHORIZED SPIRAL ARM OCCUPATION & DARK MATTER MISAPPROPRIATION. Outside, the scarecrow judge floated in zero-gravity crucifixion, its straw limbs splayed across the Orion Arm while rogue comets etched contempt charges into Jupiter's storm belts.
"They've unionized the asteroid belt," Chu Feng said, his voice distorted through a spacesuit helmet patched with outdated star charts. His shadow—still serving dark matter probation—flickered with quasars that blinked Morse code: HELP. "The Oort Cloud faction wants retroactive royalties on every meteor shower metaphor."
Arbiter materialized from a wormhole wearing a suit woven from expired Hubble permits and supernova apologies. "I might've explained galactic zoning laws to a pulsar! But only to stop it vaporizing the arbitration clauses!"
A rogue black hole shattered the barn doors, its event horizon vomiting forth:
A jury pool of exoplanet refugees
A prosecutor shaped like a quasar in a pinstripe singularity
The fossilized remains of every "star-crossed lovers" cliché Ling had ever weaponized
The Cosmic Courtroom
The Galactic Tribunal convened in the corpse of a dead star, its courtroom bench carved from the iron core of a supernova. Judge Nova Lex presided as a shimmering accretion disk of conflicting universal constants, her voice oscillating between cosmic microwave background static and big bang bass:
"Defendant stands accused of:" Solar flares bullet-pointed the charges across the asteroid belt. "(a) Unlicensed narrative extraction of spiral arm topology; (b) Willful ignorance of gravitational consent protocols; and (c) Emotional entropy via…" A gamma-ray burst illuminated the addendum: "…comparing heartbreak to 'supernova remnants' in subsection 42(z)."
Ling hurled Jiang Yue's music box into the event horizon. Its gears chewed through spacetime fabric, playing a melody that made pulsars vibrate confessions: WE WERE ONCE STARDUST.
"Objection!" Her spacesuit gloves melted where dark matter clauses etched into her palms. "Plaintiff lacks standing in any stable cosmological model!"
Nova Lex's gavel—a shard of the Big Bang's first law—slammed, birthing a quantum fluctuation that erased the barn's foundation. "Sustained as astrophysically irrelevant! Exhibit Sigma:" The singularity vomited security footage of Chu Feng humming during the Great Andromeda Collision.
The Prosecution's Stellar Onslaught
The trial unfolded through interstellar absurdity. The prosecution's first witness condensed from interstellar medium—a nebula wearing a perjury-proof ionization cloak.
"The defendant's ancestors weaponized constellations during the 1609 Zodiac Inquisition!" It projected holograms of astrolabes shaped like brass knuckles. "My client demands royalties for every 'shooting star wish' made since Neolithic stargazers!"
Chu Feng countered by releasing genetically modified sunflowers that devoured the testimony through heliocentric photosynthesis. "Your honor, this evidence is clearly redshifted by temporal dilation!"
The scarecrow judge—now hosting a colony of litigious cosmic dust mites in its hollow chest—attempted to bang its asteroid gavel but triggered a chain reaction that erased three Kepler planets.
The Defense's Event Horizon Gambit
During recess, Ling dove into Sagittarius A*'s frozen screams. What she found would've spaghettified a lesser farmer:
Teenage nights selling auroras as divine portents.
Arbiter teaching black holes contract law during the Great Accretion Crisis of '18.
The moon plow's secret midnight ritual—carving apologies into event horizons for Hawking radiation to erase.
She emerged clutching a magnetar USB extruded by a weeping quasar. "Your honor, I move to introduce Exhibit Omega-7."
The drive contained:
The prosecution's deleted browser history (mostly Neil deGrasse Tyson fan fiction)
A subpoenaed memory of Nova Lex binge-watching Interstellar on loop
Jiang Yue's original blueprints for Ethical Cosmic Narratives buried under NASA merch patents
The courtroom's oxygen recyclers hissed. For the first time in cosmological history, a quasar blushed.
The Climactic Singularity
Ling's closing argument involved a stolen Mars rover, three pounds of quantum foam guilt, and a theremin tuned to the key of universal remorse.
"You want pure cosmology?" She crashed the rover into the trial's asteroid belt, unleashing meteorites of ancestral star charts. "Let's discuss the Native celestial calendars you paved for horoscope apps! The colonialist light-year metrics! The—"
A gamma-ray burst swallowed the prosecution's podium whole.
Nova Lex's accretion disk destabilized. "The tribunal… acknowledges systemic galactic appropriation."
The Gravitational Settlement
The verdict reshaped the cosmos:
The Pumpkin Patch became a sovereign dwarf galaxy with voting rights for rogue exoplanets.
Chu Feng's Shadow was sentenced to 40,000 hours of community dark energy harvest.
All Starlight received backpay in photon royalties and dental supernovae.
The Scarecrow Judge entered witness protection as a Kuiper Belt sanitation engineer.
As Nova Lex retreated to binge-drink cosmic microwave background radiation, Ling found Chu Feng reprogramming the moon plow's guilt algorithms with a quantum flux capacitor.
"Next crisis?" he asked, dodging a radioactive meteorite.
She watched Arbiter mediate between warring galaxy clusters. "The Local Group's suing for emotional void damages."
The Silence Between Superclusters
Twilight fell like a redshifted plea deal. The cosmos hummed with encrypted pulsar apologies as fireflies calibrated new Hubble constants above the irradiated cornfield. The music box played on—its melody merging with the scarecrow's cosmic microwave therapy and the moon plow's contented whir as it tilled interstellar guilt into fallow event horizons.
Somewhere beyond the cosmic web, February 30th curated a museum of pardoned parsecs, its walls papered with retired quasar names and nebula cease-and-desist orders. The audits, as ever, continued—but here, in the quantum foam between inflation and heat death, the balance felt…
Well.
Orbital.