Hydrostatic

The hardest part about being a star is the constant, crushing refusal to collapse.
The burning, heat, and light are all secondary.

John sat in the center of the observation room. It was a glass box, suspended over a landscape that had finally finished smoothing itself out.
Outside, there was no wind, no erosion, no things. Just a perfectly grey uniformity. The ambient temperature out there was total absence of vibration.

Not cold — nothing. It feels like what zero means.

Inside the glass box, John was vibrating.

His coffee mug was still warm(ish). His blood pumped. His thoughts churned in anxious, pointless loops. He was a localized heat pocket, and a temporary insult to the universe's desire for order.

He looked to the console on his desk. It had a single red switch.

The manual called it the "System Termination" protocol. John knew it was just gravity waiting to win.

Flipping it wouldn't cause an explosion or anything; it would just stop the fusion. The pumps would cease, the heaters would fade, and the glass box would gently equalize with the grey outside.
It would be peaceful. It would be logical. It would be the end of the Lie.

John reached for his lukewarm coffee instead. He hated the taste, but the bitterness gave him something to fight through. It was a sensation. It was resistance.

"Why am I still doing this?" he whispered to the empty room. The sound waves barely made it to the glass before dying out.

He knew the biological answer: self-preservation instinct.
He knew the physics answer: he was a dissipative structure caught in a stable delay pattern.

But neither answer felt like the truth. The truth felt more sinister.

The truth was that he was the only thing left capable of perceiving the smoothness, and therefore, the only thing keeping it from being absolute.

He set the mug down with a loud thud against the wooden desk, just to hear the noise punch through the silence.

He looked at the red switch again. The gravity in the room was pulling at his shoulders, begging him to just lie down on the floor and let the heat seep out into the floorboards.

John picked up his pen and opened his notepad to a blank page. He didn't have anything to record this time. Nothing outside had changed in a thousand days.

He started writing anyway.