“La cucaracha” is one of the most utterly improbable achievements in galactic catering, a temporal inverse to the literary restaurant Milliways. It does not exist at the Big Bang, how even could it - before the concept of space? That is absurd! No, it pops into being within the infinitesimally small sliver of time (t<0) just before the Universe actually got around to getting started on starting up. Obviously.

The building materials are rather simple: a reclaimed pissoir picked up on e-bay. Said pissoar was then turned into a restaurant and subjected to a full retro-temporal projection and compression field. However, like its literary equivalent,
the mechanistics involved are ridiculously complex:

To exist in the moment before existence, the restaurant is encased in a Singularity-proximity field (patent pending). The negative-time displacement bubble is not meant to
withstand the crushing weight of a Black Hole - rather, it resists the negative pressure of non-existence. This allows “la Cucaracha” to occupy space-time during a state of “imminent possibility” just on the outskirts of the t=0 event.

Crucially, the existence of the restaurant hinges on self-annihilation. Its presence in the moment of the Big Bang creates a severe temporal stress fracture. In fact, it is theorized that the cataclysmic implosion that ensues is what triggers the singularity to expand - it is the Big Bang itself. This also means that “la Cucaracha” only exists precisely because it must be instantly destroyed so that the Universe can be created; the destruction retroactively guarantees its moment of existence.

And yet, cockroaches will be cockroaches; the destruction of “la cucaracha” is barely an inconvenience. If you ever thought that these pesky beasts seem to have been around forever - they literally have. In fact, the first guests of the grand opening of “la Cucaracha” are also its founding fathers. Building the restaurant was a project so vast that it took countless generations of their descendants and billions of years to reverse engineer how it was even made. Fun fact: future patrons continue to populate the newborn Universe by surviving the self-annihilation process and that is why there are so many goddamn cockroaches everywhere! They are outlived only by tardigrades, but more on that later.

The whole operation is, as all critics agree, patently impossible - which is also the main argument as to why “la Cucaracha” exists.

The Universe begins with a spectacular disaster but ends with a casual picnic.

The cockroaches, for all their improbable genius, survived the birth of the Universe by riding the initial explosion - a messy affair that resulted in them and their descendants being scattered throughout the newborn cosmos. They exist in time, forever stuck inside the boundaries of their closed time loop of self-perpetuating birth.

Tardigrades, however, are a different animal. They represent the culmination of cosmological selection pressure and have evolved from mere biology to being the one truly universal constant. Though you might have heard about cryptobiosis, one particular aspect of this fabled “tun” state is less well known: that of stubborn temporal denial and cosmic apathy.

At the Big Rip, when the Universe is finally torn apart and the binding forces of matter fail… the tardigrades simply activate their “temporal apathy field” and step out of time, leaving the collapsing cosmos behind like a dreary social event. They float in the true void, impervious to the trillions of suns being ripped to shreds because they are no longer participating in the physics that governs those events. Perhaps this is the greatest lesson - the most resilient creature in the cosmos does not fight for survival, it merely waits for the fight to be over.

When the tardigrades gather for their final tabberas, they are not mourning the Big Rip. They are celebrating the simple fact that, for them, another Universal Cycle has run its course. They unpack their tiny blankets, sip their tiny beverages and munch on tiny patisseries. All while casually witnessing the disintegration of “existence”.

And then they simply pause their own existence and wait - not for the end of the current Universe, but for the infinitesimal moment right before the next one begins. At which point, they step back in, utterly unscathed, still mildly damp, and without having missed a single thing. Their true survival mechanism is an elegant and simple philosophy: If you aren't participating in time, you can't be subject to its end.

Tardigrades are the silent, surprisingly polite, bowler-hatted architects of cosmic persistence.