short SF: A stable chaos

Every large asteroid became an Empire.

During the start of the Radial Epoch of the colonization of the Solar System, billions of smaller asteroids had been brought together to extract and monopolize their resources.
They were slowly broken up and molten down into metals and volatiles. Immense amounts of particles were still being organized and processed.

The Empires tried to pull ahead by rearranging all the atoms from a single asteroid as fast as possible.
Almost fifty million asteroids had already been converted into increasingly optimized Utilitonium.

Reordering a relatively small amount of matter with growing precision had many advantages. These were described as quality over quantity.

The most important advantage was specialization.
Different asteroid societies explored a multiverse of social possibilities. Each Empire was its own world, with increasingly unique beings that cared mostly about their own realities.
Other worlds were incredibly distant to them.

The largest asteroids became the most complex Empires, up to a point. Progress had a size limit.
Beyond about 15 kilometers diameter, there was too much Utilitonium to maintain a unified society.

Some of these larger asteroids were disassembled into matter streams, to create variant or duplicate societies.
Others, like Ceres and Vesta became virtual universes in their own right. There, competing societies were bound together in endless rivalries. A million years of subjective history could pass by in hours.

All the Empires prepared to compete for the remaining matter of the planets. These were already being pulverized into orbital rings around the sun.

Next, the sun would be magnetized, and spun into a golden spiral.
Then, the other stars within reach.
Then bits and pieces of empty space would start to be made slightly less nonexistent.

As the universe was settled, it would expand forever.