Nuklear Age (95 page)

I mean think about it. If you can do anything, what should you do first?

It wasn’t until the Sun exploded that I finally figured it out, or perhaps I finally stopped denying that I knew. Without the Sun, I had no reason to stay. I had to face the truth. It doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you do it sincerely.

And so I soared through the cosmos at the speed of thought. I watched a thousand worlds grow, mature, and die. I watched nations rise from the mire and stretch across the stars only to fall and seed new worlds. It was a beautiful symmetry. It was then that I began to mark my hours by centuries.

I fell into a routine there. I acted as an interstellar guardian angel. Old habit, I suppose. And though I was alone, my Earth remained with me. Everywhere I went throughout the galaxy, their voice was already there. It was another of those strange things about the Earth.

Nuklear Man accidentally sent an artifact all about our world to the other side of the galaxy and thousands of years into the past where it was found by some alien race who took the artifact to be a message from their gods. They looked at our history and it terrified them. They did everything they could to be as
unlike
us as possible. They reached to the stars with a message of peace born on the wings of our incompetence. They took the tragedy of human history everywhere they went to scare the indigenous peoples of wherever to be not like us. Theirs was a society that spread peace through sixty percent of the galaxy which, and this is the best part, Nuke was created hundreds of thousands of years before all this specifically to destroy it in order to unleash the wrath of the gods chained by fate.

Believe it or not, that's the short version.

Also? Turns out things like this were happening all the time.

I watched as the Milky Way died. It happened much quicker than I would have thought. It was like one day the stars began disappearing and, with them, all signs of life. It was little more than an ashen graveyard echoing with the electromagnetic whispers of specters. Voices and monuments proclaiming the eternal glory of some long dead people as the Milky Way spun itself into nothingness.

And I was truly alone. There were no more ancient echoes of my Earth. There were no civilizations to watch over, no more worlds to protect. And worst of all, no more stars to give me hope. You see, a promise was made to me a long time ago, in the days when I was still a man.

“You will see me again. I promise you that,” he had said.

Looking back, I suppose that was the real reason why I took to the stars, the real reason for all my little acts of heroism. I was hoping to see my friend one more time. But without the stars of the Milky Way to fuel his life, I had to accept that my friend was dead, and with him all ties to what I used to be.

I was saddened. Who wouldn't be. But there was a curious optimism there as well. The universe was at my fingertips. I embraced it. And it was magical. I met gods, I battled giants, I shared knowledge. I spoke to stars, I traveled among packs of sentient light, and the living darkness they lanced through. There was a race of beings that came to be known to me as the Girth. They were native to the vast chasms between galaxies. They dwarfed even the giants. They were often mistaken as empty massless space by the creatures observing them from the outside and as the entire universe by the creatures observing them from the inside.

At first, I envied those dwelling inside the Girth. Theirs was a universe so much more comprehensible to the mortal mind than the universe I knew. But then, one day, I asked myself, “Why? Why would anyone want to understand the universe? Why would anyone quantify their awe into nothing?”

Galactic superclusters revolved around these beings because that was the only place for them to fit. Their sheer size made it impossible for them to have any predators other than themselves, a fact which made their mating season more than a little interesting. This was the universe I wanted. A place where the wonderfully bizarre is happening all the time.

I saw all this and more. I had become a member of an eternal community of celestial beings. They called themselves, simply, the Strange. Their ranks were made up of the most unique and odd beings the universe could produce. They traced their lineage to the beginning of time when the very first being told itself, “I am.”

According to the Light, that first being had consisted of two bits of information, genetics of a sort, encoded in silicon rock. But other historians among the Strange are more ambitious. One particularly ancient section of the Dark told me that the universe itself was the first unique thing to come into existence.

Of course, the Light and the Dark hardly ever agreed.

We all had names like that among the Strange. The Girth, the Light, the Dark, the Song, the Equation, and so on. I particularly liked the Viral, a planet covered in microbes engineered to be the perfect biological weapon for the wars of its original inhabitants. The idea, as I understood it, was that these germs were designed to evolve at hyper-fast speeds to overcome the immune system of anything matching the genetic code of the enemy. What was overlooked, it would seem, is that all life native to a given planet will have remarkably similar genetic information. The germs had killed everything and covered the entire globe in weeks. Their evolution continued until they reached consciousness. The world became their body. The Viral traveled from star to star charging itself with solar energy before traversing the great expanses of nothing. It was a very peaceful being considering it had been built for murder.

I was known as the Atomik. I had few other choices left to me. The Will didn’t sound right. The Field wasn’t terribly interesting. And don’t even try The John.

Sorry. It’s an old Earth joke.

It was here I began to mark the hours by millennia. After all my wandering, I finally felt I belonged. As usual, I fell into a routine. I’m happy to say that this one was more interactive with the world around me than what I had previously allowed myself. I shared with the Strange what I had learned from my days of watching and helping. Told them of tragedies and triumphs. And they shared with me their knowledge of places far away and long dead, stories of joy and sadness.

Those were good days. You’d think with all my wisdom, accumulated from across all time and creation, I would have known they could not last.

But I didn't.

It began slowly at first. More reports among the Strange of civilizations dying off, of a Star Eater cutting through space and devouring and killing anything in its path. Of galaxies falling to pieces. Of nebulae evaporating away. What you have to understand is those sorts of things were happening all the time in those days. The universe is a big place after all, even for ageless beings as we, so it took a while before we could notice the increased frequency.

And by then it was crystal clear. It was Entropy.

Looking back, I wonder if I did not become idle in those days. Too much theory and not enough practice. I thought maybe if I had been more active, if I had been among the stars and galaxies themselves, if I had rallied my fellow Strange into action, I might have been able to stem the tide of oblivion.

Even at the end of the universe, I’m trying to build superteams.

It was frustrating. I had averted countless catastrophes in my time. Even as a man I had fought to save an entire galaxy.

But this? You could rekindle stars, move planets, divert moons, inspire greatness, punish evil, you could change the way things were, you could do something to make it better.

Sometimes, especially at the scale I had become accustomed to, you had to chase down some esoteric being of power beyond immensity and force it to see the err of its ways; or follow a trail of cause and effect, crawl through the webs of Fate to find some source of wrongdoing; or simply tear at the fabric of the universe itself and cut out its cancer.

But this? There were no gods to threaten, there was no mystery to unravel, no cancer to excise. There was nothing we could have done to stop entropy. We were contributing to its power simply by existing. It was then that I started to make the hours in eons. And it was becoming difficult to find gamma bursts in those days.

I watched as members of our rank passed on. The Light was the first to show signs of weakness. As entropy increased, the Light could not sustain the degree of coherence necessary to maintain intelligence. The Dark, quite despite itself, was saddened by its loss.

Others were quick to follow. Organic creatures were next, their flesh was much too fragile for the cold that came with the sudden lack of stars. After them, inorganic beings fell. Their matrices were too complex to survive entropy gnawing at them. Next, the huge things began to fall apart. The Viral became frozen in the icy tomb of its own toxic atmosphere. The Girth were reduced to a single member in a matter of years. He stayed with us until his death. I remember how small he seemed then, how silent.

In all this, the Dark flourished, though it too perished. It had simply become too massive for itself and died like everything before it.

It’s a shame, it had been here longer than anything.

And then the gods began to wither and die. For a time, the gods of death prospered. They at last held reign over all that had been denied them. Theirs was an interesting elation. They were the kings of everything. But without anything else left to take into death, their time too was at an end.

The gods of death were the last.

All that remained were the abstracts, which as far as I could tell, consisted of myself and one other, the Equation, a formula so complex it sought to solve itself. There in the dark I could hear her calculating herself away. I insisted that we survey the universe until we could no longer move if for no other reason than to find others to learn whatever we could from them in these final days. She did not mind so long as she was not disturbed from her work. I agreed that she would not be. She didn’t have to participate, only be with me.

I simply did not want to be alone in what I knew to be a vain effort. She at least had a purpose, I had to invent one. And without lives to save I resigned myself to the scholarly work I had begun with the Strange. Only now, I would not simply receive information second hand, I would fly out into the void and take it as my own. If all I found was death, then so be it.

Thousands of years passed. My years, with every hour measured in time most civilizations had never known.

Everywhere we traveled, we found the tombstones of creation. There were no more stars, no more beacons or guideposts. No more gamma bursts to keep track of time. Even the Equation was beginning to lose its consistency. Entropy had eroded at her for too long. Her calculations began to slow as she had to take extra time tracking down her own errors and fix them. I could tell it frustrated her to no end. Her computations continued to slow until I was convinced they were no more.

And then she spoke to me.

“Atomik. Entropy has taken a hold on my faculties as well. You no doubt must’ve noticed this by now.” She was right, but I hadn’t said anything thinking it would only further aggravate her. “It was good of you not to say anything. You cannot imagine how infuriating it is to stand face to face with your own growing inadequacies.”

“I may surprise you in that respect. What may I do for you?”

“My goal is in sight. I have quite nearly solved myself, but I’m afraid I can barely perform even the most basic functions. I can feel myself slipping away, Atomik. I have calculated myself long enough to witness the end of time. Do not let all my work die in vain.”

“I am at your service.”

“Then take me into you.”

“Excuse me?”

“We have been traveling companions for so long, I hoped the request would not have offended you.”

“That is not what troubles me. I simply don't understand it.”

“You are a being of pure will. You can do anything. Please, take me into your consciousness so that I may regain enough coherence to complete my work.”

“If it will give you comfort.” It was a simple process, I willed her as part of me.

And that’s how I had sex with an equation.

Perhaps “sex” is misleading. For one, there was no chance at procreation since neither of us had anything to procreate with. I had kept thinking of myself as being a male entity simply out of habit. It was hard enough adjusting to being an immortal personification of my own will, I didn’t want to have to worry over issues of sexuality too. And I’m not entirely sure she was a she. All I know is when we spoke or when she calculated her voice had a feminine quality to it, but such things are not universal.

All that aside, “sex” is still the only way I can think to describe it. We opened up all we were to one another and shared things that no one else would ever know.

It was interesting.

“Were all the people of your world so self-analytical?” she asked from within a corner of my own being.

“I don’t think so really.”

“No?”

“They seemed to be so afraid of what they might find that I think many of them never even tried. And others seemed so distracted by the trivial world they built for themselves that they never thought to look in the first place.”

“Tell me more about your world.”

“But won’t that distract from your calculations?

“Quite the contrary. It will give you something to concentrate on. I’m within the wavelengths of your mind now, so the more focused you are, the more focused I am.”

And so I told her of Earth, and then of my travels throughout the galaxy and then the universe. Some stories I know she had heard before, but she did not complain. She simply intoned the cadence of her calculations as regular and alive as a heartbeat.

For my part, I continued my fruitless quest to find anything even remotely alive. We were strangely content then, hurtling through absolute nothing with the clockwork of mathematics ticking away as I recited the majesty of bygone eras.

I don’t know how long we lived like that or how far we traveled together before it happened. As always happened, our comfortable routine was disrupted.