“What does it matter?” he said harshly. “You have existed for all but the briefest moments of the universe’s long history — ”
“Has there been another like me?”
He hesitated. “No,” he said. “No other like you. There hasn’t been long enough.”
“Then I am alone.”
“Anlic, all your questions will be over, answered or not, if you let yourself die here. Come now…”
She knew he was right.
She fled with him. The great black hole City disappeared behind her, its feeble glow attenuated by her gathering velocity.
She yielded to Geador’s will. She had no choice. Her questions were immediately lost in the clamor of community.
She would wake only once more.
Start with a second.
Zoom out. Factor it up to get the life of the Earth, with that second a glowing moment embedded within. Zoom out again, to get a new period, so long Earth’s lifetime is reduced to the span of that second. Then nest it. Do it again. And again and again and again…
Anlic, for the last time, came to self-awareness.
It was inevitable that, given enough time, she would be budded by chance occurrence. And so it happened.
She clung to herself and looked around.
It was dark here. Vast, wispy entities cruised across spacetime’s swelling breast.
There were no dead stars, no rogue planets. The last solid matter had long evaporated: burned up by proton decay, a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at lightspeed.
For ages the black hole engineers had struggled to maintain their Cities, to gather more material to replace what decayed away. It was magnificent, futile.
The last structures failed, the last black holes allowed to evaporate.
The Conflux of minds had dispersed, flowing out over the expanding universe like water running into sand.
Even now, of course, there was something rather than nothing. Around her was an unimaginably thin plasma: free electrons and positrons decayed from the last of the Big Bang’s hydrogen, orbiting in giant, slow circles. This cold soup was the last refuge of humanity.
The others drifted past her like clouds, immense, slow, coded in wispy light-year-wide atoms. And even now, the others clung to the solace of community.
But that was not for Anlic.
She pondered for a long time, determined not to slide back into the eternal dream.
At length she understood how she had come to be.
And she knew what she must do.
She sought out Mine One, the wreckage of man’s original galaxy. The search took more empty ages.
With caution, she approached what remained.
There was no shape here. No form, no color, no time, no order. And yet there was motion: a slow, insidious, endless writhing, punctuated by bubbles that rose and burst, spitting out fragments of mass-energy.
This was the singularity that had once lurked within the great black hole’s event horizon. Now it was naked, a glaring knot of quantum foam, a place where the unification of spacetime had been ripped apart to become a seething probabilistic froth.
Once this object had oscillated violently, and savage tides, chaotic and unpredictable, had torn at any traveler unwary enough to come close. But the singularity’s energy had been dissipated by each such encounter.
Even singularities aged.
Still, the frustrated energy contained there seethed, quantum-mechanically, randomly. And sometimes, in those belched fragments, put there purely by chance, there were hints of order.
Structure. Complexity.
She settled herself around the singularity’s cold glow.
Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took her longer to complete a single thought than it had once taken species to rise and fall on Earth.
It didn’t matter. She had plenty of time.
She remembered her last conversation with Geador. Has there been another like me?… No. No other like you. There hasn’t been long enough.
Now Anlic had all the time there was. The universe was exhausted of everything but time.
The longer she waited, the more complexity emerged from the singularity. Purely by chance. Much of it dissipated, purposeless.
But some of the mass-energy fragments had sufficient complexity to be able to gather and store information about the thinning universe. Enough to grow.
That, of course, was not enough. She continued to wait.
At last — by chance — the quantum tangle emitted a knot of structure sufficiently complex to reflect, not just the universe outside, but its own inner state.
Anlic moved closer, coldly excited.
It was a spark of consciousness: not descended from the grunting, breeding humans of the Afterglow, but born from the random quantum flexing of a singularity.
Just as she had been.
Anlic waited, nurturing, refining the rootless being’s order and cohesion. And it gathered more data, developed sophistication.
At last it — she — could frame questions.
“…Who am I? Who are you? Why are there two and not one?”
Anlic said, “I have much to tell you.” And she gathered the spark in her attenuated soul.
Together, mother and daughter drifted away, and the river of time ran slowly into an unmarked sea.