Stephen Baxter - Timelike Infinity

Michael was alone, here at the end of time. He could feel it.

Michael gathered a meal together; the mundane chore, performed in a bright island of light around the lifedome’s small galley, was oddly cheering. He carried the food to his couch, lay back with the plate balancing on one hand, and dimmed the dome lights.

God alone knew where he was… if "where" could have a meaning after such a dislocation in spacetime. The stars were distant, dark, red. Could so long have passed? — or, he wondered, could something, some unknown force, have acted to speed the stars’ aging in the aeons beyond the flashbulb slice of time occupied by humans?

There was no large-scale sign of human life, or activity; nor, indeed, of any intelligent life.

Intelligence had had time to work, Michael reflected. After millions of years, with a faster-than-light hyperdrive and singularity technology in the hands of hundreds of species, the universe should have been transformed…

The reconstruction of the universe should have been as obvious as a neon sign a thousand light-years tall.

…But the universe had merely aged.

He knew from the subjective length of his passage through the wormholes that he couldn’t have traveled through more than a few million years — a fraction of the great journey to timelike infinity — and yet already the tide of life had receded. Were any humans left, anywhere?

He smiled wistfully. So much for Shira’s grand dreams of life covering the universe, of manipulating the dynamical evolution of spacetime itself…

There would be no "Ultimate Observer," then. The Project of the Friends of Wigner could not, after all, have succeeded: there would have been nobody to hear the elaborately constructed message. But, Michael thought as he gazed out at the decayed universe, by God it had been a grand conception. To think of finite humans, already long since dust, even daring to challenge these deserts of time -

He finished his food, set the plate carefully on the floor. He drank a glass of clean water, went to the freefall shower, washed in a spray of hot water. He tried to open up his senses, to relish every particle of sensation. There was a last time for everything, for even the most mundane experiences.

He considered finding some music to play, a book to read. Somehow that might have seemed fitting.

The lights failed. Even the comms telltale from the drones winked out.

Well, so much for reading a book.

By the dimmed starlight, half by touch, he made his way back to his couch.

It grew colder; he imagined the heat of the lifedome leaking out into the immense sink of the blackened, ancient sky. What would get him first — the cold, or the failing air?

He wasn’t afraid. Oddly, he felt renewed: young, for the first time in a subjective century, the pressure of time no longer seeming to weigh on him.

Perhaps he was finding that peace of death, the readiness to abandon the cares of a too long life, which his father had discovered before him.

And he found, at last, a gladness that he had lived long enough to see all he had.

He crossed his hands on his chest. He was beginning to shiver, the air sharp in his nostrils. He closed his eyes.

Something like curiosity, a spark in a shard of its awareness, stirred the anti-Xeelee.

Here was an artifact.

How had this cooling wreckage got here, to this place and time?

There was something inside it. A single, dimming candle of consciousness -

The anti-Xeelee reached out.

There was a ship, another ship, hanging over the lifedome.

Michael, dying, stared in wonder.

It was something like a sycamore seed wrought in jet-black. No lights showed in the small, podlike hull. Night-dark wings that must have spanned hundreds of miles loomed over the wreck of the Crab, softly rippling.

The Wigner Friends had told Michael of ships like this. This was a nightfighter, the wings sheet-discontinuities in the fabric of spacetime.

Xeelee.

The cold sank claws into his chest; the muscles of his throat abruptly spasmed, and dark clouds ringed his vision.

Not now, he found himself pleading silently, his failing vision locked onto the Xeelee ship, all his elegiac acceptance gone in a flash. Just a little longer. I have to know what this means. Please -

The anti-Xeelee plucked the guttering candle flame from its wick.

The last heat fled from the wrecked craft; the air in the translucent dome began to frost over the comms panels, the couches, the galley, the abandoned body.

The anti-Xeelee cupped the flame, almost amused by its tiny fear, its wonder, its helpless longing to survive.

The anti-Xeelee spun the flame out into a web of quantum functions, acausal and nonlocal.

Michael was — discorporeal; it was as if the jewel of consciousness that had lain behind his eyes had been plucked out of his body and flung into space.

He did not even have heartbeats to count.

But there was something here with him, he sensed: some — entity. It was like a great ceiling under which he hovered and buzzed, insectlike. He sensed a vast, satisfied weariness in its mood, the contentment of the traveler at the end of a long and difficult road. For a long time he stayed within the glow of its protection.

Then it began to dissolve.

Michael wanted to cry out, like a child after its huge parent. He was buffeted, battered. It was as if a glacier of memories and emotions was calving into a hundred icebergs about him; and now those icebergs in turn burst into shards that melted into the surface of a waiting sea…

And he was left alone.

It was impossible to measure time, other than by the slow evolution of his own emotions.

He endured despair. Why had he been brought to this point in spacetime, preserved in such a fashion, and then so casually abandoned?

The despair turned to anger, and lasted a long time.

But the anger faded.

He became curious.

He began to experiment with his awareness.

Physically he seemed to be composed of a tight knot of quantum wave functions; now, cautiously, he began to unravel that knot, to allow the focus of his consciousness to slide over spacetime. Soon it was as if he were flying over the arch of the cosmos, unbound by limits of space or time.

Throughout the Galaxy he found the works of man. He lingered over places and artifacts abandoned by history, dwelling as long over a drifting child’s toy as over some huge space-going fortress.

Everywhere he found relics of war. Ruined stars and worlds, squandered energy.

He found no people — no sentience — anywhere.

At first Michael labeled the places he visited, the relics he found, in human terms; but as time passed and his confidence grew he removed this barrier of words. He allowed his consciousness to soften further, to dilute the narrow human perception to which he had clung.

All about him were quantum wave functions.

They spread from stars and planets, sheets of probability that linked matter and time. They were like spiderwebs scattered over the aging galaxies; they mingled, reinforced, and canceled each other, all bound by the implacable logic of the governing wave equations.

The functions filled spacetime and they pierced his soul. Exhilarated, he rode their gaudy brilliance through the hearts of aging stars.

He relaxed his sense of scale, so that there seemed no real difference between the width of an electron and the broad sink of a star’s gravity well. His sense of time telescoped, so that he could watch the insectlike, fluttering decay of free neutrons — or step back and watch the grand, slow decomposition of protons themselves…