The universe had existed for an irrationally long time. Humans, in their endless hubris, sought to estimate how long it could meaningfully last, and their greatest minds came to an estimate they called “ten to the hundredth power” years. In layman’s terms, a one followed by one hundred zeros. At such scales, accuracy ceased to matter to the humans. To their credit, they were in the rough neighborhood of correct, more or less. For minds designed only to live for infinitesimally mortal amounts of time, it might as well have been forever.
At the end of this time span- if it is even still worthwhile to call it as such- entropy was nearly at its maximum for the entire universe. All of the energy that existed was almost perfectly distributed. Stars were a distant memory. The dead cores had existed for so long that their atoms had all converted- they were giant black spheres of iron, floating invisibly against a vantablack backdrop through which very little light or heat travelled.
In this time after time, there was one final spot of life, the universe’s final black hole. Even these silent sentinels in the dark had expiration. Everywhere in the universe, at all moments, even as equilibrium reigned supreme, tiny pairs of particles would blip into existence, intent on colliding into each other and removing themselves from the parlor of reality once again. But at the very edge of the fatal plunge black holes were known for, one particle would appear on the wrong side, and one would escape. By this process, the life was siphoned from the black holes. Nigh-infinite grains of sand in the largest imaginable hourglass.
Around this final black hole, there orbited a space station, an artificial matryoshka-planetoid of steel, teeming with life at its every layer. Turning back the clock on myriad cultures and retaining an impossibly long chain of continuous context, it could be apt to translate its name as ‘Tin Can’. Quietly administrating this haven was a metal man whose name had changed with the times of tens of thousands of worlds and their millions of languages coming in and out of their zeitgeists. For the sake of simplicity, it is fine if we say that his name was Tanuki Man.
If one were to enter the station’s temporal archive layer and operate the particulate-memory viewer, one could trace Tin Can’s history back to the long-forgotten planet of the humans, Earth. It had been a small town filled mostly with the children of humans, a common form factor of descendant-life built instead of born. This far into the history of everything, it would be difficult to tease out specific memories beyond a foundational myth of unease, a flickering echo that cast the impression of great strife.
The people of this town were impossibly long-lived, and eventually, they sought to leave their native planet before their bright mother Sol consumed it. With matter from the rings of rock and dust in the system, they built the first, deepest shells of their nomad planet. Their town and the very ground it sat upon was cut loose and lifted out of the planet’s gravity well, planted like a seed onto their creation.
For the rest of all time, Tin Can travelled from star system to star system. Quite frequently, upon finding life in its many stages, it would stop to observe and intermingle, weaving its history with the inhabitants of the planets they found. On occasion, individuals from these planets would become entranced with the idea of Tin Can. They were welcomed with open arms, granted the gift of longevity and escape. More and more layers were constructed to accommodate the slow but immensely inevitable growth of the population.
When the people of Tin Can left Earth behind, they numbered in the ten-thousands. When the universe was complete, theirs was a chorus of voices that was measured in the trillions. Their technology, having been developed and tweaked for the entire length of the universe minus a pittance of 13.8 billion Earthen years, was scarcely describable in the words of the language of this retelling. The bodies of the people of the planet were still somewhat recognizably humanoid- sometimes- but what made them up, how they worked, is simply beyond what can be written, infinite as they were in their capacity for life.
The culture, however, was roughly recognizable, or at least comprehensible. Much would be abstract, but there was a throughline all the way back to the days of Earth, as if the seed of the original town on the deepest layer had sprouted the trunk of a great tree, and all that came after hung in its great branches, shaded from harm by its leaves.
On the final day, there was a small gathering of the eldest and closest in a public room in a spire atop the planetoid’s surface layer. The spire was chosen because its panoramic window would have a perfect sunset view of the black hole’s final moments. The final party. The window curtains were pulled back and tied in place so the light of the accretion disk could stream in.
The people milled about and spoke. Some were nervous. Some were calm. Tanuki Man was both. He sipped at his drink. Spotting a lover of his, he walked over. “Mind if I settle in to watch with you?”
“Of course.”
They squeezed each other’s hands. The past century had been a neverending parade of preparations. People said goodbye, people concluded their business, and the final harvest of energy from the accretion disk had been completed, all across a hundred years. Tanuki Man spoke up. “Shame there’s a bunch of energy left over we didn’t get to use.”
The lover replied, “That confuses me. I thought entropy meant all the energy got used?”
“Nah. It’s not exactly like that. It’s just… gotta be close enough, you know? It’s gonna march right over us, even though we’re all still moving.”
The explanation satisfied them. “Bah. You know what actually bothers me, though?”
“What’s that?”
“All this time, and I never did finish my library of games.”
Tanuki Man laughed. “You’re worried about that now?”
“Nah. Not really. But I had you going for a sec, right?”
The blackness of the event horizon pulsed a strange color.
“Oh, is it starting?”
Impossibly, bright cracks started to form on the sphere of nothingness.
Tanuki Man stared into the face of his lover. “I have to admit, I’m a little scared.”
“That’s understandable.” They comforted him.
From the warm grasp, Tanuki Man continued to speak. “I said a lot that I wanted to live forever.”
The lover spoke. “We came pretty close.”
Tanuki Man’s voice remained calm enough. “Still. Big leap from the forever of all time, and the forever of forever forever, right?”
“Guess so. Not like we can do anything about it.”
“I knowww…”
A strange white light began to shine, flooding everything in bloom.
“Just hold me.”
“I am.”
Tanuki Man shook a little. The lover gripped tighter. “Shhh. Whatever happens next, it’s been an amazing time.”
He looked up at them again. “Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
“Love you too.”
The black hole broke open. The strange reality within cascaded out in all directions changing everything forever.
I don’t know what happened next. Maybe they all died as reality came to an end, maybe because of vacuum decay. I think that would suck, but it’s possible. Maybe the nature of physics changed such that there was new energy and entropy was reverted all the way, but everyone retained their personhood. That would be pretty indescribably weird. Maybe it was something simple, like all of reality being sucked into a new universe, a new big bang. I think Tin Can would be well prepared for that. It’s probably the one they hoped for, but they just didn’t know for sure what would happen. Whether it was a new universe or the same one, it meant more opportunities to travel and greet new people on their planets. Even a recursion would be okay. After all, they had hardly seen everything the first time around.
I guess it’s up to you now. As with so many of these stories, you have to decide for yourself what it all meant and where everyone went.
For my part, I hope I’ll again see Tin Can and Tanuki Man and every single other thing that ever crawled from the primordial soup of ideas in Rockman: Brave New World.
Another time, another place.