For the first time in fifty billion years Paul looked at the sky above him and saw only darkness. On the other side of the world he inhabited, the last star of the universe shined. The star beyond which there was nothing else. It was a lost star, one which had been flung out of its galaxy, one which floated in the infinite abyss, accompanied by a sole planet. Together they traveled through the emptiness and together they would join the shadows.

Paul crawled through the black sands of the world. His legs having ceased to work many millions of years before, and now, on the last world of the universe, having no place left to go, he lost himself in thought.

He recalled the colors he had seen. Each planet, each star. They all seemed to shine a little different. He stood on many red worlds, on many brown and yellow ones too. But none were like the rest. Each glowed a different hue, each told a different story, each held a different history. Sometimes, sitting at the shore of an ocean, or at the top of a sand dune, or in the deepest place of the caverns of a world, he would lose sight of his goal. Staring into myriad stars and having gone through myriad too, he could not envision an end. A long time ago, when he had lived but a few thousand years, he had dreaded the thought of thousands more. But on those places, billions of years into his journey, he could barely remember the red planet, or the blue. It's as if he always had existed among galaxies. It's as if he never had been born, as if he never would end. In an infinite state of pursuit. A state that went back across the times, a state that seemed to speak to him from across the future. Everywhere he looked he saw himself. On every shining dot, on every hidden orbit, on every lost world. Before he even thought of going to another place, he was already there, and the place where he had been turned into a half-remembered dream. The ever-changing present, paradoxically stayed the same. Each unique dirt, each unique atmosphere, they blended with the next, and he became a creature swimming in a sea of intergalactic sludge.

Now the sludge was gone. Now he crawled across the dirt into the end of the cup where he had been, looking into the massless void between the multiverse. Having no means of crossing it, he had reached the end.

Paul took the dark slab in his hand, and he remembered her end. He had come this way to understand. He had moved from Mars, and into the last planet hoping that somewhere along the way, at some point, he would understand her end, and as he stared into the infinite he thought about his own.

With his physical self deteriorated, he could not dream of returning to humanity. Sitting at the edge, he saw no hope for a future. Would he crawl across that surface until his eyes turned black? Would he scream on that uninhabitable place until his voice died out? She and Paul had been together for hundreds of years, and they had been enough for her. She had jumped into the atmosphere of the worlds of the solar system, she had climbed the mountains where they met, she had worked, she had loved, cried, laughed, feared and dreamed. She had done it all. Why did he have the urge to continue when he had done the same things? Why had he moved through spacetime? His mind was empty of humanity. He had left a little part of it on every planet that he walked. He had asked the same questions for what seemed like eternity, and every time they went unanswered he lost a little of himself. Now, at the end of all things, he had lost the last part. He had ended. He lay flat on the ground, wide-eyed, on the last dirts of the universe. No photons reached his sensors, no winds caressed his tattered body, no sounds vibrated in him, no thoughts crossed his artificial mind.

"This is me, Paul Meridian, the synthetic. This is the end of my journey. This is the end of time and space."

He spoke the words he needed to, and then he gave his travels up. As a machine with an impossible task, like a light bulb attempting to illuminate the universe, like a blade of grass standing in an endless desert, he ended his hopes. There were no more destinations, and he waited for his energy to run out.

"We missed you Paul." A voice erupted from the heavens, its power cracking the mountains across the valleys Paul chose for his demise.

"We have been looking for you." A blinding light illuminated the universe, and his eyes were burned from such glow. His nose detecting the soot coming from his sockets.

"We are sorry to have taken so long."

Paul listened to the voice. His body shook with the planet where he lay, and for a small instant he felt life back in his useless legs.

"Join us." The sound of a trillion trillion voices exploded from above. "Humanity has come for you, our last remaining member. We are incomplete without you, we feel desolate, alone. You will make us whole, and together we will live forever, gliding across the multiverse, never-ending, always commanding, in a journey to explore realities far beyond our radix."

Somehow humanity survived. Somehow the people became an entity, a collective of minds. Powerful, ethereal, everlasting, and then Paul understood.

"I'm sorry." He said, breaking in his hand the dark slab that contained Loren. "I know the possibilities are endless, but I have lived the ones I cared for." And then Paul took his head into his ancient golden hands, and he pressed with all his might. His mind exploded with his thoughts of the past, filling every empty byte with the face of his love, with the sound of her voice, with the glow of the green eyes he had met long before, in another time, in another place.