100 billion years later
“Are preparations for the Induced Star Initiative ready?”
“Yes sir. But we have a problem… The life scanner indicates there is a lifeform in the old solar system. But it’s too small… it can’t be a planet with life. Should we proceed?”
“No. Send a scout out to investigate. We don’t want to crunch the whole system together only to find out we destroyed one the last lifeforms in the universe.”
“Yes sir. Sending scout…”
The two men looked out the window of their ship, waiting for the results to be negative, waiting so they could start creating a new star. Entropy would not beat them, if they conquered the galaxy they could conquer the so called laws of physics. They were all a myth after all, nothing was law.
“Sir, the scout indicates a small container circling the deceased star. There seems to be a lifeform inside. How do we proceed? Should we bring it in for examination?”
“No. Abort mission. We’re moving to the next deceased star. Leave that thing where it is. We’ll be back…”
1 trillion years later
His heart boomed in a slow manner. It had forgotten how to be alive. His eyes sagged and his vision was blurry. He tried to move his feet, or his hands, or his fingers, but the chemical and electrical signals from his brain were unable to reach their destination, so he waited. He had waited more lifetimes than ever existed, why not wait a little more?
Tim stood in the center of the shiny metal room floating somewhere in the proximity of the location where Earth had thrived in another time. He knew, of course, that space-time expansion made those coordinates inaccurate, irrelevant almost as the traditional passage of time had deformed space enough to make it a different place, an alien place.
His head throbbed with each beat of his heart. His eyes were beginning to fail, or was it the cryo-fluid wearing off? He felt tired. More so than he had ever been. Who wouldn’t be at the ripe old age of over one hundred billion years? A cold current of wind passed around him and his body screamed at him to sit down, to relax, maybe take a nap, maybe fall into unconsciousness and die. But he was stronger than that. He hadn’t reached this time just to nod off and take a comfortable never ending nap.
He took one cautious step forward, like a drowsy chameleon, making sure that his foot was placed in the right direction and with the correct amount of force. His foot came down on the cold metal floor and the room creaked with his sudden movement. Sudden for the room at least, which had felt no action within it for a trillion years. Tim’s pain fused with that of the room and his mind raced through the countless opportunities he had had the chance to turn back, to live a normal life, to stay behind and enjoy the little things. The little things. He didn’t care for them. He had to see what was out there, he needed to see if he had awoken in a new universe, if stars shined again, if planets again spun around their own axis, if entropy had somehow been reversed, he needed to know if he was right, if the shining city waited for him out there.
He took another step towards the peephole in the metal door a few meters in front of him and he wondered if he had made the right decisions. He remembered his days below the sun, the beautiful days on Earth when he could nap in his garden, when his dog Mat would sleep beside him, when the blue color of the sky could be taken for granted.
He placed his weak hands on the door and looked outside through small window on it. The first thought in his mind was that it had somehow been blocked. Obscured by the passage of time. He tried cleaning it with his sleeve and his breath, but before he was done reality hit him with in the face. The window was not obscured… he was looking at the dead remnants of the universe, black, empty, dead space. No stars were left alive, no planets moved in any orbits, nothing. Entropy had been fulfilled, it had all been a dream… His shining city was a delusion of his own mind, and he had just wasted a trillion years of sleeping, waiting for something that didn’t exist. He felt numbness begin to crawl over his body, and his thoughts began to fade away. He thought of his brother… of his last words… a single tear rolled down his cheek, cooling his skin on the way down. Entropy again working, ensuring he too would become one with the darkness.
There was nothing left to live for, no one out there to save him or comfort him, so he didn’t resist.
“Goodbye…”, he said, and opened the door to the ever expanding darkness outside, and as he did it engulfed him and the vault. He felt his body go cold and saw the lights in his bed go out.
“I’m sorry”, that was the last thought to ever exist, and with that entropy increased to the maximum. His frozen body floated in an undescript location in the space that used to thrive with life, with a blue world, with a yellow star, with the longest lasting people of the galaxy.