"The answers to all lies out there, with the stars."
A nondescript box spins upon the edge of a newly expanding universe. The box sits and waits, carrying a message that may or may not be found during this cycle. The box itself spins patiently within a uni‑synchronous orbit. So much change has gone on underneath the box that change itself has become repetitious. Flowing with each cycle the box dances above all, never to be caught by each universe's grasping fingers.
Far below, matter has begun to expand from the tight confines of the last singularity. The neutrino shock waves have long since passed the box, and the leading edge of the new universe will spend half of this universe's life trying surpass even a quarter of the distance to the box. The light is so weak around the box that the new universe even fails to see its own reflection off of the box's metallic sides. Even so, the box's solar batteries continue to strain to capture any of the passing light. But each revolution of the box betrays the batteries. The weak light is captured as the new universe dawns for the paneled collectors and as the universe sets, the light is cut off. By the time the universe rises again all the captured energy has dissipated. The batteries cyclic fight to replenish themselves has become as familiar as the forming of each universe. Yet, even though the batteries are doomed by distance to fail, they keep trying. Trying as they have for the last twelve cycles.
The box carries a message on the golden disks stored within itself. The message is audio and therefore useless in a void‑ filled space. Yet even so, long before the beginning of this cycle, the recorder played ‑‑ heroically trying to fill the emptiness around it with its message. An informative voice playing upon deaf ears. Its creator would find this ironic because he, too, was such a voice.
* * * * *
Within a small spaceship a man shakes. He is kneeling on the floor and hunched over one of the fold‑down wall seats crying for the hundredth time. In his hand he holds a microphone. On a small box next to him, a green light flashes its readiness.
The man hitches with breath and straightens. His back cracks and pops with the effort, betraying the time with which he has sat there. No stars, just darkness, greet his reddened eyes as he gazes longingly through a portal above the seat. Tears well at the sight and he forces his eyes down to the floor of the ship. A yellowed plasti‑metal floor stretches lifeless and cold beneath him, the engines hidden below having long since cooled. He stares across the seamless construction looking for a fault even as he tries to find fault in his own logic. Neither endeavors are successful.
The mike drops to the floor as his hands rub violently at face and eyes, spreading redness to his cheeks and brow. The interior swims before him as bursts of light and dark battle at the edge of his sight. Gradually his vision clears and as the box beside him comes into focus he finds himself staring at the small gold disk within the recorder. The disk sits, waiting for him. A flashing green light becomes increasingly reflected in his slowly glassing eyes.
He sharply shakes his head, snapping himself out of the light's hypnotic trap. Violently the man depresses a button. The recorder spins the disk for a time, clicks and then begins to play:
"As I think back, I now see that there was no hope for the others. As mortality is hard enough to face about oneself, the mortality of a universe is a concept for very few. And I have found, through forced study, that reactions vary when such a reality is forced upon someone. Most bury their heads as they proclaim their readiness for the end. The rest follow the others following them‑ over the cliff. But I, I ran. One against a seemingly endless tide of lemmings. Bent on taking me with them as they denied the facts. I fought this instinct to deny. I found that survival instinct buried deep within me an exploited it. Survival, ugly and in the raw. And to fight this end of the universe I had to run. You the listener may ask, 'How does one out run the end?'
"He does what I have done and finds the end...then moves past it!!"
The man just sits and listens to his voice. Light glistens off his face as the occasional tear trickles down his face.
"I sit now, delicately balanced on the edge of a razor. My own personal event horizon. Even as space ‑ the whole universe as I know it ‑ collapses and condenses underneath me, I float free above and beyond harm. However, this distance at which I sit is a double edged sword. If I sit too close at the final end I am sucked without mercy into the point of compression, joined with all the universal matter into a singularity. But if I orbit too far, I will be blown away by the ensuing macro‑explosion too far to ever return and I will end up being expelled forever."
The recorded voice is silent for a moment and then continues with a bit of bravado.
"All of this comes about due to my own personal discoveries. One which shows that there is a 'universal' cycle. And, therefore, time and the universe are re‑created with perpetuity. Around me, right now, the universe collapses as it rapidly consumes itself to birth another. This discovery and its truth are mine. And so is the point at which I safely sit, dancing upon the shrinking grave of the others. The fools who laughed as they walked closer to the edge. They refused to leave the precipice and denied the danger even as they fell over. I should glory in their destruction; however, it is a tarnished victory...."
The recorded voice breaks off. For a time the only sound is the rattled intake of air which is hauntingly echoed by the man as he listens. The ensuing stillness is broken with a question from the recorder.
"Can I live in Eden alone?"
"The question haunts me. Burns me."
The man cocks his head at the recorded question and briefly touches another button on the box. Words blip by and then slow.
"‑longlife.Deathofthebodywasconquered long ago by my peers. But death of the soul leaves one a prison. A hollow shell with life but not meaning. It is not a good existence. Can I endure?
"At times the power to survive glows brightly within me. 'You have survived the end or a universe, 'it says,' does that not ready you for what is at hand?' Other times it flickers faintly, cursing the darkness that surrounds me and the loneliness that pervades me. The voice echoes within me, 'How can you live without ‑ '"
The man snatches the last word from the recorder with a touch of a button. A yellow light now flashes patiently at him. Looking through the portal, the man watches as the gravity‑spin of the ship brings a single point of light into view. With a pained expression, he follows the light as it rises from the top of the portal and sets, out of sight, at the bottom.
Over time the man's brow begins to furrow with frustrated thought. As his eyes search frantically for the answer to appear outside the portal, the man's arms begin to encompass the seat next to him. The man's grip on the seat begins to turn his knuckles white. The muscles on his back twitch and knot in anger. With a yell, he frantically tries to rip the seat of the chair from the wall. Finding the seat unyielding to his frustration, he repeatedly slams the seat to its upright position. The barrage of sounds is quickly eaten by the emptiness of the ship.
The slamming continues, slows, then stops.
Looking for another outlet, the man snatches the recorder off the floor and moves to smash it against the wall next to him. The recorder's yellow light flashes patiently in his face.
Reason fades rapidly back into the man's tear stained face and he sets the recorder gingerly down in front of him.
Buttons are pushed, the recorder clicks several times before shutting off the yellow light and plays again.
"not really known. I have fought the weakness, the urge to dive into oblivion, successfully so far. But can I win a war where just one battle lost becomes the ultimate defeat?
"I will survive, though, for the window for my defeat grows shorter even as I speak. Looking out my portals I can see the old kingdom drawing to a quick and final close. The light of the singularity below me grows as the mass increases and the total size shrinks. Soon a new creation will be at hand and I can be a god of the new world."
The voice pauses again. When it continues, the voice is introspective‑ in awe of its own words.
"A god......a driving force, a need, objective or goal for this new forming universe. I will become a god, for I will have cheated death from its ultimate climax. Is that not what entails a god? To escape death, where all else fails to return?"
The man grunts in dissatisfaction at his own recorded logic but allows the voice to continue. Tears begin to well anew inside his puffy eyes.
"I will be able to watch the new order rise under my tutelage. Molded by my ideas and experience, I will be able to by‑pass the mistakes of evolution and skim the cream. By the end of the next cycle I will not be alone but a family. As gods we will watch a hundred universes fall below us. And without waiting, we can populate each new universe. The cycle will be our day, with the explosion our sunrise and the implosion our sunset.
"Gods of‑"
The man stops the recorder and slams his fist into the folded seat of the chair. Tears are streaming down his cheeks as his recorded voice echoes loudly within his head,
Gods.....my friend, Gods...
While grabbing for the mike beside him, the stabs at the record button several times before he succeeds. The words burn hot in his throat.
"The contraction has stopped."
The man's head hangs in defeat of reality. Sobs shake his body. The recorded voice echoes seductively around the ship.
Gods.....
The echo strokes him gently. The man physically shakes himself to to rid his mind of the word and nearly yells into the microphone to banish all his doubt.
"No!! There can be no gods!" Ashamed, he softens and speaks quietly. "I ‑ I am alone and will forever be alone, until I meet my fate. There is no Eden for me and I, like old Moses, see the promised land but will never live within its confines. I too must die."
The man swallows hard, the salty breath tastes sour in his throat, and continues.
"I asked myself, "How so? How can I be the corner stone for the new building. There is no escape for me. Destiny is just that, a predetermined future event. I have not escape anything except reality. Everything appears to await my return. My 'escape' has not cheated death, but cheated the lives of those to come."
Still speaking he gazes at the emptiness outside his portal.
"Beneath me all has frozen. There has been no explosion, no rebirth. There is still life within this universe ‑myself‑ and as I live so too will this world.
"Questions have sickened my mind with their constant chatter since this discovery: Can I give up this life for others, others that I will never know? And if I leave this recorder will I be enough to usher in the new age? Why does the contraction not continue? I am an insignificant fraction, why is my mass important to the total sum? What can I give? What makes me the critical mass?!"
The man pauses again and lays the mike in his lap. He cleans his streaked face with part of his shirt and sighs deeply, his lungs rattle softly. Picking up the mike he continues.
"Instead of a journal of the future, this recording has become the diary of a lost soul...."
soul‑l‑l‑l...
The word seems to reverberate throughout the ship. The man's skin tickles at its touch and the light far below the ship flickers as if in response.
"Soul....Soul? Is that what it wants? Needs?" The man's eyes brighten with the knowledge. "My mass is not the energy, but my essence is. The intangible therefore calculable! There is a measure for life. But must it come with only one left to live?" The man's face drops with the realization. "What irony that I can not live to finish such calculations. However, I myself have become a calculation, a measure. For I must measure my life against the life to be. Am I selfish enough to resist the calling? Can I obstruct the birth right of the new universe?" The man sakes his head slowly. "What are these answers except a sad no.
"I have deluded myself into thinking of actual immortality and that selfishness still calls to me."
The man again pauses to wipe at his face. Head bowed he continues.
"In my old life I was in the business to create, find and discover. I have done that better than any before me. For I sit here able to create a new universe. I am able to start a anew the cycle that brought me into existence. But only by embracing death can I be the ultimate creator."
His body straightens at the thought. The man cocks his head and speaks the next words carefully.
"I can be the god I wished to be earlier. But, alas, this god must sacrifice himself, anonymously, for the newcomers. Only with my death can new life rise.
"Now new questions float into my mind even as the old ones dissipate. Do gods wish to be remembered as I do? I want and need to be remembered, thanked and maybe even praised." The man laughs sarcastically to himself. "But that is only more selfish pride and pride was the fall of Moses. I will, though, leave this recorder for it is truly not important to the cycle. This recorder will live out here on the Universe's Lagrange Point floating on the edge of reality until discovery.
"These messages I have recorded are no longer a journal for myself, but are now a message for you the discoverer. And I pray, yes I pray, that you will not find this message fatalistic. But you, as I and all else, must end. There can be no rebirth with out death. And I must, in good conscience, complete my partof the circle."
The man stops the machine. Gathering the pile of labeled disks next to him, he places them in an orderly stack within a compartment of the recorder. Next, he detaches the microphone's cord and wraps the mike with it. Solemnly he places the wrapping into its own compartment and double checks the box to see if all is secure.
Slowly he rises to his feet, joints snapping their reluc tance. The man walks over to a small multicolored console and presses several larger buttons. A door slides open to his right with a small swoosh and he enters the cylindrical alcove. Reverently he places the recorder on the floor and retreats.
Pressing more buttons the door returns and locks. The light within the ship flickers to red and pulses with life. The man pauses, distress rises in his face. Angrily slams he fist into the display panel. A muffled explosion issues from behind the door and the man watches the recorder spin out into dead space.
Even after the recorder is gone from his sight the man stands and gazes out of the portal. Soon the solitary light of the dying universe moves into his line of view and as if to greet him, flickers. A tear slowly wells within the man's eyes and spills over to trace a new path down his cheek.
Finally, the man disengages from the window and strides pur posely the length of his ship. Sliding defiantly in to the pilot's seat he stabs at the controls. Soon the ship is streaking towards the now brightly beckoning light.
* * * * *
The air rips away from the recorder as the vacuum of space pulls mightily at the contents of the airlock. The trip outside is short and violent as the recorder is ripped from the floor of the airlock. On the way out the recorder strikes the side of a wall. Unknown to its creator, the recorder begins to spill its information out of the small speaker on its side. But with noth ing to transmit upon, the speaker cone just vibrates silently.
The recorder spins slowly away from the space ship and into the vast emptiness the shrinking space still has to offer. Behind the recorder, the engines of the space ship flare brightly, lighting up the immediate area and bouncing the digital readouts of the recorder's solar collectors beyond overcharge as the re corder spins to face the ship. Slowly, the bow and midships of the space vessel begin to stretch as if the aft of the ship was being held in place. The elongation takes only seconds. Then, like a released rubber band, the ship snaps out of sight. A small implosion seals the exit hole to hyperspace and the recorder spins alone.
Perturbations of the sacrifice ripple underneath the re corder. The matter of the dying universe continues to grow and warp the space around it with its gravitational pull. With shape of space constantly changing, no constants exist for the counting of time except the mechanical consistency of the revolutions of the moving disk within the recorder. But over long enough time periods, every constant is only temporary and the disk's revolutions too begin to change, to slow. The stored energy weakens without enough light to replenish the stockpiles and time begins to lengthen as each revolution takes longer.
Fittingly, as the recorder dies so too does the present world around it. Pulling at the recorder the light shrinks away and finally collapses upon itself. The singularity proves again to be unstable and an explosion rips at the heavy fabric of space. Through this hole neutrinos flood the empty space around the nova starting the borders of universe back towards their last zenith. Upon this wave the recorder dances and spins until the light and gravity beckon again.
In a scene destined to be repeated and uncounted, the cycle begins anew.
