Beyond the End

A short story from the future -- the EXTREME future...

   I dangle my feet over the cliff’s edge. The drop is incredible. Peering into the darkness below me, I can just barely make out the reddish ground.
   I look up into the sky. There are no clouds. There has been no water here for years. All that there is now is the terrible red glow. It is barely enough to light up the dreary landscape, but soon, there will be even less. The huge red orb of this sun is nearing its death.
   I take out my watch. By my calculations, there are less than five minutes left before the last star of the Universe goes nova. It will, of course, take 10 more seconds for the light of the explosion to reach me and then it will be time to leave. I have readied the ship for its final launch. My ship is a little one; the final model released by G&G: Frontier Outfitters. It’s truly incredible, needing only one nuclear engine coupled with two antimatter drives. I still remember the advertisement: Seats five, handles like a breeze, and holds ten cubic meters of cargo. It moves at god knows how many times the speed of light. We ran water drops on it several million years ago. Made billions off of it too, when water was going for 700 dollars per cubic centimeter.
   Then we were raided and Paul was killed and I lost a leg and that was the end of that. We weren’t the last, but we were close to it. Nobody wanted to risk it anymore. It wasn’t worth it. I’d been keeping a journal for three subjective years by then, but it was now that we decided to record everything. We renamed the ship to The Chronicler, equipped some improved observational tech and were off.
   It was a crazy idea, but I think we pulled it off. We downloaded and updated the databases of all three major space civilizations that were still around and sped around galaxies noting the deaths of stars and planets, and other major events. The ship used no fuel once it had accelerated and, since it needed very little to do that, we refueled only every thousand years or so. It wasn’t bad really, until David lost it and pulled a knife and stabbed Marilyn fifteen times. Then he broke down and sat in the ship screaming his head off. Me and Nick were out in the port, trying to barter a water tank down from 1000000. Luckily there was a pilot who liked to walk back to his ship and he heard him.
   They saved Mary, and rewired half of David’s brain and then they were fine. A crew member was too precious to lose so we kept them both on. David became quiet and sad, and Mary was reduced to frequent hysterics and fits, but we survived.
   They say the Universe is infinite, but the living space in it sure isn’t. They said you couldn’t see it all, but I’m pretty sure we did. We had been out for a year of subjective time in “blank space” as we called it -- for that’s what it was. No galaxies, no stars, no planets, not even dust. Nick wanted to push the ship to maximum velocity and go like this until we died or “pierced the wall of infinity.” We might have done it too, but Mary got scared and screamed and raged and we turned back. I don’t know if I could have handled it myself now that I think about it.
   I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I think we ended up being the last alive. We had lucked out. We had a ship, money, we had survived the pirates, and we spent all our time nowhere, buying ourselves more of it with our ship’s faster than light drive. We just kept traveling through space, recording the death of the Universe.
   I glance at my watch once more. One minute remaining. I snap a few photos and upload them immediately to my ship’s database. I have set it to launch automatically even if I’m not on it.
What use is there in this?, said Nick. He was the first to leave, snagging an abandoned ship on one of the desolate planets that we landed on. I think he really wanted to continue the journey into nowhere. I told him he wouldn’t find anything more, but he refused to listen and stay.
   Mary was the second. She just stopped one day. Wouldn’t move, wouldn’t talk. We couldn’t tell what was wrong with her. She seemed completely fine but had no willpower left. She died a week later. David said it was time to make some upgrades or we’d end up the same way, and there was no way I was disagreeing. We dropped on some derelict space station and found some functioning medbots.
   Time to go. I walk up the short ramp into the inside of my ship, giving one last sweeping look over the terrain.
   I don’t know if I’m still human. I sure have more machinery in me than organic material. I haven’t needed to drink or eat in centuries. David isn’t with me anymore though. The altered circuitry in his brain couldn’t withstand the pressure of the mechanization of his body. His mind was fried.
   The planet is light years behind me now. I look off into the grayness of the warped space around me. So this is the end? Yet infinity still stretches billions of light years ahead of me. I’ve heard the popular saying that the ending of one thing brings about the start of something new. I disagree. It’s just that once you’ve seen what you thought was the end, you see that there is still quite a long way to go beyond it.
   I set the speed to maximum. Ordering the ship to wake me in fifty years of subjective time I switch off my electronic brain.