Chapter 37
I woke on a beach.
I woke to the sound of surf and crashing waves, to the sun on my face and warm, soft sand against my bare back and legs.
I opened my eyes.
A sky of perfect blue arced over my head. An immense dome. The sun, or at least a sun, shone from midway up in the sky. Palm trees rustled in the breeze.
I blinked and moved my eyes. I was warm and dry and comfortable. I sat up and took in my surroundings.
White sand stretched around me. Blue ocean waves crept in and curled over before crashing in white, foamy broth.
The water extended like fingers across the wet sand before pulling back in time for the next wave to tumble in.
A line of palm trees stood behind me, their broad leaves shifting back and forth in the breeze, sending shadows skittering over the miniature dunes and cliffs in the sand.
The beach arced away from me, forming a crescent-shaped cove.
I stood, my legs tingling as if they had been asleep for a while.
My toes sank into the soft sand. I felt the warm, gritty particles against my skin—there was no hint of the suit, no barrier between my skin and the sand.
The water was crystal clear. Silver flashes of fish darted in the calmer water beyond the crashing waves.
I wore swimming trunks. I remembered them.
I’d worn them when I’d been a kid, the first time I went to the beach.
They were adult size now. And I recognized the beach.
This was where Amy and I had our honeymoon, three trillion years ago.
The cabin sat in the distance, along the forest edge where the sand ended.
“Lyle?”
There was no response. No voice in my ear.
A twinge at my back made me turn. A figure approached. A woman in a white shift that fluttered in the wind. Long, dark hair swayed around an oval face. She stopped a few yards from me.
It was her, from the wall. The woman I’d drawn on the cave. Or tried to draw. The face of my past. The fading memory of people I’d known, now brought to life.
The woman smiled. “Hello, Scott,” she said. Her voice was my mother’s, or, rather, how I remembered my mother’s voice from when I was a child. Smooth and calm and comforting. “Welcome to the end.”
I looked around the beach, at the curve of the distant horizon above the white-capped waves. “Am I dead?”
“Not yet.”
“Are you God?”
“Not as you understand the term. I am not the Alpha. I am, however, the Omega.”
I breathed. In and out. It felt real. The sand beneath my toes felt warm and soft. “Are you the one responsible for…?” I trailed off and shook my head. “For pulling me forward through time?”
“Yes.”
I shut my eyes, wobbling in the sand. I felt her touch—warm and firm—as she grasped my shoulder.
“Easy, my friend,” she said. “You’ve come a very long way.”
I opened my eyes. She stood close. Her eyes were brown, and hazel, and blue and green—every color. They sparkled in the sunlight reflected off the waves. “What are you?”
“I am the final life of this universe. I am, in a sense, the sentience of the universe itself.”
“I don’t—”
“Let us walk along this beach, and I will tell you my story, which is, in part, your own.” She guided me forward, practically carrying me for the first few steps.
My legs found themselves, and I was able to walk on my own.
She let go of my arm but stayed close on my right.
The ocean was a broad crescent to my left, the waves lapping at our toes.
“Why did you do this to me?” I asked. I could barely get the sentence out.
“Because I had to. On you, and those like you, everything hinges.”
I started to open my mouth, but she swept one arm out.
“Do you like this?” she asked.
“I—it’s beautiful.”
“It is a composite of your mental version of a perfect place, a place of relaxation, of joy. A guess, if you will, of your concept of what Heaven might look like. I chose it to put you at ease, as I did with this form.” She gestured to herself.
“If you would be more comfortable in another setting, or speaking to a different form, please let me know.”
“Where are we, really?”
“If you mean your corporeal form, you are in stasis within one of the few remaining mass- and energy-rich locations in our universe. We talk now in a constructed reality, built for you so you can understand and to do what you must do.”
“Where’s Lyle?”
“Your constructed sentient companion is in its own version of a perfect reality, albeit one that is markedly different from your own. It is, or rather was, having a similar conversation with me about its own role to play in what is about to occur. It has already decided.”
“He’s okay? He’s safe?”
“He is safe.”
I stopped. My hands shook. I balled them into fists and felt my arms shake, the muscles trembling. I sucked in a shuddering breath.
My heart pounded.
She’d brought me here.
I saw Lyle’s face, back when he was ninety-plus years old, ancient and skeletal and endlessly determined.
“Why did you do this to me?” My voice rose.
“I lost my wife. I lost my entire life. I had to watch my son grow old, watch him sacrifice his life for me, sacrifice my grandchildren for me. I had to watch my world die, my—my everything, die.” I took a few heaving breaths.
“I did what was necessary. For the pain it brought you, I am sorry.”
I stared at her. She met my eyes without blinking.
I clenched my jaw, grinding my teeth to stop my body from shaking.
In that moment I saw what my father would do.
How he would react. I was not him. I’d never been him.
I squeezed my eyes shut, fighting back tears.
One escaped and rolled hot and wet down my cheek.
I unfurled my fists. “Can you send me back?”
“There is no back.”
I raised my face to the sky. I wanted to scream.
I wanted to fall into darkness and never wake up again.
“Goddamnit,” I whispered. I opened my eyes and sucked in a hard breath.
I was not my father, but … “Fuck you,” I whispered.
“Fuck you and your perfect beach and your—your whatever, your composite body image that you mind-raped out of me. Fuck you.” I fell to my knees in the sand, my chest heaving and my heart pounding. “You have no idea—no goddamn idea…”
She stood and waited.
I stared at the sand and shook and breathed until my heart slowed, until the crawling red rage receded from the corners of my eyes. I thought of Lyle as a child, peering at me through his thick glasses, a tattered paperback in his small hands. “Why me?”
The Omega, the woman before me, extended one slender hand. “This will not satisfy you as an answer, although it is the truth. I picked you because I have always picked you. I picked you because you are here.”
I looked at her hand. At her perfectly formed fingers.
I looked past her, out across the dunes to the water, to the horizon beyond.
I drew in a deep breath. Then I reached up and took her hand.
She pulled me easily to my feet. I looked into her eyes.
“You’re right. That’s not an answer. That’s a circle. ”
“Yes. A tautology. And the truth.”
I puffed out a breath and stared out to sea again.
“Please, Scott. Walk with me, and I will tell you everything.”
I nodded, numb and distant.
We walked for a moment before she began.
“I am the final breath of the universe. I am life constructed and unconstructed. My thoughts are the decay of protons, the erratic movement of quarks and the brief, subtle fires of muons, and the epic flare of supernovae. My nerve pathways are wormholes, and my consciousness travels the breadth and depth of our universe, faster than the speed of light. I arose by accident out of deliberate design, an unforeseen and inevitable consequence of technology intended to carry information and to enable travel between the stars. I was created by sentient beings such as yours, those that manufactured wormholes and punched shortcuts through the fabric of space and time. I am the last spark in the darkness, the final realization of life by the universe, its final realization of itself. I am the last entity our universe has built that can understand it.”
I thought about how the Overmind and the Consciousness had both used the data from my transits to manufacture wormholes.
The Omega, perhaps reading my thoughts, nodded. “The fact that I brought you—and those like you—forward through time enabled my existence. I exist, and therefore I have always done so. I have always brought you, and those others, forward to this time. To the end of time.”
“That sounds like you created yourself.”
“I did.”
I shook my head.
“But I am the Omega,” she said. “What you see, what I am, is the end. The universe has expanded, unending, for trillions of years. Entropy has done its job, and everything is decaying, cooling, dissipating. As powerful as I am, as fully aware, I am still ending. But what are endings but the possibility of new beginnings?”
We walked. The breeze felt nice on my cheek, contrasting with the warmth of the sun overhead and the sand on my feet.
“I have found another a way to a new beginning.” She stopped and turned, and I stopped as well.
Her eyes rooted me in place. I would have thought myself beyond surprise, beyond humbling, having stood next to beings such as the Overmind and the Consciousness.
But, standing here, meeting the Omega’s gaze, I felt humbled.
I trembled with awe in the face of the fathomless power and intellect behind that gaze.
This was an entity as far above the Consciousness as the Consciousness had been above me.
I was sure of it, without needing to ask.
I was face-to-face with God, or as close as I would ever come.