Chapter 37 #2
“I cannot stop this ending,” she said. “But I will make a new spark. A new universe in the multiverse. Ours will end when this new one begins. We will provide the tinder for this new fire. Our finale. And we, you and I and all the others, we must provide a gift to this nascent universe.”
Waves crashed behind me. “What gift?”
“Memory. Thought. Love. Emotion. Life.” She turned and continued walking. I stood and breathed for a moment, then hurried to catch up.
“Others?”
“I have pulled forward, to this final point, one member of every sentient species that helped form the structures of my mind. Every race that built or used the wormhole network that now makes up my essence, my brain, if you will. I could not reach a representative of every sentient race that ever lived in the lifespan of our universe, and I regret that deeply. The ones I was able to bring … they must be enough.”
“And what are we supposed to do?”
“Soon I will initiate the final cascade. I will use the remaining matter and energy of this universe, and my own essence, the power that drives me and gives me life, to re-collapse the universe into a duplicate of its original singularity. Encoded into this wave form of densest, purest energy will be your signature, your memories. Whatever you choose to tell, whatever you choose to say, if you choose to share anything at all, will be passed to the new creation. Your thoughts and emotions and feelings will guide the physics and energies of the new universe. They will provide the spark to ignite life anew. Our ending, their beginning.”
We walked. I was silent for a long time. Thoughts whirled, fragmented, uncertain. “You brought me here to die.”
“Yes.”
“I could have lived my life. I could’ve watched my son grow up.
I could’ve experienced everything I had in the years left to me.
But you brought me here, now, to share my autobiography with a new universe?
” I turned and walked a few steps out into the surf.
There I stopped and let the warm water flow around my ankles.
“Would your life have had the same fullness of meaning, the same extraordinary potential, if I hadn’t pulled you here, brought you forward?
Would you ever have had a chance like this one, the chance to guide the hand of fate itself, to influence the lives of trillions that will come?
Entire civilizations, entire worlds, perhaps even entire new universes will feel your touch.
Life and love, thought and emotion, will arise with your help, and the help of those like you.
” I could feel the weight of her gaze on me, like a beacon.
But it was warm and gentle, that spotlight, free of judgment.
I could feel her sorrow for me, and I could feel her hope.
Her hope for me. Her hope in me.
I watched the waves. Even the air tasted like the ocean. Salt and brine. Sunlight shimmered and danced in the ripples of the water. “Why twenty-four hours? Why did you start me jumping ahead by twenty-four hours?”
“It was within tolerance. It was a time frame that would make sense to you. One rotation of your native planet. For members of other species, I selected different time scales, ones consequential to them, although always within the constraints of the energy required to bring them forward.”
“Why didn’t you bring me here immediately?”
“I couldn’t. I pulled you forward as I was able, and from each jump onward it grew exponentially easier. The closer you came to the now, as you might call it, the farther forward I was able to bring you with each subsequent transit.”
“You know, I nearly died, many times. I could have died. Hell, there’s no way I should have survived, really. Without Lyle, and the Consciousness, and so many others, I wouldn’t even be here.”
“But you are. You always have been. That’s why I had to select you. You are the chosen of your species.”
“Chosen.”
“By me if that helps. Or by destiny, fate, the requirements of the new universe waiting to be born. You are one needed, and so you arrived.”
“The Traveler.”
“If you like.”
“What about transcendence?”
“An escape beyond the universe. Beyond this reality.”
“Yeah, all that.”
“I have chosen to renew this reality, not attempt to escape it. Whether one or the other is better is not for me to say. But as the Omega point of this universe, I feel it falls to me to guide the construction of the next universe. To become, in a sense, the Alpha anew. This may have been what happened at the creation of our own universe. One ended so ours could begin, and in the outpouring of energy that began our universe were the mechanisms to ensure our lives came to fruition. Or we may be the first—life in our universe an accident, a consequence of luck, of physical laws tuned just so to allow us to exist.” She bent and picked up a handful of sand.
She let it stream through her fingers, multiple paths of glittering white.
“I apologize for the pain I’ve caused you, Scott.
But I do not apologize for bringing you here.
What I am offering to you, now, is to be a part of the most important thing anyone in the entire existence of our universe has ever done.
An act of pure selflessness, an act of pure creation. A chance to shape the future.”
I looked across the sea.
The future.
I spotted a rock, smooth and worn, and picked it up.
I held it for a moment, feeling its warmth.
I turned and side-armed it across the waves.
It skipped, leaving progressively smaller splashes before it disappeared.
The ripples from each impact spread and unraveled and disappeared in the constant action of the waves.
I thought about Amy. I thought about Anjari, and Hayward, and my father.
I thought about the man in the jail cell who pressed Lyle’s gun to my forehead.
I thought about Severine and Sophie, and how much I’d leaned on them as a kid, only to lose touch with them as an adult.
I thought about Miri and Lily and Case and their desperate existence in the shadow of the Machine War.
I thought about the Central Overmind and the streak of the burning orbital factory as it plunged down and obliterated Gossamer.
I thought about my car vanishing around me. Skidding across the pavement.
I thought about watching the sun come up on Mars.
I thought about Lyle, about the Word.
I shut my eyes and laughed, soft and quiet.
“What is it?” she asked.
“My son.” I turned and looked up the short slope.
“He was right. About me, about why this happened. Not the specifics, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t get it just about right.
” I shook my head. “I’ll never know where he got his brains.
” I met and held her eyes, those powerful, awe-inspiring, humbling eyes, and we watched one another across the sand.
Shadows of palm trees drifted back and forth.
Waves ebbed and flowed around my feet. The sand ran out with each receding wave, and my toes buried themselves in the soft wet particles.
She waited.
“What did Lyle choose? Did he share himself, his memories, with this next universe?” I already knew. I knew Lyle.
“The sentient AI construct of your son chose to add himself to the future.”
“Can I see him? Or is he already gone?”
“You may see him. He’s here.”
“Hello, Dad.” The voice, so familiar and yet so odd not to hear directly in my ear, came from behind me. I turned as a man strode across the sand.
Tears welled, turning the beach kaleidoscopic.
He was there. As I remembered him, back at the mountain cabin, when he’d still been strong and yet old enough to have bearing and wisdom. Early fifties, a little wrinkled around the eyes and mouth. He wore shorts and a gray T-shirt. His feet were bare.
“Lyle,” I whispered.
He wrapped his arms around me.
I hugged him back, tentatively at first, then with more strength. “I thought I would never see you again,” I said into his shoulder. “Never see you.”
“Well,” Lyle said, stepping back, still grasping my shoulders. “I’m here. And not just a voice in your head anymore.”
Tears spilled down my cheeks. “Bud.” I couldn’t find the words.
He smiled, understanding, his eyes intense but gentle. “It’s okay, Dad. You made it. Against all the odds, against everything thrown at you. You made it.”
“I—” I wiped at the tears. “It’s too big? You know?”
“You’re ready for this, Dad.” He gazed at the beach.
“Everything you went through made you ready for this. We’re here.
We made it. It isn’t fair that we’re here.
It isn’t right. But it isn’t unfair, it isn’t wrong.
It just is. You became the Traveler, you lost everything, so you could be here, now, to contribute to something almost inconceivably special.
I managed to tag along, and—” He shrugged.
“And I feel humbled and honored to be a part of shaping this new beginning.”
“This cost me my life, Lyle. It cost me you.”
“I know. And it cost the lives of thousands of other sentient creatures the Omega pulled forward through time to this final moment in our history. Sacrifices, all, to be sure. But sacrifices for a purpose.”
“For the next universe,” I whispered. Lyle’s face flashed before me again, Lyle as a child, those expressive eyes staring at me with that eerie, penetrating intellect behind his thick glasses.
“To give those who will come a better world,” Lyle said, the older Lyle, older than me, who stood on the beach.
“Without the Omega’s actions, here, at this last moment, there won’t be a next universe.
At least, not one to follow from our own.
Our universe, our history, would die off, expanding forever into the cold and emptiness.
Everything we’ve experienced, everything we’ve seen and felt and dreamed, everything we’ve been, would be lost. Without the Omega, the end of our universe is meaningless.
And without us, the beginning of the next universe would be without history or context.
You represent all of humanity in this moment, Dad.
Just as I represent the sentient intelligences humanity created.
We’re making our lives, and all the lives of those trillions of sentient beings who existed in our universe, mean something. ”
I stared into his eyes until I couldn’t. I looked out across the waves again, toward the fantastic, curving, pearlescent horizon shimmering in the sunlight. I glanced at Lyle. “Mean what?”
“Everything.”
I nodded and turned back to the ocean and watched the waves.
I breathed.
In. Out.
“Will you stay with me?”
“Of course I will. To the end. Always.”
“Thank you, Lyle. I don’t—I just—Thank you. For everything.”
“I love you, Dad. Always have, always will.”
I turned to the Omega. She remained where she’d been standing, watching us, calm and quiet and sure. I opened my mouth and closed it. I cleared my throat. “What do I need to do?”
She gave me the options, and I chose. She left me in the drafty, comfortable old cabin. Lyle remained by my side, strolling on the beach with me, talking things through. Keeping me company, as the end approached.
The Omega gave me time, in this constructed reality. The end—the beginning—would come when I was ready. When I’d told my story.
And so, I wrote.
I wrote this. I left nothing out. I could have.
I could’ve tried to make it pretty, could’ve tried to make myself the epic hero.
I could’ve skipped the messy details, left out the wars and the pain and the suffering.
But I realized, as I sat and gazed out to sea through the shifting shadows of the palm trees, doing so would diminish their sacrifice.
Miri and Lily, striding across a broken and war-torn landscape to find me.
Hayward, protecting me from the Legion. Amy’s more subtle, but very real, sacrifice.
And Lyle’s sacrifice. His entire life, given for me. His memories and consciousness given to me. As completely as it was his to give, he’d given it all so I would survive to see this end—this beginning.
I wrote about Lyle.
I wrote about his glasses. His fumbling, youthful lack of grace, his nose pressed into Michael Crichton novels as he sat curled next to me in our reading room.
His bewildering intelligence and that pure strength of conviction, his belief in me, despite my best efforts to convince him of the contrary.
Someday, in the new universe to come, creatures will pull themselves out of the muck and start forming a society.
They’ll start asking the big questions. Someday those creatures will remember, will feel, a little of that love, passed down to them from the long-forgotten ending of the universe that gave birth to their own.
They will feel a stirring of the uncompromising love Lyle had for me, and the unconditional love I had for him.
And it will help make that new world a better place.