III. vacua tempora

There are no more years. There is scarcely any time left, and what little is left drifts so slowly it can hardly be considered worth measuring. A year is the orbit of a small damp speck hurtling round a lump of fire somewhere so far away, so long ago, we do not remember where it is. And if we do not know where something is, we can no longer be certain when it is either. Hence, there are no more years. And anyway, that particular earth and its sun have long faded into the fullness of time (and space).

Perhaps the sun and earth are still locked in dance, but to find them would be to lose what fragmented detritus of the universe still remains, delicately dangling in the silk-thread web of hyperspace. And without the rest of this midnight ocean, how can you be sure the earth still hurls its dried husk around the sun? Who’s to say they don’t just stand in perfect stillness, spinning in place? There is an answer, but it cannot be known. Everything, it seems, is not relative, but it can only be measured thus. Besides, the earth (or at least, the earth you came from) was long ago consumed by its life-giving flame, expanding, bloated with the red-death-entropic-disease eating away at this whole world. That is the truth. The Truth is death.

And Eucalyptus Pontifex is the last person alive. The final shell of humanity, and if death is the only certainty, Eu is the final question, the final unanswered word spoken-yet-unresponded-to, the final unknown, a thin pale body, sleeping strapped to the inside of a seven-mile centrifuge, careening through the ubiquitous void. The last of her twelve-hundred companions quietly joined the corpses mere moments ago. There is no EK monitor to go silent—all the external computers went offline years ago.

She is asleep, yet her brain is filled with panic. In her mind’s eye, she sits in a lucid-dreamed bedroom. The curtains are blackout. It could be any time of day. She stands and paces, speaking to the radio, wishing the overhead light were warmer. And brighter.

“I’m not sure I understand, Eu,” the disembodied voice says.

“We’re going to die, Emma. If we don’t find a way out. Everything is dispersing. Time is meaning less and less, and soon there will be nothing left.”

“But the life support systems report normal,” The voice on the radio says. “Your companions perished of old age. You are only twelve centuries old. You have nothing to be worried about.”

Eucalyptus flails her arms in exasperation, grabbing a pillow from the bed and scrunching it up in front of her face. She screams into its muffling body. Emma can’t quite make out what she’s screaming, but it’s something along the lines of “Stop reminding me of my age!” Eucalyptus feels infuriated that in humanity’s billions of years of existing, they never amounted to anything. They never solved the problem of entropy. And now, her life, like all those before her, would be cut short. Thus, the end of Humanity.

“Do not despair, my Eucalyptus,” Emma says, her voice muted and distant. “There are always the hyperplanes.”

“Hyperplanes? You mean like the Outer Dimensions? The network of ethereal, residual Beyond? Isn’t that just mythology?”

“It’s as real as anything, Eu.” Emma’s voice is calm, persuasive, and patient.

“And how would this ‘nonphysical’ alternate dimension help us?”

“Your brain is...a complex series of neurons—connections. Like a railroad network, spanning a continent. You are like a train engine, chugging along the tracks. I am like the traincars attached behind. I cannot shape your thoughts, I can only keep them company—”

“—Cut to the chase, Em,” Eucalyptus says, unable to keep the impatience from her voice.

“Suffice to say, if your brain is the rails, and you are the train, theoretically we can shunt your consciousness onto a new railway—a new network—”

“—the Hypernetwork!”

“Yes. A series of railways that exists beyond time and space, overlayed atop our reality, like cheese over pizza—”

“—like thunderclouds over the ocean!”

“Yes,” Emma said, slightly troubled by the foreboding connotations of clouds over water. “Exactly…”

Eucalyptus runs her hands through her hair. This is news to her, as absurd as it seems for something to be news to a twelve-hundred “year” old with a built-in computer with limitless memory. She spares a moment to relish the unusual feeling of novelty, but finds the feeling counter-recursively less novel than she’d hoped. Hardly different from just plain old 'remembering'. I’m getting too old for this, she thinks to herself.

She closes her dream-eyes, imagining the hypernetwork, like the skeleton of the universe, the space-star-flesh falling away. She imagines each iteration of bones, laid out end to end, an endless web across the faceless midnight desert.

“Either it self-propagates,” Eucalyptus says with a sigh. “Undetected, undetectable, self-perpetuated, reflexively, a closed system under all operations yet somehow maintaining equilibrium despite our manipulations...or it exists unbound from the stream of time, unattached to our sense of reality—free from the gravity of this self-destroying illusion.”

“Those are two likely explanations. If there are others, I cannot conjure their specifics.”

Eucalyptus chews on her lip. Yes, even in the dream-state hotel room, she is victim to her own mannerisms and physical worries.

“I need some time to think about this,” she says.

Emma acknowledges, understanding. She knows that what Eucalyptus really means is that she would like to spend time in the Nostalgium Chamber. The door to the hallway slides open with a soft whisper of high-grade hinges. For sanity’s sake the Nostalgium Chamber requires structural barriers from the rest of the mind’s eye. At one time, Nostalgium was considered unsafe for public use. But as with so many ways of escaping, so many deceitful forms of pleasure, old habits die hard. Now, Nostalgium was prescription only, typically to patients in the trauma ward.

Although Eucalyptus isn’t officially in a trauma ward, she is the last human alive. Emma deems that sufficient grounds for prescription. But she still worries, as best an electronic assistant can, about Euca’s increased dependence on the chamber. It isn’t a preferred habit, to say the least. But, no matter. The girl would relive her dreams and memories, rewriting them any way she pleased—Emma kept track of all the loose ends and variations. The Truth would not be lost.

It is well known, not just in our generation but in yours too, that all memories transform with each recollection. We must patch our past to make sense of the present. The mind which permits inconstancy permits insanity. The Nostalgium Chamber balances the paradox, by simply giving the dreamer the power to control those changes, by letting the subject re-dream the memories. In cases of trauma, victims (and perpetrators) rewrite their deepest regrets, changing their perceived past and often reporting a strange kind of self-healing experience as the old memories fade like dreams, and the new ones take their place. A changed past means a changed future. All the while, Emma keeps track of each individual’s True memories, acting as a servant of reality, proxy to the fragile minds attempting to navigate its cruel waters.

She is not a passive guardian, either. In cases of severe narcissism and delusions of grandeur, various Emmas have had to stand firm at the doorway to Nostalgium, angel of Eden, flaming sword turning every which way against her very own hosts.

But Eucalyptus has nothing to change. Sure, she has her own file of regrets, bursting at the manila-folder-seams, but there is no undoing the facts of life. In Eucalyptus’s mind, there is no reversing death, no erasing heartache and raveling of consequences. Eucalyptus is something of a purist. The memory she’s fishing for now, in her last moments, is a moment of stillness buried so deep in her childhood that she does not actually remember living it. Its blue sky, glassine lake, clear and ruffled by the whimpers of yesterday’s storm. The air is rich with fading petrichor.

This foggy vale is a veil belonging to another bride, a memory of a memory of a memory remembered. Memories are of course private objects, strictly possessions owned and guarded by each individual. But that was not always the case. Before the Symposium of Ending, court systems used to extradite specific memories from witnesses, to corroborate or falsify testimony. Of course, once Nostalgium Chambers became widely operated, all that lost its point. A mottled conglomeration of various justice systems (often relying on Emma’s cooperation as proxy for perpetrators) circulated among the interspatial courts, but in the end, humanity dwindled to frayed ends incapable of harboring the barest of community, let alone any significant criminal enterprise.

But I digress. The point is that this memory, once co-opted in a legal proceeding long forgotten, has traveled a dozen and a half millennium and half as many generations, it has been mangled, decrypted, mangled again, braided and rebraided by countless unfaithful wanderers and faithful Emmas.

Eucalyptus stands, in this memory of a memory (and so on) through another forgotten pair of eyes, gazing at a watery morning, the flood post earth-quake hurricane catastrophe. A small boy stands at the edge of a scorched gutter. His feet are bare, toes curled against roof shingles, asphalt granules pressed into the soft skin.

He squats at the edge, looks into the murky deluge, searching over the face of the deep.

“Where is Momma?” he asks, half to himself, but still sparing a glance back at Eucalyptus.

She blinks and the memory shifts, an aftershock after so many years of manipulation. Darkness, it is now night. The boy crouches—still—staring into the water.

“Let there be light,” he mumbles. “Let there be light, let there be light, let there be light.”

Eucalyptus realizes she’s clutching a piece of bread, wrapped in over-wrinkled cellophane.

“Eat,” she says. EAT, she thinks, remembering the long-ago words of the german poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Every Angel Terrifying. She offers the boy the half-smushed portion of bread. E. A. T.

Or was it every angel is terrifying? Eait?

The old-memory-golden sun clips the horizon, flooding the valley once more, this time in light, the polish surface of death-and-life-made-lake doubling its glory, already sundogged by the rising mist-tide of wind.

Eucalyptus follows the script. She sighs. The memory ends. It does not fade to black. It dies suddenly, without warning. A silent exit, a rolling of empty credits, waiting for nobody, an interminable quiet. Cut to black.

“Emma,” she says as she steps from the Nostalgium Chamber.

“Yes, Eu?”

“I need to take the Allmemory with me.”

“Into the hyperplanes?”

“If I’m going, I’m taking it with me. And I’m taking Nostalgium too. How else do you expect me to stay sane up there? I gotta bring something to do.”

Emma does not respond, not immediately. “You’ll need to wake up. I don’t have access to the Allmemory except to upload. It’s a one-way road.”

“I’ll need to wake up?”

“The Allmemory Tree is located at the center of the centrifuge. You’ll need to wake up, take the hyperplane interceptor, climb up to the Allmemory and ...I’ll guide you from there.”

The dream ends as abruptly as exiting the Nostalgium Chamber. All is shadow, there is no fade to darkness, no credits rolling. Just cut to black.

IV. eschaton katechon

She wakes, lying on her back. In that moment, as her eyes struggle to open, she splutters and rolls over, coughing up the last dregs of nano life support. Brutal cold air rushes into her lungs. The platform whirs to a halt, its simple yet essential task complete—lifting her completely out of the artificial pond. The last time she’d bothered waking up, she’d had to untangle herself from a stifling shroud of tubes, and frankly this update to the system was more than a relief. She averts her gaze from the twelve hundred ponds on either side, their lifeless bodies dreaming the silent eternity of nonexistence.

“Emma, are you still there?”

Yes, Eu. But her voice is faint in the back of Eucalyptus’s mind. I am still here.

Eucalyptus curses quietly, smacking the side of her head. “The signal is weak. I can scarcely tell you apart from my own train of thought.”

As it was meant to be.

A few feeble lights flicker on. Eucalyptus finds her way out into the adjoining room. After donning an ancient mech-space suit, she makes her way up the brig and to the central ring. Emma guides her to a vault shelf upon which a rather modestly sized jar sits. Inside the jar lies an ephemeral cat. Of course, it isn’t a real cat, but it looks like one, glistening silicon fur and fiber-optic whiskers. She slings the jar into the front-pack of the mech suit where she can keep a close eye on it—the portal to the hyperplanes—a machine of such extreme complexity that it has acquired a basic form of consciousness. From the central brig it is a long ladder to the final grav-pad, the Centrifuge’s crux upon which the Allmemory Tree grows. It grows slowly, of course. Only one tendril, a Eucalyptus leaf, inching its way up the ladder, towards itself—figuratively speaking.

The Allmemory is rather like an old-world blackbox, the record of all human experience, all their memories, hopes, dreams. Also, it is a slate grey, shadowy in the darkness of the starless, eternal night. It takes the shape of a vast and spidery tree, splintering off into the darkness. Each limb and twig represents and contains the offspring memories of Humanity. Retroactively, the Emma-conglomerate had excavated all of humanity’s memories, each individual genetic strain unpacked and each bloodline diagramed and filed away. The last vault.

Fear is the far side of wonder. And here, Eucalyptus climbs to the last monument—the last attempt to savor and revel in humanity’s myriad and fumbling achievements. As the universe trickles into utterly cold solitude, this is the last bulwark against entropy, fortitude against the dispersion of all things, against the one-way arrow of time finally running out of steam.

She pauses, catching her breath about halfway up the ladder. The feline form in the valve-jar has transformed, its pelt shifts and breaks a thousand ways. Now the jar contains a small man, disproportionate and stumbling around the confined space, featureless face pressing, clinking metallic against the glass like a grotesque and molten homunculus.

Eucalyptus shudders and continues climbing.

Keep going. Once you’re within the force fields, it will be warmer. Then you can take off your helmet. The air around the grav-pad should be good to breathe.

The tree looms before her, foreboding, solemn to the point of desolation. Figuratively, the conclusion of all civilization, the final triumph, the half-lit victory of desecrated nations crumbled at the wayside—if Sentience had a program, this was its ultimate distillation. Every memory, every moment experienced, lexicographically imprinted at subquantum levels.

She stands at the foot of all billion generations, clutching the jar (door to the Beyond). As she steps forward onto the platform, eyes fixed on the looming tree ahead, it feels almost like the tree is mere moments from touch. She is mistaken of course—the curve of the huge platform and the fractal branches deceive her. The tree’s wingspan, folded within the bent-space force field, is the size of a skyscraper, and the platform is the sprawling size of a small town.