Death Of The Gods

The stars were dying. Si had seen it herself. Celestial furnaces of fire gradually succumbing to the creeping stillness of perpetuity, a slowing Expansion which had created schisms of vastness between the worlds her species had inhabited. She witnessed the darkness washing against the void, eager to claim what was rightfully its, all the way back at the beginning.

She stood within a broken world. The sea lapped up the shore towards her thin, elongated feet, caressing her skin in salt and sand. The world’s sun had set a short time ago, but there was still a residue of redness stubbornly clinging onto the horizon like a cancer, fading with the passing of time, slowing down, slower. Like a river turning to stone. Oh, she thought fervently; weep for the world, the sea, the sky. Lament for the passing of the Gods, her species; the Emergents.

She looked down at the little bundle in her hands that had once held life. Her child, thus dead; taken by the icy stranglehold that so few newborns were liable to suffer, even in such ominous times. She felt…anger. It was strange. Grief was normally the byproduct of such circumstances. She thought perhaps it was the shock of losing a child, the irresistible urge of the mother to blame the world and everything in it for her loss. She suspected that sorrow would greet her eventually, and that when it did, it would consume her utterly. But until then, she would stand by the shore and watch the world take its last few breaths before it was rendered still by the Anomaly, the unfathomable machine which was ripping the strands of reality apart from the great tapestry of her universe.

The sky above was eerily quiescent, devoid of life. Nature had long since retreated from the skies; too cold for creatures of such a specialized nature to exist. The clouds crawled along overhead, and every so often you could hear the crash of thunder in the distance; signs of a storm approaching inwards from the sea. Si’s Casmin, the tiny bodies of intellect that moved over her body in their millions, creating a blanket of attire, sensed the danger and altered. They became a flowing white dress, dispelling the sound of the approaching behemoth. She smiled; they never did like loud noises.

Behind her was her home for millennia, a wonderful shining conurbation. A beacon of resistance to a chaos none of them could even grasp. It had set her the task; picked her out of the rest, out of all the worlds. She felt exultant and terrified, two raw emotions battling within her for the centre ground. She dispelled them without interest. The dial on her wrist spiraled a peculiar blue, an intrinsic colour of meaning and information. She did not know how the device worked. All she knew was that it worked on an abstraction of metamathics, whatever that meant. It was the pinnacle of Emergent technology, and it was their only hope. It pulsed once, signaling its intent. It was ready. She was not.

Si set her child down amongst the sand, letting nature take it along in its undercurrent. She gave it one last look, before the sea rushed upon it and took it, down into its dark depths. And then she wept, the tears flowing down her cheeks like a river of a lost happiness. To have been a mother was what she had always wanted, to bring another life into the world and watch it grow. That would never happen now. She accepted that fact with a ruthless determinism, a fierce inner pride. She walked back up the beach, along the stone steps that led up to the outlook grid. When she got to the top, Si pivoted on the spot. She looked out across the fading twilight into the wide girth of the sea. Enough was enough; she was wasting time on such petty nostalgia. Everything would be different on her return. Or so she hoped.

She looked down into the sentient dial, watching it twist and lapse in an ever changing torrent of colour. It was restless. So was she. The lattice of configuration points coalesced into a point 500,000 years previously, on the eve of the Anomaly’s discovery. She invoked the pass key that had been imbedded in her neural lace, and watched a point of light appear in front of her, twisting into an ever widening blanket which engulfed her. Then her world vanished from view in a blur of silence.
-So, Si thought, what went wrong with the universe?

***