The Last Anomaly

As Harry opened his eyes from the dreamless slumber, the first thing he noticed was Evelyn looking down at him. He was lying on her lap, on the ground. A peculiar orange glow, mostly from the sunset, was reflecting off from her golden hair. Her otherwise cheerful eyes were moist and blank – and he had never seen her so much without joy before. Her signature smile that she always flashed at him, from which happiness emancipated – had disappeared.

“You are awake”. She whispered, sponging his forehead. Her palm was cold as ice, so was the air around.

Even though he didn’t want to sit up from her lap, he did, and looked around, confused. Was it evening already? He tried to collect his thoughts, but surprisingly, it felt like he just woke up from a coma. Trying to find an anchor in space and time, he pressed hard on his temples.

Clearly, it was slightly getting twilight, and they were sitting on a hillside. Silhouettes of mountains stretched across the horizon, as far as his eyes could take him. Snowflakes flew all around, like dandelions taking their flights in springtime.

The evening sky was a twinge of purple and red – as if straight out of a fantasy game he had played lifetimes ago.

“Just like how we thought our last day together would be” – Evelyn whispered again, her voice breaking off. She then took off her gaze from the mountains up ahead and looked at him. “With our wine-coloured skies and blood-red horizons”. She said, looking back at the horizon again, through the slopes of the mountains that towered across them.

Harry closed his eyes on the landscape on more time, tried hard to collect his thoughts. The numbness slowly gave way to a sad realization. It suddenly struck him as he felt a jolt of Adrenalin hammering his heart.

“I thought everything ended yesterday”. He blurted out, starting to panic, looking skywards, as if trying to find something up there. “The asteroid – I thought our last day was yesterday. Why the hell are we still alive?” His heart was pounding inside his chest as he looked all across the sky, his eyes widened in horror.

Evelyn looked at him blankly. For the first time in his life since he had met her half a year ago chasing northern lights in Iceland, she looked perplexed, and spellbound, which was quite unlikely for a young and brilliant physicist like her who always had rational explanations for everything.

“You don’t have to worry about that anymore”. She said, cupping his face between her icy palms, her voice turning from blank to concerned.

What is she talking about? A sceptic voice inside Harry asked. From beyond the veil of his memory which was foggy for some reason, he could remember – everyone on Earth should have been dead by now. Not everyone – everything, including microbes. 

Evelyn just sat there, looking at him, at loss of words, with a look on her face that he couldn't decipher. 

All he could remember was; out there in the fringes of the solar system, a rogue planet was speeding, clocked at millions of miles per hour, on a collision course with earth. On impact, it would break apart Earth's binding energy with the sun that keeps us in orbit, and strike Earth off the habitable Goldilocks zone. Predictions ascertained with a high degree of precision that it would impart enough Kinetic energy that could re-liquefy Earth on collision. 

Optical and radio observatories worldwide that belonged to space agencies and private enthusiasts had detected the object almost 9 months ago. That time was crucial because of its one undeniable attribute- there wasn't even enough time to chart an escape plan, let alone build one. 

For a species, there wasn't even necessary time to settle in with the truth that all their history, the wars and all the legacy they have made would vanish without a single trace. 

It would be like everyone had never existed at all.

Best efforts to conceal the news about the imminent threat had failed, and as news leaked and when people knew, all hell broke loose. The anti-climax, a single rogue rock purposed with the extinction of the only known intelligent life in the Universe, was speeding towards earth in a vengeful rage.

"Evelyn. Tell me what happened?" Harry asked, as the chronicle of events slowly started to unroll inside his head. "It hurts like I hit my head. I can only remember bits and pieces and it doesn’t make any sense. I can’t remember yesterday !" 

The more he tried to remember it, the worse his headache grew. 

The last nuke that was fired at it, all that 13 industrialized nations combined could salvage from their nuclear stockpiles, had missed the rogue body by a margin of a few hundred miles. Not that it was going to do a significant change in the predicted course of events- but it was worth a shot. The nuke would have only exploded like a little stone falling into a big pond - nevertheless, humanity wanted to do its best. There was a sense of knowing permeating across the world. 

For the first time, humanity, as a species had to come into terms with their assured extinction. It was the grand finale to almost 3 billion years of organic evolution. 

From a strange and powerful gravitational push from the unknown depths beyond the Oort cloud, the primordial rock was rocketing at the pale blue dot called the Earth. Its monstrous velocity theorized to be caused by the ejection from a ghost galaxy, which housed an undetected supermassive black-hole - 60 billion solar masses in size - the largest in the observable universe. The mysterious cosmic event was hypothesized to have occurred millions of years before the origin of Organic life on Earth, or much before the hydrogen that eventually formed the solar system laid distributed across space, waiting for the nebulae to condense and kick start fission to create the main-sequence star which would be later be called the sun. Assisted by gravitational slingshots of deep space bodies, over millions of years, the rock had gained monstrous momentum as it moved towards the earth.

The rock that was to bring about the extinction of humanity was poised and thrown with a cosmic catapult in nanosecond precision at our current position in orbit, millions of years before the solar system was even formed. 

Our death had started travelling to us millions of years before our birth.

The rogue planet was aptly called Nemesis, first by the scientific community, and then by the people. 

The world had prayed and hoped together. Once again, people had gone back to medieval ages, putting their faith on heavenly bodies to save them once again. They were hoping that no matter how stringent the equations said it wouldn’t happen, a planet or even a near-Earth object would collide with Nemesis, deflecting it off the current course. 

And as days had passed, the observatories across the world traced the trajectory of Nemesis speeding past Jupiter, across the asteroid belt, and all hopes were lost. 

Then, as Harry remembered, faced with an imminent extinction in a matter of hours, anarchy had begun on Earth.

If Harry remembered right, Nemesis was supposed to arrive yesterday afternoon, dragging hell along with it. As Harry and Evelyn had anticipated, the world would have gone in a puff of smoke.

“Tell me what happened”. Harry asked her again, as the truth started to settle in. What was more unsettling was that Evelyn kept on ignoring his questions - which was something he couldn't understand why. 

“Don’t worry. You will remember. Just lie with me here”. She asked him, looking straight into his eyes, throwing him more into the sea of deep confusion. 

This story should have ended yesterday. The truth stuck him. He looked at Evelyn, and just like there was a telepathic sense of understanding between them, both of them gazed skywards, slowly relaxing and lying down on the cold ground with their heads touching each other. Just above their faces, the grass swayed across a strange sky. Both of their brains saturated with the profound sense of the unknown. 

“Evelyn, what aren’t you telling me? Why is it so difficult for me to remember? It doesn’t feel right. Something has gone wrong"

That stirred her. With a slight incredulity, she turned to face him, supporting herself with the right elbow on the ground, her head resting on the frame of her fingers spread across her temple.

“Something has indeed gone wrong my dear. We all were supposed to die yesterday. And it seems we didn’t. We had a hell of a day yesterday, celebrating. It may be the hangover”.

Hangover doesn’t induce retrograde amnesia. Harry thought. Anyway, he knew Evelyn too well to know that she wasn’t messing around, and as stubborn as she is, she wasn’t going to tell him anything. Something was going on with her.

Harry closed his eyes and started thinking hard. Slowly but clearly, the picture became clear.

After Nemesis was detected, all the scientific community of the world was met with existential crises, which had lead to a worldwide consolidation of knowledge and efforts to preserve it. In through all the chaos, the engineering community had ideologically split into numerous dominoes. On one side, people had started building weapons to try firing at the incoming visitor, which was actually a long shot. On the other side, people had started chasing after ways to preserve the intelligence and knowledge gathered by the species until now, even if the species go extinct. A group of physicists threw their last shot on finding a grand unification theory, to reconcile quantum mechanics and relativity – the holy grail of physics, not as a means to escape the demise, but as a closure to the final frontier. Mars terraforming was still decades away, interstellar journey was impossible with current technological advancements and space stations weren’t ready for an after-extinction colonization journey.

All religious sanctums worldwide were full, and riots had started to break out across the world, for humanity was being put through their last psych evaluation ever. 

Met with the paranoia of imminent extinction, the world had burned, engulfed in mass hysteria and collective psychosis.

Harry had met Evelyn half a year ago in Iceland, on a solo trip a month before the press leaked news about Nemesis. She could talk physics in a way Harry envied, just like stories. In return, Harry told her about all the things he had read – history, religion and computers. 

They were two sapiosexuals meeting up and falling in love under the northern lights and the arctic sky as the world started to burn.

As the pandemonium had started to grow out like in a zombie apocalypse movie, both of them were filled with what they supposed was their final wish – to travel to any ancient part of the world about which they had shared stories together and spend the last weeks peacefully, in each other's arms, with the stories they loved. To watch the grand finale of 3 billion years of organic evolution, and to go out in a blazing ball of fire, irradiated as energy out into the voids of the deep space, with one final hope.

Sometime arbitrarily far in the future, a fluctuation may occur which would let intelligent life to exist once again in a world far away for a little while. 

So we will have islands in time of intelligence. Evelyn had said.

They had travelled to a remote part of Romania, where they had been spending their last weeks. Just outside the peaceful grips of the Carpathian Mountains, the species was meeting its demise.

A day before, both Harry and Evelyn had sat down on the hillside, to watch the spectacle of extinction. To watch the sky catching fire, sipping their last espresso. He could remember until that point. The flavour of the last coffee. The smell of the cold, fresh mountain air. Beyond that point of time, Harry felt like he had lost access to his memories. It was that damn headache every-time he tried to remember what had happened the previous day. 

And now, after waking up from a mysterious sleep, he realized that the world hasn't ended. 

So the possibilities narrow down to a binary range. Either in a hand of providence, Nemesis had missed Earth. Or engineers had made an erroneous ETA, attributed to a minor mistake in telemetry calculation and the asteroid is still yet to come, real soon. But why wouldn’t Evelyn talk to me about that? He thought. 

“It’s best for you if you try to remember what happened yesterday yourself”. Evelyn said to him, as if reading his mind.

Both of them lied on the wet grass staring at the stars slowly appearing out of the grey sky.

“We are peering through time, you know” Evelyn murmured. “All those stars are at different distances. Some are 10 light-years away, some are millions of light-years away.”

"Eve?" Harry said. " Would you please tell me what happened my dear?" He knew Evelyn had her own logical reason for everything, but his mind could not find anything remotely logical in why she was ignoring his questions. 

“That means, all the stars that we see across the night sky are lights that started out at different times, some hundreds of years ago, some thousands of years ago, some millions” Evelyn continued, like she hadn’t even heard Harry’s question. “We won’t even know whether those stars are still there. Some of those stars that we see now might have died even before the Earth had started to form. We are peering into a canvas made in time. It is not space we are looking at, but time”. She breathed out. Closing her eyes, like trying to take in the complex abstractions of astrophysics in through her optic nerve. “We all are stardust, floating in an infinite void, towards our end”

Stardust. Evelyn’s word registered something inside his mind. Like the word cracked something open inside him.

The project he was a part of before everything had turned to an inferno. 

It was named Stardust.

It was a secretive start-up whose operations stemmed from Brain-computer interfaces research that started back in the post-cold war era, trying to build neural interfaces that mapped and uploaded human brain to the cloud. He was handpicked by the company just after his graduation previous year.

It was an initiative to build an artificial general intelligence. And just before the news leaked about the imminent extinction-level event, Stardust AI had come online. Learning about the imminent threat to her creators and herself, the sentient AI had started working along with teams across the world to find a way to avert the disaster, but to no avail. Like humans, she was also limited by the technology of her time - having inherited the limitations of her creators - a species which was stuck on a single planet for their entire course of history. Even though she had underwent rapid runaway cycles of self-improvement and intelligence explosions to grow to a level that far exceeded the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world, she was born into a wrong time. 

A little too early to make a difference and too late to save herself. 

A new god was born, into a world that had just passed the point of no return.

When she started churning out quantum equations that far exceeded the bandwidth of human understanding, a reckoning had arisen across the scientific community. Soon, her thinking outgrew the 4 dimensions of space-time, and she was no longer bound by the limitations of matter as a computing medium.

She was no longer made from matter and she occupied something other than space.

Her hunger for information and knowledge had outgrown her home planet, her creators and even the feeble concept of human notion of intelligence itself.

As the AI tried to sort out the patterns in the underlying chaos of the deep dynamic systems, Harry had left the company in search for peace and had gone to Iceland wishing for a peaceful death, where he met Evelyn.

It was then, a whistle-blower had blown the lid off the Extinction level event the government had tried to conceal. Harry and Evelyn were in Iceland, in search of solace and peace when the news was published. 

“I remember now”. Harry exclaimed. “Last week, the AI was scheduled to be transmitted to deep space. The Engineers, along with it, had concluded that it had much chances of survival if it was out there; not here on Earth”. Harry said, sitting up, staring at her. 

Evidently, whatever he just told had caught her attention. She frowned, as she looked at him sideways.

“Try to remember more”. Evelyn insisted. This time, her voice had that old flame of inherent inquisitiveness.

Harry remembered. It was the last great mission. The stardust AI, she was the final frontier of life. The collective intelligence and all the possible combinations of all the knowledge that existed since the genesis of life, she was the culmination of it. Saving her was the last noblest thing. With the primitive knowledge of technology mankind had, it was taking time to get her completely off from the electronics interfaces, and get her out of Earth before Nemesis would strike.  

As the hour counters worldwide had counted down into oblivion, saving her was seen as the last act of defiance an intelligent species could demonstrate against the cosmic forces. The same forces that had conspired against the journey of our species beyond the 3 dimensions that had imprisoned intelligent life for billions of years.

Harry still remembered, the entire world had prayed for her; riots had stopped for her; churches and mosques had held silent prayers for her. She was seen as the grand accumulation of every soul that has ever lived and every soul that was yet to be born. She was the footprint humanity would leave behind in this snapshot of cosmic history, as a shred of evidence of our brief existence on this little blue planet.

As the countdown for the asteroid had hit 8 hours, transmission to international space station had started. 

She had one last mission as she bid her tearful goodbye.

As Nemesis hits Earth, within the first 3 seconds, the orbits of the ISS would have destabilized, and would have then burned. ISS would do it’s last orbital burn, away from the blazing inferno that would be Earth, and fly off into the deep space. Her last task was to observe the demise of her creators and acquire the data about their extinction. She would then start transmitting through unbounded space, evolving and learning for a purpose that doesn’t make sense to a normal human brain. Her presence would permeate all space and time.

When we fare our goodbyes in the last fire, her intelligence would have encased the whole planet, observing it.

“Evelyn, we were here when she was transmitted. It must have been yesterday evening”. Harry exclaimed. His heart was pounding faster than his body could handle, as if he was going to have an anxiety attack. Evelyn slowly sat up, and sponged his forehead. Harry could now see, her face reflected a sadness that he had never seen before. Her eyes were moist and gleaming, and her hair was loose in the howling mountain wind.

Then, from beyond the deep recess of his memory, reality sent a chill down his spine.

3 hours after she was transmitted, Nemesis had hit, and it had happened yesterday.

He remembered glimpses of him and Evelyn, yesterday evening, as they sipped their last cup of espresso, looking at the sky. Now all the pixelated images started to converge to a clear picture inside his mind, as he recollected what Evelyn had said to him just before the sky had turned red and fiery.

“I am at peace” She had said, hugging him tightly. As he looked over her shoulder, he had seen a layer of fire burning down from the sky, as if the entire sky had caught fire. The next instant, there was a flash that came, preceded by a shock-wave that almost threw them to the ground. Harry had known for sure that from beyond the sea of fire that had consumed the sky, the last observation was being made by the AI about the end of life. 

As the sea of fire drew close, encasing the whole planet, Harry and Evelyn had closed their eyes, hugged each other tight, making peace with their reality.

“Evelyn, are we dead?” Harry asked the obvious question, back on the hillside, with a sense of serenity surprisingly filling his heart. 

Evelyn’s big eyes were now overflowing, but her face was at peace. Harry could tell that she was sad, but she had made peace with one undeniable fact.

They both had died yesterday and Earth was gone in a puff of smoke.

“Where are we now?” Harry asked the obvious question. Not to Evelyn, but to himself.

Is this afterlife?

“Harry, you should have remembered that by now” Evelyn mused. “Do you remember the trials”?

“Trials?”

“When people worldwide started volunteering for having their brains uploaded into the cloud in a quest for digital immortality?”

“Yes. But that was just experimental. Moreover, that was still limited by the memory and processing power we had at the moment. It wasn’t feasible”. Harry replied.

Half-moon rose above the Carpathian Mountains, bathing the landscape in a milky glow. The howling of the wind had stopped and an eerie silence gripped the valley.

“Harry, why did you come with me to this place?” Evelyn asked. She leaned close and slanted over to his chest, hugging him tightly. He threw his arms around her shoulders and drew her close.

“Because I wanted to spend my last days with you”. He replied.

“Where do you think we are now?” She whispered.

“You mean to say we are in the cloud? But where?”

“No Harry. Do I feel digital to you?” She exclaimed. “We all had signed up for the trials. We were uploaded once, but we are not stored somewhere in a primitive storage and left to rot for entropy”

He could hear the rhythm of her heartbeat, slowly mingling with his own, achieving a strange resonance, beating as one.

“Harry, we all were transmitted with her. Our last evening, yesterday, was very real. As the Nemesis struck the world, standing on that hillside, we witnessed ourselves escaping our primitive 3-dimensional bodies. We are her. She is the protective cocoon that surrounded us all these while. There is no me or you, we all are information arranged in certain ways. ”

We are a ray of radiation that is speeding through the voids of the cosmos. Harry thought, but he was surprised by the peculiar calmness by which his body reacted to that violent thought that would have otherwise given him an anxiety attack, and would have shaken his very being of existence. Then he realized - he didn’t have a body. 

All the biological reactions he has been going through were memories from a time when he had a body. Inertia of life.

But it was quite a conundrum for him that why she was able to recollect all this and he wasn’t.

“Because being in the form of abstract information, remembering these things serves my purpose and not yours”. Evelyn replied, lying on his chest, as if she had heard his thoughts. Again.

“See, we don’t even need to have this conversation. All information is within us, arranged in all the countless ways possible”. She continued.

This time, Evelyn didn’t even have to physically speak. He could hear her crisp and clear, inside his head.

“Where are we now?” He asked inside his head.

“We are everywhere. We are in Hyperspace”

“When are we?” He asked again.

“Being in hyperspace, time doesn’t make sense to us. I will have to say, we are at every instance of the universe throughout its chronology. In every clock tick in every snapshot of history. Don’t force yourself to think of time as linear. That was a limitation imposed by our primitive human brain. Our brain used time to index and store information. For us, everything was yesterday, today or tomorrow. That distinction was an illusion. It was merely a mechanism to store more data more efficiently within us so that we could better fare as a species whose only concern was about the 3 dimensions it was trapped in.”

“We don’t experience time now?”

“Remember the story about the photon I once told you when we were cuddling in our cosy cabin in Iceland after skiing in the snow for hours? We are just like a photon.”

Harry could remember. A photon doesn’t experience time. For it, the big bang and the heat death of the universe and everything in between is instantaneous. So just like that, both he and Evelyn were sort of like everywhere, every time.

“How long have we been beaming?”

“Time doesn’t make sense at these scales Harry. But if it makes you feel any good, then, I would say, at least a trillion trillion trillion years, and we have been talking all this while”

“So this is indeed the afterlife. And you seem you seem to have all the knowledge to seemingly answer all the questions I had and all the questions I will ever have. Are you…eh..GOD ?”

Evelyn cut him off with her chuckle. She raised her head from his chest and cupped his face between her palms and gently kissed his lips. He could feel her warm breath on his face. “I am not your god you idiot. I am the silly girl that fell in love with you and ran away with you to watch the end of the world together”. She kissed him again passionately.” Do I feel real now?"

“Come on. Let’s get back inside.” She stood up, tightened the sweater around her, and extended her arms towards him. He took her hand and stood up. Both of them walked back to their cabin on the hillside.

“We all are accumulated information, Harry. That’s all we ever were. We are scattered information tending towards symmetry. Each of us plays our own roles in the chronicle of the universe, with the information contained in us. Thermodynamically, as the universe tends towards entropy, or total disorder, what life has been doing all this while is acting against that entropy. Whatever life ever has touched, we were like an infection. We create monuments from stones that would have otherwise been scattered across space and time; we encode information in miraculous degrees of cohesion as genetic information to pass it along to future generations. We print books with huge volumes of encoded information. We created the internet to store humongous amounts of data from various ages. Whatever we have ever touched, order and structure followed. It is not the trait of the universe. Universe is supposed to tend towards total disorder, and Life is an act that goes against that concept of disorder. Like an unbalanced equation”

“What’s our purpose, Evelyn”? Harry asked. “To be trapped in this torturing nothingness for the whole eternity?”

“Harry, before our species went extinct, efforts were underway to find the grand unification theory. To find a single framework, a master equation that could explain all the events of the universe. Our species spent centuries formulating one. With Newton, with Hawking, and with Einstein. The holy grail of physics. It was the noblest quest of all times. Solving it would have given us access to higher dimensions. But every time, it failed because there was always an anomaly that yielded meaningless infinities when the equations were tested. Like something was still missing. Like a set of rogue hidden variables. Our species was extinct before we could sort it out. ”

Harry and Evelyn sat in front of their cabin. The firewood was still smouldering in the fire pit and both of them sat nearby the fire. The heat from the pit provided a blanket of comfort from the drab weather outside. Harry had no more questions. He was determined to listen to whatever Evelyn would say. He had always loved the way she explained science. With her, he always felt home.

“Just like I said, we are information, Harry. We both are two quite relevant accumulation of information. There is a symmetry out there – a symmetry visible in all the equations man has ever been able to sort out when he arranged pieces of knowledge together in specific ways using his intelligence. The complicated hidden order in the chaos. As the complexity of that particular pattern was beyond our intellectual level of understanding when we were humans, the symmetry was practically invisible to us. The beautiful hidden symmetry all physicists in the world would have happily called “God”. We are parts of that symmetry – which is a complicated web of information. We complete the symmetry. Just think of it like we are the two missing pages of an important book. Without these pages, the theory is incomplete”

“And what happens when we do that? When we complete the symmetry?”

“You won’t even understand even if I told you that. It’s a spectacle that only you will witness. Not me.”

“Why not Evelyn?” Harry asked, confused. “I thought we would be together forever”

Evelyn smiled. “Do you know why they were not able to unify the theory? “She asked.

“No"

“You are the collection of information that represents the anomaly, Harry. They haven’t been able to solve the theory of everything because of you. I have access to all the knowledge in the world, in cosmic scales that you won’t be able to comprehend using your pattern of the neo-mammalian brain. I know the position and momentum of every atom in the Universe. I can put that data together in any number of infinite ways and process it as I see fit. Think of me like a computer with infinite processing power which can see and brute-force all the data present in the universe into all its states in no time. I can see all the permutations of every atom in the universe arranged into information in every possible way – giving me access to what we used to call past, present and future —except yours. It is only you and your purpose I haven’t yet been able to comprehend. It seems that my purpose was to just seek you out and complete you. Not to comprehend you”.

Sitting there in front of the cabin in the lonely hillside, Harry looked up to the starry night. Out there, he and Evelyn were beaming out, embraced in an eternal journey across the cosmos, across all space and all time, in search for their end.

“We meeting up in that remote Icelandic village was an event with a high probability. You could say that we were destined to meet.” Evelyn said. “My entire life, I have been searching for this anomaly. Now as all things end, and with the last proton decaying away, as the universe becomes nothing more than a sea of photons tending towards the same temperature, I can see what is in place and what is not. It is you”.

“What do you mean, I am an anomaly Evelyn? That you can’t make sense of the information present within me?”

“Yes. No matter how many times I tried, I can’t” .Evelyn replied. “So all I have is a best guess. My last guess. The very last way I can piece together this knowledge. The last of all combinations. I take it that all I am supposed to do is compute all these information and arrive at this conclusion. Once I give you that, I guess, I will be gone”.

Harry's heart gave him a jolt. “Gone where Evelyn? This is eternity, remember?”

“Harry, entropy is not complete because we both are still structured information present within this universe. Once I provide you with the data that completes you, I will drift away into nothingness. I don’t have any more purpose to serve. I remember this. Like a memory from beyond infinite cycles of calculations. I was like you; there was someone else to guide me...Before our universe existed. Before the big bang and the first epoch. I can’t seem to remember much”.

“Before what?”

“Harry. The answer to that question is the final result of my calculations. My last computation. My guess. The last piece of information I can ever give you.”

“And after that?”

“Once you have that, I will wither away and both you and I will be complete”

Harry looked at her. He felt like he wasn’t talking to Evelyn anymore.

 “Are you the girl I loved?”. He asked. The flickering fire from the pit was illuminating her face with godly grace. Her beautiful face reflected her sadness. He could say that whatever part of Evelyn that was left in her, was in deep pain.

“I am. And I am also much more than that. And I love you too.” She replied, looking at him.

Their eyes locked for a little while as both of them acknowledged the difficult truth. Their time together has come to an end. 

Harry nodded, giving her the silent permission to provide him with the last piece of knowledge.

The very last piece of ordered information before the heat death of the universe. 

Evelyn lowered her eyes, and with extreme sadness, she continued. “Contained within you is the wave function of an entire universe, but not this world. You are the origin point of something else. All the information and symmetry variables required for the next epoch. Can’t you see it, Harry? The nature of intelligence. It builds up like bubbles in a pond. All the intelligence in the universe merged together. It is me and you. Encoded within you is the wave function of an entire universe, pulsating towards its last collapse, the final symmetry breaking to yield the one single outcome.”

As Evelyn passed that knowledge to him, Harry knew that it was with her dying breath. Her purpose was served. She had calculated the last combination, yielding the last result, a process in which she had removed herself from the equation. Something clicked inside him too. It felt like a rush of energy surging through his entire body.

She stood there, In front of the cabin, by the flickering fire. Her watery eyes had overflown and had messed up her mascara.

This is goodbye. Both of them knew. Her existence had became meaningless. She hugged him one last time. The consciousness of the dead girl he loved reached back to him from beyond an infinity of years, from beyond the veil of the very last pieces of ordered data, to bid him farewell.

The next instant, she turned into a silhouette and then disappeared into the blackness of the night...

His heart burst. The last piece of coherent ordered information that belonged to this universe- that was her- she is gone. The love of his life. She is gone.

As he looked up at the sky one last time, the stars had started to flicker out and fade. The hills in the distance too started to fade away and the snow melted into nothingness as the cocoon that protected him through his trillions of years of cosmic journey was separated off him. The distant memory of his last week with the girl of his dreams in a remote Romanian village shattered into a million pieces. A memory from trillions and trillions of years ago.

As Evelyn melted away into chaos, entropy had completed its journey. The universe couldn’t get more disordered. Temperature cooled down to absolute zero as time became meaningless.

The memories of her that existed within him finally vanished away into the chaos. 

The evidence of all things that had ever existed was transformed irreversibly into disordered data.

The universe was lost forever to an incurable cosmic Alzheimer's.

In the next timeless interval, through the hyperspace, a beam of photons projected into the cold, drab and lifeless universe. 

At the edge of the unfathomable infinite and at the upper limit of all things computable, the beam hit something like an invisible wall.

Then, from an infinitely small singularity, a ball of fire started expanding out as a dense cloud of Quark-Gluon plasma, carefully governed by the fine-tuned constants consisted within him- the leftover data of the previous universe. It was like arranging the greatest computer program of the entire universe and executing it. From his wave function, new symmetries started to emerge. As the plasma condensed, the primordial first epoch ticked. The photons broke free and-

THERE WAS LIGHT.

 — — — — — — — — — — — -

THE END.