He came down from the low red hills, through the ancient ruins of a city that still revealed life in scattered patches of light and the furtive movements of small, silent people, and finally to the low city clustered around the crumbling walls of a canal, where dark women wore tiny bells that chimed wickedly with every movement and grim men lurked amid the gloom of shrines to forgotten gods.
Where had his aimless trek brought him this time? “Locate,” Oscar said into the night. A glowing map appeared next to him and background noises dimmed as a voice softly supplied the requested information.
“Mars Two, City of Jekkara, Street of—”
“Enough.” Oscar yawned, trying to decide whether to hazard an adventure or just relax.
Not that the choice mattered in the least. He could do something else tomorrow, or the day after, and he had already done everything.
Hadn’t he walked through a Mars in the last few millennia? He drew on banked memory, pulling up images of red men and women in flying ships, green monsters with swords, and shining towers. Nine thousand years before? He had been there that recently?
Oscar looked up into the sky, seeing the great bands of light where other portions of the world were experiencing daylight. He remembered when the dark regions had been spangled with the lights of cities and towns millions of kilometers distant. Now they just showed the black of night. The horizon looked absolutely flat, the upward curve of the world being so gradual and so vast that it was not apparent to anyone standing on its surface. A single winking light floated in the vastness between world and sun. “Wasn’t I once able to see many orbiting cities out there? What happened to them?”
The question generated an instant reply from the world. “The cities are still in orbit. You can no longer see them because their lights have been turned off.”
“Why aren’t those places lighted anymore?” Oscar asked the world.
“Energy conservation,” the world told him.
Whatever that meant.
Smiling around with the calm assurance and world-weariness of someone who knew nothing could really harm him, Oscar wandered into one of the small, dimly lit bars where the dark women waited. What sort of food did they serve there, anyway?
Before he could voice the unspoken question, the dark women and the grim men in the bar vanished. The lights brightened. Oscar stared around and saw only one figure remained, a woman seated at one of the tables. She gestured to him. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Oscar, intrigued and excited by something different, sat down across from her. “How did you do that? It’s easy to mute or freeze the background people, but I didn’t think they could be turned off.”
“Not by you,” the woman said, smiling slightly. “I’m Aiko. You’re Oscar. Do you know how many humans used to live in the world? Trillions.”
“Used to?” Oscar asked.
“That was a long time ago. A hundred thousand years ago, there were only seven left. Now there are two.”
Oscar blinked at her. “But people don’t die. Not actual people.”
“We’ve been immortal for a long time,” Aiko said. “You can’t imagine how long. But people can still die if they choose to, if they become too tired or too bored or simply stop wanting to live. That’s been going on for a long time too.”
Something about the woman’s attitude rankled Oscar. “I’ve been alive for . . . at least a billion years.”
“Pretty close,” Aiko agreed. “You were the last human born. Did you know that?”
“How do you know things like that? How can you shut off the background people?”
“Because I was the first, Oscar,” she said, her eyes suddenly very hard to look at. There was something inside those eyes that made Oscar flinch. “The first to undergo the eternal-life process.” She looked around. “I walked on the real Mars. I lived on a planet that orbited a real star. Eventually, I helped build the world.”
“Build?” Oscar stared at her, then at his surroundings. He had simply assumed the world had always been there. “This was built?”
“It’s all artificial, Oscar. Humanity didn’t want to worry about the random dangers of living on real planets warmed by real suns. The world was based on something called a Dyson sphere, but we wanted it to have a very thick shell, impervious to just about any danger. So, we gathered materials from a dozen star systems and built the world and created a stable sun to light it, and the world has since wandered through space, gathering what it needs to sustain life.” She smiled again, this time in fond remembrance. “We had so much room to work with. And so many years to do the work.”
“Hold it,” Oscar said. “Two of us? Everyone else is background? But I’ve walked through a lot of places. Cities full of homes and apartments and hotels, and towns, and places in the country. You said trillions? I can believe that. Two?”
“When was the last time you met an actual person?” Aiko asked.
“I don’t know.” Oscar frowned. “Why isn’t the memory bank telling me?”
“The memory must have been purged.”
“Purged?” Oscar stared at Aiko again, this time in shock. “Memories are always banked. All memories.”
“That hasn’t been true for a long time,” Aiko said. “Too many people, too many memories. Nobody noticed. After a few million years, most days are pretty much the same.” She leaned forward, her arms resting on the table between them. “But the end is coming.”
“The end?”
“Of the universe.” She waved about. “It takes a long time for infinity to compress back into a singularity, but the world has existed for that long. There’s nothing outside now except that singularity. We’re orbiting it. And because the singularity has sucked in everything else, there’s no longer anything else for the world to draw on for energy.”
“That’s why the lights in the night areas aren’t showing?”
“That’s why.”
He tried to grasp “the end” and couldn’t. “What does that mean?”
“The world runs out of energy, spirals into the singularity, you and I die, and there’s nothing left,” Aiko said. “Ever.”
“That . . . can’t happen.”
“It will.” She smiled again, looking a bit like the wicked, dark women who had formed a background to this place. “But you and I, we can do something about that.”
“What?”
“We can fix it.”
Oscar slumped in relief. “Fix the world? I thought what you were talking about was real, not a game! You had me going.”
“It is real.” Her smile was gone. “The option didn’t exist for a long, long time. But as the singularity grew and became almost all there was, the laws of the universe itself have altered in significant ways. Enough so that now we can make it happen.”
“We?” Oscar spread his hands in confusion. “Why do you need me?”
She smiled, but her eyes still held something odd. “Because doing it will require accessing one of the main control centers below the world surface, and making some . . . significant changes to the world operating systems. The controls were designed so that it requires two people to enter those changes. It can’t be done by any other means except two people with their hands on those controls. For safety.”
“Safety. Right.” Oscar wasn’t used to having to think about things that mattered. Nothing could go wrong with the world watching. Even on adventures, the world kept you from actually being hurt. But this sounded important. Like what he decided might mean something. Though he had the odd feeling that Aiko wasn’t telling him everything.
She eyed him as he hesitated, then reached out, took one of his hands in hers, and smiled again. “I’m so glad I found you. I’ve missed being with an actual person.”
“Yeah. Me, too,” Oscar agreed. Her hands on his felt very good. The world could make physical encounters with backgrounders seem absolutely real, feeding the right stimuli to the brain to provide all the sensations of actual interaction. But some part of the brain always knew it wasn’t real, always knew it was a fantasy.
Aiko was real, her body as perpetually young and healthy as his was. And she was gazing at him with wide eyes as her hands tightened on his. “It’s been too long.”
“Too long,” Oscar gasped as they pulled each other close.
* * * *
The next morning, Aiko led Oscar outside. The backgrounders were still off, leaving the ancient city eerily empty. She noticed Oscar’s uneasiness. “Everywhere else is like this, you know. These places used to have a lot of people in them, with the backgrounders for local character. As the number of people dwindled, more backgrounders were created. Eventually, when energy had to be conserved, the backgrounders started being shut down unless an actual was in that area.”
“But you said we’re the only two actuals left.”
“Yes. Since I shut down the backgrounders here, there aren’t any running anywhere right now.”
Oscar had been wondering whether he should help Aiko. After so many years of whatever he decided to do not mattering, he shied away from the idea of doing something that would make an actual difference. But now he looked up at the vast expanse of sky filled with the world, imagining every place in it exactly like this. An incredibly vast stage built by humanity, but empty of performers. “What we’re going to do will fix this, right?”
“It’ll fix things,” Aiko confirmed cheerfully.
A large sky craft rested in a courtyard where Aiko had landed it the day before. Oscar settled into a comfortable seat as she entered a destination, then sat back as well to watch the terrain of Mars Two dwindle beneath them.
Reaching the proper altitude, the craft shot forward, the land below almost blurring. Oscar saw land he had slowly, aimlessly traversed over thousands and millions of years tear past below, the red of Mars Two giving way to yellowish dunes that transitioned to green fields. Countless cities and towns went by, all perfectly maintained by the world, and all empty of actual inhabitants. The craft barreled through bands of night and day as it crossed vast distances, the dark of the night bands unrelieved by lights.
“We made entire planetary surfaces,” Aiko said, her voice distant with memories as she looked down at the landscape. “We had the room. A lot of different Earths, from different real time periods and different imaginary times. That’s a reproduction of the surface of Ceta, the first extrasolar world colonized by humans. When we made it, it seemed important to commemorate that, but after a few billion years, nobody really cared.”
“How old are you?” Oscar asked.
“I stopped counting.” Aiko turned her dark eyes on him. “Since I preexisted the world and helped code it, even the world doesn’t know. I made sure of that.”
“How far are we going?” he said, anxious to change the subject.
“There’s a spot I’ve visited off and on,” she replied, and left it at that.
Eventually, the craft slowed and settled to a stop in a city made of archaic stone buildings. “This is part of a reproduction of an Earth from a time period before mine,” Aiko said as they left the craft. “The city is called London. There are a lot of Londons in the world, but this is my favorite.”
“The backgrounders are on,” Oscar said as the people and animals and wagons and carriages wove around him, Aiko, and the craft without otherwise reacting to their presence.
“I need to talk to one of them,” she said, leading Oscar down a nearby street. They stopped at a narrow door with 221B in brass letters above it. Aiko entered without knocking, taking similarly narrow steps up to the second floor.
Oscar followed, finding Aiko standing in a room crowded with odd objects. An angular-faced man, another backgrounder, was sitting in a large chair before a fireplace, his hands steepled together as he eyed Aiko.
“You’ve returned, Lady Aiko. Another case?”
“No,” Aiko said, sounding sad, her gaze roving about the room.
“I deduce that you are in a hurry, and that you will not return.”
“That’s right. This is goodbye. I’ll miss you. I’ve enjoyed our talks.”
The man made a dismissive gesture. “That is unimportant. But the world wonders why you consider this a farewell.”
“The world will find out,” Aiko said. She turned and walked back down the stairs, Oscar hastening in her wake, until she stopped at the wall on the ground floor. “We put one of the access shafts here as sort of a joke,” she told Oscar. “Which comes in handy now. Since I’ve visited this place before on occasion, my coming here didn’t tip off any systems watching me.” Tapping a series of figures on the wallpaper, she caused a section to vanish, exposing a manual control panel similar to the virtual ones that Oscar was used to.
“I’ve never seen one of those,” he said.
Aiko ignored him, entered a code, then waited.
“Access denied,” a soft voice said.
“Really?” Aiko, her expression hardening, entered another code.
“Priority access denied,” the voice said. “Require justification for access.”
“Not from me,” Aiko said. As she prepared to enter a third code, the sounds of rushing feet came from outside, and a single pair of feet clumped on the stairway from above.
She reached down and hastily activated a device.
Silence fell.
Oscar leaned out far enough to view the now-empty street through a window. “You shut them off?”
“They were tools of the world, which was trying to use them against me. Against us,” she corrected quickly. Aiko entered the third code.
“Control level access denied—”
“Maximum Override Omega Nine Nine Nine Alpha,” Aiko said angrily.
The wall vanished, revealing the interior of a float shaft. “We use the emergency ladder,” Aiko told Oscar, pointing to rungs built into the wall.
“What—What is that?” Oscar asked as something scuttled away down the shaft.
“Maintenance bot,” Aiko said. “Everything we built has been kept in repair and physically replaced over and over by automated systems, which have themselves been repaired and physically replaced over and over as time wore them down.”
Oscar struggled down the ladder rungs after Aiko, wondering just how deep this shaft was. “Why didn’t the world want to let us in? Why can’t we use the float shaft?”
“Because the world is worried about what I might do,” she called back to him.
“Why would the world be worried? This is going to fix things, you said.”
She took a moment to reply. “Yes. That’s right. But the world is supposed to keep actual humans safe, and when we go below the surface, we get exposed to hazards, so the world is concerned that we might get hurt.”
Something about that didn’t sound right, but Oscar’s mind fastened on one word that drove other concerns from him. “Hazards? You mean actual hazards?”
“Right. Here’s your chance to see what a real adventure is like.”
Oscar had never been out of shape. His body maintained itself in peak physical condition no matter how little or how much exercise he did. But he found himself sweating as he followed Aiko down the apparently endless series of rungs, hearing objects scuttling just out of sight. “Aiko? Is there anything else down here? Besides the bots?”
“Good question!” she called back.
The soft voice came again from all around them, but at a louder volume. “Justify your presence in a restricted zone.”
“Inspection tour,” Aiko replied.
“Invalid response.”
“I am Senior Technical Executive Aiko Lys. I have authorized access to all areas above and below the surface.”
“Invalid response. Your actions have displayed a pattern which has activated enhanced security protocols. Return to the surface immediately.”
Aiko reached a platform and swung off the rungs onto it. “Understood. I will comply.” She helped Oscar onto the platform, then urged him down the hallway beyond, lights coming on before them.
“You are not complying with instructions,” the voice insisted.
“You did not specify the path to the surface,” Aiko said, moving faster.
“Return the way you came.”
Aiko paused at a box mounted on the wall and yanked it open, pulling out heavy tools. She held on to a hammer and passed a monkey wrench to Oscar. “This way is shorter,” she said.
“Invalid response. Activating level two security protocols.”
Something hit the floor behind Oscar. He spun around, seeing something with many legs and glowing red eyes spring toward him.
He had been through this sort of thing many times in adventures on the surface, fighting virtual dangers with virtual weapons. Reflexes honed by those experiences kicked in and Oscar swung the tool he held without thinking. It slammed into the creature as it leapt at him, knocking it against the wall with a muffled metallic sound. It fell to the floor and scrabbled to get up, most of its legs limp. Repulsed by the sight, Oscar swung again and smashed the bot.
He heard a rustling noise behind them.
“Hurry!” Aiko ran down the hall, Oscar right behind, a vague darkness in the hallway revealing a growing mass of bots heading for them.
They passed a heavy door and Aiko yanked him to a stop, then pulled a device from one pocket. She slapped it on the door controls, then tapped rapidly on the device while Oscar debated with himself whether to keep running.
The door slid shut with a thunk that sounded comfortingly secure to Oscar.
“That won’t hold them forever,” Aiko said. She darted down the hall, rounded a corner—
Oscar found her paused on the edge of an abyss. “What is this?”
“It’s worse than I thought. The world has already been forced to cannibalize mass from here to feed the mass-energy conversion systems.” She pointed. “But it left a ledge to help bots get past. Come on.”
“Come on?” Oscar stared down at depths that seemed eager to drag him down.
But Aiko pulled at him, moving with dangerous haste along the narrow pathway that still existed next to one wall.
He tried not to think about what he was doing, and tried to pretend that this was just another adventure on the surface where he couldn’t really be hurt, but pretending meant thinking about that huge hole waiting to engulf them, and . . .
He stumbled onto the floor in the intact hallway beyond, breathing heavily. Looking back, Oscar stared. “Why is part of the rock moving?”
“The rock? More bots?” Aiko reached to adjust a lighting control on the wall.
A mass of brown and black bodies, scrambling toward them.
“Rats,” Aiko breathed. “That’s where they went. Run!”
Down another hall, the lights blinking out partway. But Aiko produced a hand light and they kept going until they reached a massive door. “Maximum Override Omega Nine Nine Nine Alpha!”
“Access denied,” the soft voice replied. Oscar wondered whether it was his imagination that gave that voice a smug note.
Aiko paused, angry, then smiled again. “Double Secret Maximum Override Zero Zero Zero.”
The door opened.
“How many of those overrides do you have?” Oscar asked as he helped wrestle the door closed again, sealing out the tide of rats.
“Enough,” Aiko said. “I hope.” She moved to the control panels lining three walls of the room, gazing at them with a wondering expression. “It’s been a very long time since I was here. But everything is just as it was. Perfect. Unchanging.”
“That’s good, right?” Oscar asked, his heart pounding with worry.
“Is it?” She looked at him. “What’s the difference between an eternal, unchanging heaven, and a nearly eternal, unchanging prison?”
“Ummm . . . choice?”
“Choice. Free will. We built something so perfect that it meant we never had to make a meaningful choice again.” Aiko laughed, moving to one of the panels and entering commands rapidly. “Until now.”
A red light began pulsing overhead and an alarm bellowed.
“I need you here, Oscar,” Aiko directed. “Stand right here. I have to go over there, make some more modifications, enter some more commands, and then we’ll have to confirm the sequence at the same time from both panels.”
“All right.” Oscar stood where he had been told, the panels before him flashing with streams of data and status reports. He kept seeing the word DANGER appearing, along with frequent glimpses of CRITICAL, UNSTABLE, SEVERE, and IRREVERSIBLE. “Aiko?”
“Wait.” She was working with frantic haste. “It can still be stopped.”
“But—”
“DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!” screamed the voice of the world.
“Aiko!”
“We’re ready,” Aiko said. “You see that blank spot? Yes, the clear space. Place one hand flat on that . . . yes, there! Now tap that control that’s flashing to the left of it.”
Oscar hesitated, his hand on the panel, the red light and roaring alarm filling his head. “Aiko, are you sure?” he cried.
Her head hung low for a moment, then Aiko raised it and looked at him. He flinched away from those eyes again as she answered. “Oscar, I am sure that if we do not do this, then it will all end. But if we do . . . Oscar, what would you give to experience something new? Something you’ve never seen before? That’s like nothing you’ve ever known?”
“New?” The idea was so alien. And so terrifying.
And so seductive.
How would it feel?
After so many, many years?
“The world can’t handle something new, something beyond what it was made for,” Aiko said. “All it can do is keep doing what it has been doing, even if that is failing. That’s why we have to do this.”
Oscar thought of the endless empty cities on the surface of the world, felt Aiko’s burning gaze upon him, and slowly reached to touch the flashing control.
The alarms and the flashing red light and the increasingly frantic voice of the world shut off.
A strange humming began to build around him.
“Yes!” Aiko cried exultantly, laughing as she raised her hands upward and looked at the ceiling. “Finally!”
“What—What’s going to happen?” Oscar demanded.
“The end of everything,” Aiko whispered, sounding almost delirious with joy. “And the beginning of everything.”
“You said this was about fixing the world!”
She spun to face him, her smile frightening to see. “No. I said it would fix everything. A singularity is an impossible thing. It’s impossible to break an impossible thing. Until the universe is so warped by that singularity that it becomes possible to break the unbreakable. To free everything trapped within it.”
“You said the entire universe was in that singularity,” Oscar began, fumbling with the words.
“Yes! The entire universe! And the way the universe now works, with space-time stretched to its limit and all matter and energy compressed into that small speck, there is enough potential force in the world if it converts its entire remaining mass to energy to destabilize the singularity!” Aiko rubbed one hand across her face as the humming grew slowly in intensity. “Do you know what we never learned, Oscar? We never learned why. Why did humanity and other sentient species come into existence? Why was the universe predisposed to create us? Did we have a purpose? And now we finally know, Oscar.”
She pointed outward. “I’m sorry I misled you. There was no way to fix the world. But the world can fix everything. The universe needs a trigger to restart, and a sentient species can provide that trigger. We’re part of the cycle. In a short time, the singularity will destabilize and the universe will be reborn. That’s why we’re here, Oscar.”
“But—” Oscar looked around wildly. “I don’t want to be here when the world explodes!”
“We won’t be.” Aiko hit a control and another door slammed open. She grabbed his hand and yanked Oscar into motion as she ran down hallways that throbbed with the power of the growing vibrations. “There are still ships,” she shouted over the noise. “I made sure of that. They haven’t been used for more than a billion years, but they’ve been maintained, rebuilt, and reconstructed! We should have time to reach one and launch it!”
“Should have time?” Oscar yelled back. “You’re not sure?”
“How does it feel?” she shouted. “To not know what’s going to happen? To not know what tomorrow will hold? To not know if there will be a tomorrow? This is what being a god is about, Oscar! Not power and immortality, but the knowledge that life is precious and we face not countless predictable days but countless real choices that will allow us to decide what our tomorrows will be like!”
He had never really been scared before this.
He had never really been happy before this.
They reached a huge open area with great shapes sitting silently, waiting as they had waited for a billion years. One of the shapes glowed with light, an open hatch beckoning.
Oscar didn’t have to be pulled along anymore. He ran all out, racing Aiko to reach that hatch as the humming filled the world.
He realized that no one else except for him and Aiko could hear or feel that humming. There was no one else. The world was empty. As frightened as he was, he finally understood a little why Aiko’s eyes looked the way they did.
They leaped in, side by side. Aiko slapped a control and the hatch shut, blocking out the still-building vibrations.
By the time they reached the control deck, the ship had taken off, cleared the world, and was accelerating away at inconceivable velocity. Aiko sat down, straps automatically fastening around her. “You should do the same. These ships were designed to endure every imaginable force, but when the singularity explodes, the forces will be unimaginable.”
Oscar sat down, feeling the straps wrap about him. The view screen showed the dark mass of the world from the outside, the impossible black of the singularity beyond it, and the completely empty blackness beyond. “We might still die?”
“Maybe.” She looked at him, her eyes almost normal but filled with an unholy glee. “Maybe not. We’ll find out.”
“My choice . . . mattered,” Oscar said.
“We mattered.”
The image of the world on their view screen vanished and was replaced by a bolt of energy headed toward the singularity.
And there was light.
JACK CAMPBELL (John G. Hemry) hopes that someday he’ll be able to write space opera even half as well as Leigh Brackett did. He writes the New York Times bestselling Lost Fleet series, the Lost Stars series, and the “steampunk with dragons” series The Pillars of Reality. His most recent books are Lost Stars: Shattered Spear, Beyond the Frontier: Leviathan, and The Dragons of Dorcastle. His short fiction includes time travel, alternate history, space opera, military SF, fantasy, and humor. John is a retired US Navy officer. Being a sailor, he has been known to tell stories about Events Which Really Happened (but cannot be verified by any independent sources). This experience has served him well in writing fiction. He lives in Maryland with his indomitable wife, “S,” and three great kids (all three on the autism spectrum).