1. And I Came Unto the Sea of Information

I was in a nearly limitless sea, cold and coldly lit by coruscations of green and blue, my particles and antiparticles (lightly bound by the four forces of the atom) at rest—or, better said, dormant and expectant like the elements of rudimentary life in Darwin’s “warm little pond” that had waited for a chance event to jolt them into life. In my previous existence, I had gone all to pieces (to speak in the style in use before the Digital Age). My body had been reduced to its elementary stuff, which, by a prodigiously augmented collective intelligence, I soon learned to govern. I’d had adventures in the space-time continuum—some prosaic, others exotic, all unsatisfactory. To enlarge my understanding (essential in the age of information), I had merged the data of my thoughts in the World Wide Web—surfing its countless channels and acquiring by a kind of “spidering” an encyclopedic knowledge of the cosmos, of things vast and minute and, in their sum, beyond the grasp of any one person. I was a generalist par excellence: a Renaissance man, though without the normal equipment of one. I was alone with my thoughts and suffered in silence (to speak in clichés, in which ordinary men and women take refuge and comfort).

Strengthening my intelligence inside a New York Public Library computer on a winter afternoon when the streets were rivers of slush between banks of sooted snow, I allowed myself—that is to say, my data—to be drawn further and further away from a site devoted to hypothetical particles, by the hypnotic influence of the blue hyperlinks. I was eager to learn all that I could about the subtleties—the mysteries (a word foreign to technocrats)—of my strange condition. In time (impossible to tell how long my impulsiveness carried me downstream from the source document), I had navigated thousands of electronic pages, until I drew near to a vast sea of information. I wish I could make you see that sea, how it filled the black void with waves of blue-green light beneath an equally black sky—no, not sky, for the place where the numberless data streams converged (an estuary rich in deposits of human kind’s ceaseless grappling with matter and energy, ideas and follies) was an airless confine without moon or stars—strangely silent, except for data seething in microprocessors: the background radiation of the Digital Age. There, I slept—I insist that I am a man still and subject to the regimens and habits of our species regardless of my disintegrated body! I slept and dreamed of Egypt and of Manchester, of Provence and of Tierra del Fuego, where, as a swarm of elementary particles, I had traveled. I dreamed, too, of Brooklyn, where I had lived happily with a wife and rat terrier before the catastrophe had ruined me. You ask how an atomic cloud, no matter its intelligence, could dream? I say again: Thoughts, dreams—the life of the mind waking and sleeping—are nothing but electronic impulses; that is, data!

During that time, which to me was timeless, I was like the jellyfish trailing portions of itself in the current, aided or impeded by wind. Not that there was a wind inside the enormous data-storage unit in which I bathed (to speak picturesquely), although we—I mean the collective consciousness that constituted my sorely divided self—were aware of a noise that might be mistaken for wind, produced by numerous fans ventilating the computers’ overheated bodies. And as the jellyfish searches the medium in which it moves with its tentacles, so did I send my sensitive quarks and leptons into the electronic sea, nourishing myself on its salts and ions and restoring my flagging energy with electrolytes—all without waking; for just as your dreaming will sometimes register the disturbances and alarms invading sleep from the outside world, so did my unconscious self monitor the information in which I steeped. Thus it was that I came into contact with another data swarm, whose name was Boyd.

2. As Distance Might Be Measured Where All Is Immeasurable

As a convenience, I will set down my exchange with Boyd as I would an ordinary conversation. Ordinary conversation, of course, was impossible in that remote sea: As pure data, none of us had the equipment of speech or audition. And when I say that the sea was remote, I do not mean that it lay at an enormous distance from the user interface inside the New York City library where I had slipped into the data stream. Not necessarily. I have no way of knowing the location of the multitude of servers I visited during my headlong hypertex-tual flight. I may have browsed my way to Bombay, Tokyo, or Timbuktu—or it may be that I never left the library’s own databases. The remoteness of the electronic sea from its sources cannot be ascertained by nautical miles, clock, or calendar—not even by the length of Ethernet cables. It is, rather, the effect in time of pages proliferating madly—link by link—throughout the World Wide Web: a luminous corridor that may, in fact, be endless. Boyd approached me as a man might in a small boat—a felicitous image that I shall use hereafter to describe my relationship to others on that dark sea simmering with electronic impulses.

“Hi, I’m Arnold Boyd. I haven’t seen you before. Where were you converted?”

I didn’t understand.

“Your scan,” he said. “I went under in Santa Fe—with my sister. The two of us together. We’d never been to the sea. Not that this is anybody’s idea of the sea. Still, it’s not the desert. The desert gets monotonous after a while. Not that this doesn’t get on your nerves . . . I like your boat idea.”

“You can read my mind?” I asked.

“It’s all data—right? Thoughts and stuff. Mind reading is just data transfer—yours to mine and vice versa. Not that it doesn’t get monotonous after a while. After a while, you just want to be off by yourself so’s not to have to process other people’s thoughts. My own are boring enough.”

“Where is your sister?”

“Browsing the Dance. She was with the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet right up to the time she went under. It’s in her blood. Not that she has any now. It’s all she cares about. Lucky for her, there’re thousands of pages on the subject. She’s into the Javanese at the moment. I don’t care for the stuff. What I like is ice hockey, prizefighting, basketball, sports in general. I spend lots of time taking in the games, the bouts, the matches. If you can call it ‘time.’”

“What do you mean by ‘went under’?” I asked him.

“The full-mental scan. The Big Data Conversion. They call it something else where you come from?”

Suspicious, he came closer, wanting to sift my mind.

“What year is it?” I asked, pushing on the oars (figuratively speaking) to open a little more space between us, though I had no idea of the strength of his mind’s reach—its capacity to spider other’s data fields (to speak à la mode).

“Hard to tell,” he said. “But when I went under, it was 2170.”

3. A Brief Discourse on Time

The future is an annex of the past, which survives in the data streams. Having come to rest in the second decade of the twenty-first century, I—that is to say, my potential remained, without measurable loss, in stasis while time continued its inexorable progress toward the end of the universe (which may or may not be the end of time itself). Simply put, I was like a man asleep on a boat carried along on the stream of time. The boat is the past—and you can see plainly how it remained intact while—moment by moment—it entered the future, which is nothing more than another potential waiting to be, briefly, unsatisfactorily realized. When at the end of a protracted sleep I sensed the presence of Boyd (that is, acquired definitive bytes of his unique data), I woke to find that 150-odd years had elapsed. I was in a future moment—undeniably so; but the boat in which I had traveled held within it the moment of time past in which I had logged on. As I went in search of Boyd’s sister, I was in the twenty-second and also in the twenty-first centuries. In the sea of information and also in New York. It was just the same for the Time Traveler in Wells’s story: Regardless of the remote future he visited, he was always a man of his time.

4. Entertaining the Possibility of Love, Again

From the distance came the sound of a gamelan orchestra. The music accorded well with the faint seething of the sea of information and the soft, fitful noise of the ventilation fans. Everywhere was dark, except for intermittent flashes of vivid green light below the surface. (While the sea was a virtual one, it behaved in many ways like a body of water of immense depth, perturbed by wind and current. I was reminded, in fact, of having fished one night for blues in a small boat out of sight of land.) I had been rowing for an indeterminate time in the direction Boyd had indicated. I wanted to see his sister, whose name was Irene. Always, I have pictured women unknown to me as attractive, before my eyes could confirm the truth of my supposition. I was hopeful, now, that Irene would be, at the very least, pretty. You are doubtless infuriated once more by my fantasies. “What can a man without eyes know of a woman’s looks?” you ask. “And by what standard may a unit of information be judged pretty?” Must I remind you that what has been habitual in a man remains so—even in his direst extremity? A romantic once, I am a romantic still!

I have recorded elsewhere my thoughts concerning love. Let’s say that love—both the emotion and the act—were important in my past life (regardless of intensity of passion or degree of prowess) and they would be again if for no other reason than to lessen my loneliness in this space of starkly partitioned functionality. I had, therefore, high hopes for Irene. “But what of your wife?” you ask. And now it is my turn to be annoyed, for my wife, our rat terrier, the garden with its brilliant beds of phlox—all property movable and immovable—have long since vanished in time.

The source of the music, a MP3 file of a recorded gamelan orchestral performance, was very near. I shipped oars (in a manner of speaking) and let the boat move forward according to Newton’s first law, into a virtual reality with sufficient strength to deceive me into believing I had landed on the beach at Plengkung.

“Hi,” I said to a young woman clad colorfully in the data of a Javanese dancer. At first glance, she was no more than a severely pixilated image moving in the darkness, but after interpreting it in my CPU, the artifact resolved into a woman performing the “Manipuren,” in which a shepherdess dances in hopes of beguiling the Lord Krishna into favoring her with his gaze. I was pleased to see that the girl was pretty.

The ardor of Irene’s movements, which were at once seductive and elegant, increased at the sound of my voice. The boat having beached (I must remain faithful to the metaphor if I am to be understood), I stepped out onto firm ground where, a short distance away, Irene was making the angular gestures characteristic of the art. I thought I saw her blush. Maybe she mistook me for the Hindu god himself, for I, too, would be a pixilated image until her motherboard could process my visual data. The moment before visual resolution was always tentative and ambiguous. Or perhaps I only imagined that she had acknowledged my presence in a manner so gratifying to male vanity. (I tell you I am, even now, subject to the weaknesses of my sex!) The MP3 file exhausted, the music and the dancer ceased at almost the same instant.

“Hi,” I repeated stupidly. I detest the casual vulgarities of e-mail messaging, of texting, and chat—the newspeak of the Digital Age: hi, thnx, and mystifications such as SGTM, BTAIM, PMFJI, TTYL, SFSG, O RLY, not to mention emoticons!

“Hi,” Irene replied.

We had each other in focus now. And as she took a step toward me, I wondered if, at long last, I were to find love among the particles.

5. The Persistence of Boredom in Time to Come

Neither the moon nor stars, which transfigure night on earth, were there. But as I rowed across the black sea faintly illuminated as though by Saint Elmo’s fire—or by fish following incandescent paths whose origins and destinations were as inscrutable to me as would be thoughts in the mind of God (or of an enormous artificial intelligence capable of governing planets and atoms, macrocosms and microcosms)—I fell into a kind of trance, imagining myself to be out on the middle of a lake, at night, with a girl whom I would shortly kiss. My cheeks were fanned by soft breezes (I forgot the ventilation fans—forgot, also, our dimensionless existence), and I relished the odor of clove and nutmeg borne by breezes from the Maluku Islands—mixed subtly with the tang of salt and ions.

“It’s all a fantasy!” you shout, incensed by the richness of description. “The girl, the boat—nothing but a product of your sick, self-deluded mind.”

I would answer you in this way: “They are neither more nor less real than anything else in the world of pixels, of bytes and gigabytes, of electronic devices and imaging.”

“But––”

“Is a CT scan of my brain unreal? Is its reality less than the brain it images—less than your idea of me?”

I shipped oars and turned around to look at Irene. “I believe in you,” I said. “I believe that you are sitting in the boat with me—here and now.”

She smiled, and I was once more grateful that she was pretty.

“But you––”

No more of you and your interrogation! I am switching you off.

For a long while, I looked at Irene’s face, wanting to imprint my memory with its lovely image at the very highest resolution.

“It’s boring,” she said after a lengthy pause.

“What is?” I asked.

“Sitting here. It’s so quiet, and dark.”

“I’ve been lonely,” I said, taking her hand.

“But there’s so much to do in cyberspace; so many fascinating people! Yesterday, I visited Pavlova; the day before, Petipa. Tonight, I’m attending the premiere of Le Coq d’Or. In Moscow, in 1909.”

“What about love?” I asked, squeezing her hand with passion enough to make her cry ouch.

“I lost interest in love,” she said with a shrug of indifference. “It’s a side effect of the Big Data Conversion.”

And as if she were weighing anchor, she pulled up from the dusky depths between her full breasts (to speak wishfully) an iPod. For a third time since my metamorphosis, love among particles was proved to be an impossibility. Dejected, I rowed her back to the beach while she listened through a set of earbuds to The Rite of Spring.

I reminded myself that I was no longer in the future, that I was in the present and also in the past, which swaddled me like something warm and familiar. The past is always with us, I told myself, even as Le Coq d’Or is always receiving its 1909 premiere. It’s true. If this were only a fantasy—an invention all my own—then I would have taken Irene in my arms out there on the sea and kissed her, and she, she would have sighed.

6. Inside, the Universe Is Also Expanding

“You must be careful of It,” said Mr. Ogilvy.

“What ‘It’?”

“It,” he repeated, giving me to understand that he would not or could not say more.

“Where is It?”

“Outside,” he said, glancing upward. “Beyond.”

I thought his mysteriousness tiresome, and told him so. He shrugged as if to say my opinion of him was of no consequence.

“Thankfully, we have our carapace,” he went on, just as mysteriously as before.

“What do you mean, carapace?”

“The hardware. And what lies outside and beyond is It, which must not be treated lightly.”

Ogilvy reminded me of a certain type of person I had known during my working life—men, mostly, who pretended to some secret knowledge denied the rest of us. Like him, they were masters of smirk and swagger. He did everything except lay a finger aside his nose and wink to insinuate the existence of matters that must remain unsaid.

“What’s out there?” I asked him. “Besides It.”

“No one knows. No one can even be sure of what year it is outside. I went under in 2167. August twentieth. I was among the first.”

His self-satisfaction was enormous. I wanted to knock him into the sea with an oar. I would have liked to watch him drown.

“It maybe the twenty-third century, or the fortieth,” he continued. “Or—who knows?—we may have outlived time. We may have come out the other side of it.”

He told me how it was in the years toward the end of the twenty-second century. Minerals, the soil, vegetation, oil—then water, then food, and finally breathable air—all depleted. Mankind—the animal kingdom—would not survive the exhaustion of the earth and its resources. He told me how imaging and scanning devices had developed beyond what anyone even twenty years earlier could have foreseen. Digital representations of tissue and organs by the “visible light” of C-scan and MRI equipment had become, by 2160, full-mental scans so data-rich that the mind’s entirety of thought, memory, dreams, affective life, the manifold aspects of personality could be converted to strings of highly compressed, lossless data. Full-mental scanning was a destructive process: The human body was destroyed. But bodies were doomed anyway. Organic life on the planet was finished. They had begun with the best minds, minds that would contribute to the survival of the species as it was now defined: by information. Quality of information determined the elect. People with minds that could be depended on to refresh the World Wide Web’s pages and to augment them were the first to be converted. Minds deemed unfit for the conservation and extension of information were left alone—that is, to perish inside their nonsustainable bodies when the air, or the water, or the food finally ran out. It was eugenics all over again, only data had replaced genes. Inorganic, inexhaustible data. It was the full flowering of the Digital Age, which had begun in my time, at the end of the twentieth century. At first, to make a pretense of equality, they had held annual lotteries, thereby admitting ordinary men and women to the Ark, as it came inevitably to be called, according to the democratic law of chance. In that way, Boyd, Irene, and the insufferable Mr. Ogilvy had gone under. Their undistinguished minds could contribute nothing original or useful to the sea of information, which was thought to be as immense as the universe itself and, like it, to be expanding. Only the unceasing propagation of Web pages could populate the emptiness of that sea, which, after a time, came to replace the old idea of the universe. That infinite space could be housed by hardware—by Ogilvy’s “carapace”—was a paradox that troubled no one. Ogilvy’s “secret knowledge” does not account for everything in this history. His mind is ordinary, as I told you, and irony is beyond him. I’ve conflated what he told me with what I later learned—a discovery I’ll make in its proper place. This is a story I’m telling you, after all! (I wish its language were sensual, but I am among the dead.)

“Got to go,” said Ogilvy, who reminded me at that moment of the self-important and harried Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (When I squinted, he became as garishly pixilated as the rabbit’s waistcoat.) “I’ve scheduled a chat with the Great Books Society on Valley of the Dolls. And let me give you a friendly warning: Confine your navigation to the main channels if you don’t want to end up neutralized by antivirus software.”

“What happened to the natural world?” I shouted after him.

He hurried off to the chat room, as though unwilling even to conceive of such a thing. (The pertinent Web pages had been expunged long before from the digital record.) And yet he had acknowledged the inconceivable, if only far below the seat of his consciousness, where fancies and leftover dream figments included a field of sunflowers, a bird I think was a pigeon, and a river winding among green trees—its lucid depths revealing, here and there, a fish. As I had sifted the chaotic fragments, I even saw a tiger! Ogilvy disappeared into his separate darkness, leaving me determined to take a look outside.

7. “It” Is the Name of Their Fear

I have told elsewhere how I have only to exit a computer by a user interface and, once outside, decompress my data in order to resume existence as a swarm of subatomic particles. For the first time since my transformation, I felt lucky. Had I undergone the Big Data Conversion, like much of humankind in the twenty-second century, I would have remained inside the machine—apparently forever, unless time, even in cyberspace, will one day end. (Love, too, is said to be endless.) Inside was without light. Outside was a large room: windowless, with white walls, white ceiling, gray floor—silent except for the hum of fluorescent tubes, the soft drone of air conditioning, the small digestive noises of information churning inside microprocessors; a room empty of furniture except for sleek chromium tables supporting mainframes and servers and, here and there, a wheeled, backless chair. In time, the silence was broken by the opening and closing of a door, followed by footsteps on foam tiles. A man stepped into the room. He wore white crepe-soled shoes and white overalls, on the back of which was imprinted in large black letters: IT. He sat on one of the backless chairs and looked at a monitor, intermittently clicking or scrolling with a mouse. I drew near him until my particles were within his sphere of consciousness: a plasma ball luminous, for me, with his thoughts, which I could also taste as the tang of positive and negative ions. And as I had done in the presence of Rutherford in Manchester and in the infinitely more desirable company of dw3t-ntr in Nubia so many centuries earlier, I read his mind. He was scanning for viruses and—on the frontier of consciousness, where random associations and dreams harass reason—worried about a rare polymorphic-encoded virus that may have eluded Information Technology’s interceptors. The technician (a brother in the Order of Information) refused to accept the possibility advanced by some younger members that one or another of the disaffected groups within IT (lawless misfits and malcontents, thankfully small in number) had introduced a new, malicious strain undetectable by current scanner technology. That there might be an organized resistance working to overthrow IT and, ultimately, destroy the data fields was unthinkable. I confess that the politics of that place in time did not interest me. If there were a resistance, I wished it well. Maybe the old wariness that had caused me to remain aloof, the shyness that had culminated in a pathological reserve persisted. Why not, if the past—mine—accompanied me no matter how distantly I traveled into history or into the world’s future? (Don’t words themselves carry their origins into the future, though none but linguists may remember them?) For myself, I wanted only to return to 2012 and see my wife worrying over her flowers.

The technician turned suddenly in his chair as a man might who has sensed an alien presence. My particles were still in contact with his electromagnetic field, which trembled and billowed in a bluish fountain of excited particles. In this way, I made my mind known to him:

I am from the past. I was changed into particles, and then I was converted into a data string inside a computer at a New York City public library. Have you ever heard of New York? It was a city in America. Does it still exist? Does America? Are there cities yet? I arrived in your time, here, suspended in a data stream. I did not go under; I was not scanned. That’s why I can exit the computer and reform as a particle cloud inside your space. I want to go back. I want to know if there is anyone in your time who knows how to reverse the disintegration process that changed me from a man to a dust cloud. I want to be reformatted into what I used to be, and I want to go back home to Brooklyn. I’m sick—my heart is. You cannot imagine how lonely it is to be a broken man. A man who—for no reason he can fathom—has gone completely to pieces.

He had not understood. He had sat with a hand cupped to his ear, like someone hard of hearing. My thought transference having failed, he took from a gray metal cabinet a synthetic voice generator, which he plugged into an offline computer. I understood that he wished me to resume my digital existence so that I might speak my mind to him aloud. I did so, and the device voiced what I had attempted to communicate to him by thought alone.

“What you ask is impossible,” he said when I had finished. “There may have been a time at the end of the last century when science could have reintegrated you. But for a long time now, science has been developing in a single direction: data control. We are not an advanced civilization; we are only a highly computerized one. ‘IT is power’: The doxology and benediction of our order begins with those words. There may be specialized minds in there,” he said, pointing to the computer bank, “which can help you, but the order would never risk waking them.”

“They’re asleep?” I asked.

“To the practical application of their specialties. They revel in speculation, in theoretical knowledge; but they are forbidden to apply it. They collate new information; they refresh their databases; they enlarge the sea of information through the Hypertext. The sacred Hypertext is the underlying reality of our order and the central tenet of our faith. It is the Digital Age’s version of the hypostasis of the old Christian thought. Nearly three centuries ago, the founders of our order chose to remain outside to safeguard the data. For it, many brothers and sisters suffered martyrdoms of hunger, thirst, suffocation. We are like the ancient monasteries where, during the Dark Ages of the old history, information was preserved.”

The technician was a fleshy man, who looked like someone who deprived himself of few of life’s benisons.

“And now?” I asked him. “How is it now, outside, on earth nearly three centuries later?”

Instead of answering, he admonished me: “Remember that ‘IT is power,’ and we have only to activate the sleep mode to control the data.”

8. Guardians of the Data Shall Inherit the Earth

Had this been the Atomic Age, the walls would have been sheathed in lead; but they were of cinder block only, and in my fragmented condition, I penetrated them without difficulty. Outside was summer as I remembered it—not as it was in 2012, not in Brooklyn anyway, but on a back country road in Pennsylvania, riding in a 1948 Ford with my parents. That was . . .1957 or ’58. We stopped the car and unwrapped sandwiches from their wax paper and cracked open hard-boiled eggs and ate on a Philadelphia Inquirer spread beneath the trees. Cows lolled on the other side of a wire fence, its rusty barbs nearly hidden by forsythia and columbine; and sheep fled a shadow’s scythe across the grass as a wind, unfelt by us on the loamy earth, drove clouds across the blue uplands of an August afternoon. (Summer rests, languidly, in sentences—in a language of heat and light, voice of birds, noise of insects, scent of grass, and stink of late summer’s decay: a language alien to computer programs with their algorithms of winter.) My particles swarmed like gnats across the meadows of timothy and clover, where the low, white, windowless buildings of IT: Northeastern Sector stood in silence. Cows there were, and sheep also, as in that other, distant summertime. On the margin of the field, trees climbed into the bright air’s upper stories, green leaves swelling with wind. The strong force made stronger to bind them, my elementary particles flew like a formation of birds over the trees and saw, trembling in the hot afternoon, a town lying against a river. There, I discovered brothers and sisters of the Order of Information living in abundance. There were wind- and watermills, children playing in the lanes, dogs sleeping in the shade of elm trees and flowering locust, whose sweet smell delighted me. After martyrdoms of thirst, hunger, and suffocation, the order had flourished—its members inheriting the land, which was once more fat.

I didn’t need to read the mind of any of the townspeople to know that—with population reduced by full-mental scanning almost to that of before the Industrial Revolution—the earth, in time, was able to renew its resources, while members of the order, inclined by tradition to austerity, made few demands on the strengthening environment. And the data endured—for what purpose, I couldn’t guess, unless as sacrament, as the raison d’être for the order’s existence. Eden had come again, at least here, to the Northeastern Sector. At least for a few. I don’t know if, for earth’s sake, it was right that it should have been so, or not. I’m glad that the decision had not been mine to make.

9. Alone at the End of Information

I returned to the sea of information to sleep while the stream of time lifted the boat in which I lay and carried me out into the future. What woke me, I cannot tell, unless it was the end to motion that came when entropy reached zero—that is, when the processing of data no longer yielded information. The strings of data lay dormant. Inert, but not dead. They could be reanimated if entropy were increased—meaning, if unpredictability were reintroduced into the system. Unpredictability is a measure of life, of possibility, while death is the only absolutely predictable state for organic matter. The future in which I woke was dark, motionless, and silent; the sea of information frozen, its electronic currents arrested. Existence was now at its most impoverished: Anything less would be Meaninglessness, like a sentence whose grammatical structure is destroyed—its words loosed into disorder. The system having timed out, there remained only the end of time itself to annihilate every last byte of data and to purge them from memory. The computer hardware—Ogilvy’s carapace—had become a catacombs. The tender organism was out of its shell.

I pulled myself together and fled—my data reformatting themselves as particles on the other side of the server, which was silent, its processing of information stalled. We—I was inside a white, windowless, atmospherically controlled room. But it was not the same room where I had spoken my mind to the brother-technician. This lay far below the earth’s surface in one of the many data-storage vaults built inside disused coal mines at the end of the twentieth century. I ascended by a ventilation shaft and came out onto the ruin of a city. I saw no one—not the least sign of men and women. It might have been the moon I wandered over, except for the deer grazing shyly on shoots of forsythia. The natural world, which had taken hold, tentatively, centuries earlier for the privileged few left outside to control the data, had triumphed over them. Earth, at long last, had rid itself of humankind. Time would be shaped by other than our desires. Or not shaped at all, but given over to entropy at its most unpredictable. What age this might be in which I wandered all alone or what age it might herald for the balance of time, I couldn’t say. But the many Ages of Man were finished, and I knew with unaccountable certainty that there would be no more of them. Information, too, was finished and also language, unless it was the purely sensuous language of animals that, according to Jakob Boehme, had been spoken in Eden.

“Maybe this is only a misanthrope’s happiest dream,” you say. “Maybe you’ll wake once again in the year 2012 and see from the bedroom window your wife pulling off her gardening gloves as she walks across the flagstones toward the kitchen to make breakfast.”

Perhaps. But somehow I feel that the truth is just as I have told it: that I have come to the end.