On the last night of the world, the gods decreed for themselves a revel, a final masquerade in which they took on their long-discarded human forms and spent themselves in orgiastic and drunken festivity. It was a wake for spacetime itself.

The numbers of the gods had dwindled through the long middle age of the Universe. Each was a vast and unique information structure, grown from a merely human seed. Augmented and elaborated first in magnitude and then in kind, each became a god, a single mind as complex as a civilization or an entire ecosystem, with instrumentality capable of manipulating individual molecules or entire galaxies. A wave of transformation had spread out from the birth-world of the gods, a phase-change that swept through all space-time and transformed it to the liking of the gods. Their capabilities were bounded only by the limits of what was possible.

Yet those limits proved confining enough. The gods had known, while still seeds in the womb of Earth, that the very matter they were composed of was not immortal. They conjectured, and later demonstrated, that the protons constituting baryonic matter were unstable, and would decay over the course of the protracted lifetimes of the gods. As time progressed, the gods knew, their very substance would grow more and more radioactive and less reliable. Information, the real essence of the gods, would be lost. In the end, the gods themselves would die. This, they could not bear.

They consumed whole galaxies seeking the underlying mechanisms of their doom, and finding them, found they could change nothing. Physics had graven its laws in the substrate of spacetime itself. The instability that accumulated in the proton came from a source the gods could neither locate nor dam. Baryonic matter was provably doomed.

The gods contrived a reprieve. One who styled himself Perdurabo discovered a way to spread the instability among all of the remaining baryons as it accumulated. Linked by a hyperspatial network of equipotential conduits, all of the baryons of existence would age together, in lockstep... none could grow any more unstable than any other. When they decayed, they would all decay at once... spectacularly.

The gods had traded slow dissolution for a final cataclysm. Their Universe would live fast and die young. The Stabilization cost the gods much -- enacting it consumed fully half of their remaining baryons -- but it bought them time to work on the problem of encoding consciousness in non-baryonic matter. Leptons -- electrons and mesons -- were immune to the accumulation of instability that doomed the protons and neutrons. If the gods could find out how to build new minds from these unwieldy members, they could perhaps survive the final blast.

The problem was the liquidity of leptonic matter. Even as the Universe cooled to near absolute zero, the particles from which the gods hoped to build their new selves remained intractably fluid and evanescent, refusing to form well-behaved machinery of any kind. The gods worked on this problem for a period of time longer than their entire previous existence. The gods had already long traced the perimeter of possibility; all physical law was known to them. Within that perimeter was the rich fractal space of all physically possible phenomena, so vast and complex that it was impossible for them to know a priori whether or not there was a solution to their problem within it. The gods continued to experiment, and explore, and worry, while around them the stored energy of the stars and galaxies burned low and the hidden pressure of apocalypse mounted higher inside every proton.

When only a sliver of the lifetime of the baryonic universe remained to it, the god known to his fellows as Excelsius published what he claimed was a proof that leptonic minds were impossible. There was disagreement from several quarters, but most of the gods were convinced. It came as a relief to some; it triggered madness in others. Religion was rediscovered, as the gods were faced for the first time in an eternity with the prospect of death being imposed upon them, arbitrarily and without exception, by the Universe.

The idea spread among the gods that the end of eternity called for a fête, a spectacular wake to end all wakes, a funeral for existence itself. As the true diehards continued to explore increasingly desperate lines of research, the remaining gods -- only a few million had survived the Stabilization -- gathered in a single galaxy, a single solar system, for their revel.

The nominal host of the extravaganza was Perdurabo, author of the Stabilization. The solar system chosen was in fact the site of the instrument of the Stabilization itself. Each of the gods created a human form and sent it to the earthlike planet built especially for the occasion, where Perdurabo had constructed a palace the size of a continent to house the avatars of the gods. Some of the gods encoded a representative sample of their intellect into the biological brain and destroyed the rest of themselves -- pruning themselves down to a mere human level of capability to experience the end. Most chose to teleoperate their meat body instead, living the party from the viewpoint of that body, but with their consciousness in fact still inhabiting their vast spaceborne forms.

Perdurabo called the party "The Masque of the Heat Death," and its theme was a story from the dimmest past of the gods. The central feature of the palace was a clock as great as a mountain, a vast diamondoid cube whose edges were hundreds of meters long. On each face of the cube (it stood on one corner), two long hands marked the time counting down to the figurative midnight of the world. Instead of actually counting seconds, the remaining "time" displayed by the clock was in fact made to be proportional to the capacity remaining in the Stabilization network. Most of the mass of the cube consisted of instruments measuring the imminence of the overload. There would be no error, no surprise -- when the clock struck midnight, every atom in the universe would explode.

The gods in their biological forms occupied themselves in every form of debauchery and delight that the architecture of the human body could endure. Some expired early, from the sheer exuberance of their antics, leaving the god animating them (if any remained) suddenly back in their true body as the remote carcass ceased to function.

Perdurabo himself took no part in the festivity. He was one of the optimistic few who continued to work on their researches and grasp desperately at final straws right up until the moment of destabilization. Excelsius found him tending some immense instrument far beneath the surface where the now-mortal gods frolicked above.

"Perdurabo, I insist, do join in," said Excelsius, folding the arms of his remote and leaning back against a slanting wall of diamond many meters high. "You gave it a gallant try, old man -- we all did -- and now it's time to relax, enjoy the fruits of our labors, have a last blow-out before the, well, before the last blow-out."

Perdurabo bustled about his instrument as furtively as a beetle rolling a ball of dung. "And as your host, I insist, Excelsius, that you get up there and entertain yourself instead of wasting your final moments..." -- for the great clock, represented in the depths of the wall against which Excelsius leaned, did read 11:55 -- "... in wasted efforts to get me to have a final drink and a good time."

Excelsius smiled. "I think I almost prefer to wait it out here, watching you. Do let me know if there's anything I can do to help. If anyone can save us now, it's you. What are you trying to do?"

The body that did not house any significant part of Perdurabo smiled back. "It's a bit late to go into it now. For the bandwidth to explain it to you in the time remaining, we'd have to communicate directly -- real mind to real mind -- instead of through these meat bodies. I'd be violating the spirit of the party." He pointed downward through the transparent floor. In the vast cavern below Excelsius recognized the outward form of one kind of godbrain and realized that he was looking at the real Perdurabo, a complex of computing mechanisms as large as a city and more capacious than a billion brains of meat.

"Well, explain what you can in the time left. You couldn't put it to me directly anyway... there's no longer any 'me' to communicate with." Perdurabo stopped and stared. "Yes, that's right. I did it just a few hours ago." Excelsius spread his arms. "This humble shell is all that remains of the once-great Excelsius."

Perdurabo frowned and went back to his work. "I'm sorry. I'll miss you."

"Not for long, I'll warrant. Now what are you up to? What do you hope to prove with this one last experiment before the curtain comes down?"

Perdurabo actually grinned. He glanced at the image of the clock -- 11:58. "Well, I suppose I can tell you. There's not much danger of you telling anyone else, eh?" He shifted a final component into position, then seated his body at a control console -- another purely theatrical gesture; surely the real brain below was in direct control of all the machinery in this room.

He motioned for Excelsius to sit beside him. "You see, this isn't an experiment. I finished with research a long, long time ago, when I found out that you were wrong."

Excelsius was surprised. "An error in my proof? Damn, that was one of the things I didn't download to this body! Now you can't even tell me where I went wrong." He sat heavily beside Perdurabo. "Damn! Well, I don't suppose that makes much difference at this stage, either."

"It wasn't an error in your proof. I know there must be one, but I never found it. No, what I found was a counterexample." The clock ticked over to 11:59, and Perdurabo pushed home a final button. The machinery around them came to life.

The room shook. Excelsius jumped to his feet despite himself. "What was that?"

"It's time. Midnight. The end of the world." Harsh, actinic light bore down into the godbrain below and started tearing it apart.

Excelsius watched in horrified fascination. "Are -- are you killing yourself?"

Perdurabo folded his arms. "Hardly. Merely encoding the consciousness of that brain -- me -- into another form. This body is cut off from the real me now, too -- we're two men again, and we'll die like mere men. I said I discovered a counterexample to your proof, Excelsius."

Excelsius was unable to answer, as a light far brighter than that welling up from below washed away his vision. That hellish light of Armageddon shone not merely through the walls but from them and from every object in the room, as their constituent protons rent themselves into gamma rays and leptons.

Perdurabo, or at least the abandoned meat body that was still speaking for Perdurabo, seemed calm. "I discovered a way. It is possible to survive. It is possible to have an enduring consciousness in a universe without protons..."

Excelsius was thankful that he couldn't hear the screaming, the terrible screaming that must be coming from the mind of every remaining god as their very substance exploded into nonexistence. But what he could hear was nearly as horrible, as in his last moment he heard Perdurabo's words:

"... but only one."

Tue, Oct 7, 1997 dave@fqa.com
Copyright © Dave Krieger 1994-1997.

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