everyone's hearts as flower girl for the woman who would soon be her stepmother.
Stepmother. Half-sister. Ex-wife. Ex-husband. New wife. Permutations; the
panoply of human interactions, of ways to constitute a family. Hardly anyone got
married in a big ceremony anymore, but Lloyd had insisted. The laws in most states
and provinces in North America said if two adults lived together for sufficient time,
they were married, and if they ceased living together, they ceased to be married.
Clean and simple, no muss, no fuss --and none of the pain that Lloyd's parents had
gone through, none of the histrionics and suffering that he and Dolly had watched,
wide-eyed, stunned by it all, their world crumbling around them.
But Lloyd had wanted the ceremony; he had forgone so much because of his fear
of creating another broken home --a term, he'd noted, that his latest Merriam-
Webster flagged as "archaic." He was determined never to be daunted by that --by
the past --again. And so he and Doreen had tied one on as they tied the knot --a
great party, everyone had said, a night to remember, full of dancing and singing and
laughter and love.
Doreen had been past menopause by the time she and Lloyd got together. Of
course there were procedures now, and techniques, and had she wanted a child she
could still have had one. Lloyd was more than willing; he was a father already, but
he surely wouldn't deny her the chance to be a mother. But Doreen had declined.
She had been content with her life before meeting Lloyd, and enjoyed it even more
now that they were together --but she didn't crave children, didn't seek immortality.
Now that Lloyd had retired, they spent a lot of time at the cottage in Vermont. Of
course, both of their visions had placed them there on this day. They'd laughed as
they furnished the bedroom, making it look exactly as it had when they'd first seen
it, precisely positioning the old particle-board night table and knotty-pine wall mirror.
And now Lloyd and Doreen were lying side by side in their bed; she was even
wearing a navy-blue Tilley work shirt. Through the window, trees dressed in glorious
fall colors were visible. They had their fingers intertwined. The radio was on,
counting down to the arrival of the Sanduleak neutrinos.
Lloyd smiled at Doreen. They'd been married now for five years. He supposed,
being the child of divorce and now being himself once divorced, that he shouldn't be
thinking na.ve thoughts about being together with Doreen forever, but nonetheless
he found himself constantly feeling that way. Lloyd and Michiko had been a good fit,
but he and Doreen were a perfect one. Doreen had been married once before, but it
had ended more than twenty years ago. She had assumed she'd never marry again,
and had been getting on with a single life.
And then she and Lloyd had met, him a Nobel-Prizewinning physicist, and her a
painter, two completely different worlds, more different in many ways than Michiko's
Nippon was from Lloyd's North America, and yet they had hit it off beautifully, and
love had blossomed between them, and now he divided his life into two parts, before
Doreen and after.
The voice on the radio was counting down. "Ten seconds. Nine. Eight."
He looked at her and smiled, and she smiled back at him.
"Six. Five. Four."
Lloyd wondered what he would see in the future, but of one thing he had no
doubt, no doubt whatsoever.
"Two! One!"
Whatever the future held, Doreen and he would be together, always.
Zero!
Lloyd saw a brief still frame of him and Doreen, much older, older than he would
have thought it possible for them to be, and then --
Surely they didn't die. Surely he would be seeing nothing if his consciousness had
ceased to be.
His body might have faded away but --a quick glimpse, a flash of an image ...
A new body, all silver and gold, smooth and shiny ...
An android body? A robot form for his human consciousness?
Or a virtual body, nothing more --or less --than a representation of what he was
inside a computer?
Lloyd's perspective shifted.
He was now looking down on Earth, from hundreds of kilometers up. White clouds
still swirled over it, and sunlight reflected off the vast oceans ...
Except ...
Except, in the one brief moment during which he was perceiving this, he thought
perhaps that those weren't oceans, but rather the continent of North America,
glinting, its surface covered over with a spiderwork of metal and machinery, the
whole planet literally having become the World Wide Web.
And then his perspective changed again, but once more he glimpsed Earth, or
what he'd thought might have been Earth. Yes, yes, surely it was, for there was the
moon, rising over its limb. But the Pacific ocean was smaller, covering only a third of
the face he was seeing, and the west coast of North America had changed radically.
Time was whipping by; the continents had had millennia enough to drift to new
locations.
And still he skimmed ahead ...
He saw the moon spiraling farther and farther away from the Earth, and then --
It seemed instantaneous, but perhaps it had taken thousands of years --
The moon crumbling to nothing.
Another shift ...
And the Earth itself reducing, shrinking, being whittled away, growing smaller, a
pebble, and then --
The sun again, but --
Incredible ...
The sun was now half-encased in a metal sphere, capturing every photon of
energy that fell upon it. The Moon and Earth hadn't crumbled --they had been
dismantled. Raw materials.
Lloyd continued his journey ahead. He saw --
Yes, it had been inevitable; yes, he'd read about it countless years ago, but he'd
never thought he would live to see it.
The Milky Way galaxy, the pinwheel of stars that humanity called home, colliding
with Andromeda, its larger neighbor, the two pinwheels intersecting, interstellar gas
aglow.
And still he traveled on, ahead, into the future.
It was nothing like the first time --but then what in life ever is?
The first time the visions had occurred, the switch from the present to the future
had seemed instantaneous. But if it took a hundred thousandth of a second, who
would have noticed? And if that hundred thousandth of a second had been allotted as
0.00005 seconds per year jumped ahead, again, who would have been aware of
that? But 0.00005 seconds times eight billion years added up to something over an
hour --an hour spent skimming, gliding over vistas of time, never quite locking in,
never quite materializing, never quite displacing the proper consciousness of the
moment, and yet sensing, perceiving, seeing it all unfold, watching the universe
grow and change, experiencing the evolution of humanity step by step from
childhood into ...
... into whatever it was destined to become.
Of course Lloyd wasn't really traveling at all. He was still firmly in New England,
and he had no more control over what he was seeing or what his replacement body
was doing than he'd had during his first vision. The perspective shifts were doubtless
due to the repositioning of whatever he'd become as the millennia went by. There
must have been some sort of persistence of memory, analogous to the persistence of
vision that made watching movies possible. Surely he was touching each of these
times for only the most fleeting moment; his consciousness looking to see if that
slice through the cube was occupied, and, when it discovered that it was, something
like the exclusion principle --Theo had emailed him all about Rusch and his apparent
ravings --barring it from taking up residence there, speeding onward, forward,
farther and farther into the future.
Lloyd was surprised that he still had individuality; he would have thought that if
humanity were to survive at all for millions of years surely it would be as a linked,
collective consciousness. But he heard no other voices in his mind; as far as he could
tell, he was still a unique separate entity, even if the frail physical body that had
once encapsulated him had long since ceased to exist.
He'd seen the Dyson sphere half-encasing the sun, meaning humanity would one
day command fantastic technology, but, as yet, he'd seen no evidence of any
intelligence beyond that of humans.
And then it hit him: a flash of insight. What was happening meant there was no
other intelligent life anywhere --not on any of the planets of the two hundred billion
stars that made up the Milky Way, or --he stopped to correct himself --the six
hundred billion stars comprising the currently combined supergalaxy formed by the
intersection of the smaller Milky Way with larger Andromeda. And not on any of the
planets of any of the stars in the countless billion other galaxies that made up the
universe.
Surely all consciousness everywhere had to agree on what constituted "now." If
human consciousness was bouncing around, shifting, didn't that mean that there
must be no other consciousness in existence, no other group vying for the right to
assert which particular moment constituted the present?
In which case, humanity was staggeringly, overwhelmingly, unrelentingly alone in
all the vast dark cosmos, the sole spark of sentience ever to arise. Life had
proceeded on Earth very happily for four billion years before the first stirrings of selfawareness,
and still, by 2030, no one had managed to duplicate that sentience in a
machine. Being conscious, being aware that that was then and this is now and that
tomorrow is another day, was an incredible fluke, a happenstance, a freak
occurrence never before or since duplicated in the history of the universe.
And perhaps that explained the incredible failure of nerve that Lloyd had observed
time and again. Even by 2030, humanity still hadn't ventured beyond the Moon; no
one had gone on to Mars in the sixty-one years since Armstrong's small step, and
there didn't seem to be any plans in the works to accomplish that. Mars, of course,
could get as far from Earth as 377 million kilometers when the two worlds were on
opposite sides of the sun. A human mind on Mars under those circumstances would
be twenty-one light-minutes away from the other human minds on Earth. Even
people standing right beside each other were separated somewhat in time --seeing
each other not as they are but as they were a trillionth of a second earlier. Yes, some
degree of desynchronization was clearly tolerable, but it must have an upper limit.
Perhaps sixteen light-minutes was still acceptable --the separation between two
people on the opposite sides of a Dyson sphere built at the radius of Earth's orbit -but
twenty-one light minutes was too much. Or perhaps even sixteen exceeded what
was allowable for conscious beings. Humanity had doubtless built the Dyson sphere
Lloyd had observed --in so doing walling itself off from the empty, lonely vastness
on the outside --but perhaps its entire inner surface was not populated. People
might occupy only one portion of its surface. A Dyson sphere, after all, had a surface
area millions of times that of planet Earth; even using a tenth of the territory it
afforded would still give humanity orders of magnitude more land than it had ever
known before. The sphere might harvest every photon put out by the central star,
but humanity perhaps did not roam over its entire surface.
Lloyd --or whatever Lloyd had become --found himself pushing farther and
farther ahead into the future. The images kept changing.
He thought about what Michiko had said: Frank Tipler and his theory that
everyone who ever was, or ever could be, would be resurrected at the Omega Point
to live again. The physics of immortality.
But Tipler's theory was based on an assumption that the universe was closed, that
it had sufficient mass so that its own gravitational attraction would eventually cause
everything to collapse back down into a singularity. As the eons sped by, it became
clear that wasn't going to happen. Yes, the Milky Way and its nearest neighbor had
collided, but even whole galaxies were minuscule on the scale of an ever-expanding
universe. The expansion might slow to almost nothing, asymptotically approaching
zero, but it would never stop. There would never be an omega point. And there
would never be another universe. This was it, the one and only iteration of space and
time.
Of course, by now, even the star enclosed by the Dyson sphere had doubtless
given up the ghost; if twenty-first-century astronomers were correct, Earth's sun
would have expanded into a red giant, engulfing the shell around it. Humanity had
surely had billions of years of warning, though, and had doubtless moved --en
masse, if that's what the physics of consciousness required --somewhere else.
At least, thought Lloyd, he hoped they had. He still felt disconnected from all that
was playing out in individual illuminated frames. Maybe humanity had been snuffed
out when its sun died.
But he --whatever he'd become --was somehow still alive, still thinking, still
feeling.
There had to be someone else to share all this with.
Unless --
Unless this was the universe's way of sealing the unexpected rift caused by
Sanduleak's neutrinos showering down on a re-creation of the first moments of
existence.
Wipe out all extraneous life. Just leave one qualified observer --one omniscient
form, looking down, on -
--on everything, deciding reality by its observations, locking in one steady now,
moving forward at the inexorable rate of one second per second.
A god ...
But of an empty, lifeless, unthinking universe.
Finally, the skimming through time came to an end. He'd arrived at his
destination, at the opening up; the consciousness of this far distant year --if the
word year had any meaning anymore, the planet whose orbit it measured having
long since disappeared --having vacated for even more remote realms, leaving a
