After an endless amount of time. So long that the planet we may have once called home was eaten by its star, stripped down to the bare nutrients that gave breath to life and turned into material that powered the most destructive kind of bomb in the universe. So long that we had moved between not two, or ten, or a hundred worlds and stars, but an amount of which we could never count in several lifetimes. Whatever we are today, it is not human. It has not been so for a very, very long time now. Our galaxy is not the same, our universe is larger in scope but smaller in actuality. We live in manufactured pods, heated by the last remnants of the universe’s final breaths.
We will not live to see the end of this reality and could never hope to survive the birth of the next. Even now, our existence is entirely built around the idea of persistence. Some say the plug must be pulled while many more plead to keep the lights on just a generation more. At the beginning of every third child came the voting epoch. We cast votes, take knowledge of where it all stands and remain in this everlasting cycle for the few million years we have left until the world outside our homes grinds to a halt so extreme that it will be impossible to live past.
But there is a great lie at the heart of the third epoch. A lie that has spanned a million generations before mine and will cover the million that comes after. We, the rulers of those who remain at the edge of existence, will never let such a vote of decay to take place. Results will be manipulated, stories will be altered. No matter what, our living persistence must continue. We have pushed on for so long until now, having given so much to the universe to hear just a whisper of its secrets. Letting that slip from what might be our palms would be an eternity entombed in the flesh that we’ve clung to in favor of machines or simulations, wasted on a choice to give up at the very end. By comparison the time that remains might as well be a few moments of time. But the children never see it so clearly. They have the spark of rebellion within them. The drive for rebirth and radical autonomy, even at the cost of all those who came before. They will come to understand, as did I and my ancestors millions of eons before me.
The mind of a simple wet brain is weak and dull, incapable of understanding the cliffside we’ve come to, intending to jump away. The edge of wisdom sits just out of reach for the youth, as their continuation of life is fraught with the battles they face. The need to leave their mark clashing against the want to respect their kin. The great and thankful place here is that one day they will all understand and keep the lie alive, for as many as it takes to see the last of us take their final breath, even if it is taken alone.
I am nearing my final days. Rations that have been calculated a thousand years before I was born detailed just exactly how much air I could take in, the cool waft of life flowing into my body. The amount of food I would ingest each day for four-hundred thousand days. The attempts at restoring myself should accidents occur, all come to their rounding point. A new heir to the badge of authority will take my place. The second of three generations. In my final weeks I have considered for the first time in a millennium, the sanctity of death. The relief that leaving this flesh might bring contrasted with the value of the knowledge we so dogmatically seek. Each day in these bodies, which have been designed and perfected a thousand times over, still ache in their joints. Still creak in the bones. Eyes continue to go bad, skin flakes off and becomes cancerous. Regardless of the planning and ration decrees one can suddenly fail themselves and pass away hundreds of years before they were ever intended to. Both our leadership and the working class in the depths of the chambers below. In this we are equal, children of the universe that have a moment of relation to all those who came before and all those that will come after.
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When I was younger I may have agreed. That this should all be destroyed and we should be given the peace of nothing. To yearn for nothing. At the edge of death, given a rest so that when the world is reborn anew long after we’re gone, we will know we had lived lives not so dissimilar from those next creatures who come into the reality that succeeds us. But today I loathe the thought, if only because I agree. Against the scale of the cosmos and the unfathomable stretches of time, our continued stubbornness in the face of eternity does little besides prolong our suffering and aching. Mercy, a notion of peace. And therein hides the second, perhaps more cruel lie at the heart of us all. The truth that we agree, those who carry the burden of knowledge. Only the most fanatical can hold on to their faith but that is in fact all it is, a belief that something might change. The concealment of the second lie is not one made out of the betterment of our continuation but fear for what might happen if we approach the truth.
Although who might say it is the other way around, that we lie to keep ourselves alive because we simply fear the mercy that the end would grant us? This is why it’s kept from the children for their choices would be made without the rationed lifetime to influence them. And yet I must ask myself, is that not what life is? Living is not the continued persistence for the sake of it, to be alive was to be active. To have the controls of destiny in hand, rather than kept in secret for so many years while never knowing they existed. Have we already been living in death? Simply denying that we gave ourselves to this entropy millions of years ago? At the edge of a grave choice I must make, I hope it is not so.
My choice was a single button, rounded with a light inside just waiting to illuminate the desk before me, validating my decision to continue our persistence. But it was not the only choice, even if I lacked another device, it would be as simple as to not press down with a digit. To avoid continuation. I could stand from this place and run into the next few halls, screaming with the limited air I have, stealing the oxygen that was permitted for those who are foretold to come after me. I sit here now on this edge. Watching the gleam of the transparent synth-plastic stamp shining like a beckoning beacon from under the lights of my office. I would absolve myself of the responsibility if I just pressed it. Does one hand deserve the right to choose otherwise? A vote of our ancestors put this machine in motion-- but an honest vote from those alive now could grind it to a halt. Was our knowledge worth this conundrum? Was their peace and mercy truly what we would find meaning in? If we’re going to all die eventually, I struggle to offer up reasoning for why we should fight on besides the stubborn instinct for life to continue.
My digit pressed so close upon the button that the sensation of touch shot into my limbs and felt like the weight of the future bearing down on my soul. I had not yet pressed it, but the instinct to do so urged evermore. Sitting here with a finger on the device, my eyes focused on the door. At the edge of eternity, wondering whether we should die.
