Mort

He remembered being summoned into reluctant existence the very instant the first protolife came to be. It was but a sphere of hydrocarbons with some rather complex, self-replicating molecules in them. The first protolife appeared and died^*, and with that first swipe of His scythe^**, the certain knowledge was there that He would be the one taking every life there ever was, no matter how big, how small, how great, or insignificant.

He would outlast the last life there ever was, and with the final sweep of His sun-crushing scythe^***, all would end and He would be there still, to, proverbially, sweep up the bits and pieces, stack up the chairs on the tables and keep the registers, put up the CLOSED sign and turn off the lights. The lives he took would have gone to wherever they would be going, or where they thought they would be going, but He? He would be there.

And the He remembered the finality, the loneliness.

He remembered the nothingness, and the eternity.

For ever.

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*It was actually one of the molecules in that sphere that had made the mistake of trusting and aiding replicating duty to the others, on the promise of itself being replicated in the process. That was life’s first foray at creating the first rift between the somatic and the germ line. Being a first time try, it wasn’t very successful. In the end the sphere budded off a new spherelet, taking with it all the viable resources it could get from the mother-sphere, but without that poor, cheated molecule, because they had a better resource generating molecule. Which teaches you that if you want something done, you should do it yourself. The poor molecule was left behind, to contemplate its worthless existence for a while, churning out resources but now bereft of replicative capability, before being engulfed by another new, predatory sphere^†. That’s evolution for you.

^†It was the descendent of the spherelet, whose descendents decided that it was easier to take over readily made resources rather than synthesize new ones.

**Well, it was actually more of a metaphorical digestive heme-containing enzyme complex; a scythe wasn't something the simple molecules could understand.

***The last life in the universe, incidentally, would be a sentient sun, who within ten minutes of achieving sentience, realized that he would be very lonely, and decided to try giving birth to a nebula in hopes of creating more suns from the nebula. Thus he went supernova, and in the process, wiped out his binary twin-sun (who had yet to achieve sentience) and created a supermassive black hole^‡. This black hole would eventually suck everything through to its core, and coalesce into a new particle. Once the pressure of this present reality had died, this new particle would expand and explode into a new universe, as it had done, so many times.

^‡ Smart as the sun was, one realizes that mathematics is never as cracked up as it seems to be. Einstein would tell you that. In short, the sun miscalculated how much it should have gone nova.