The Legends of Forever by Barry Lyga (books to read for beginners .txt) 📕

The Curtain loomed before them. Barry’s heart froze and his blood turned to ice at the sight of it, so infinitely massive, so powerful and adamantine. The Waverider couldn’t get through this thing—could he?

At his back, the vibrational pattern initially generated by ten thousand speedsters urged him forward. All that power, following them from the distant past into the far-flung future.

Yes. Yes, he could do it. More, he would do it.

Now.

Barry slowed ever so slightly, allowing himself to drop back into the tidal swell of the Earth 27 speedsters. The wavefront of the vibrational pattern relaxed against him for a moment, then rebounded, impelling him forward at even greater speed. It occurred to him suddenly that James Jesse and the rest of the Earth 27 refugees had been dead for thousands of millennia, but their hope and goodwill still extended into the future, propelling him onward.

The Iron Curtain of Time rose before him. Barry sprinted ahead, not slowing for an instant as the Curtain loomed higher and higher, larger and larger.

If they’d miscalculated, he knew, he would be destroyed beyond even death, his body shredded at the subatomic level and scattered throughout Time.

“I’m going through!” Barry shouted to Superman. “Hang back half a second so you can pull up if it doesn’t work!”

“Not a chance!” Superman yelled back. “We go through together. Our chances are better if we all hit at once.”

Barry wanted to argue the point, but there was no time left in which to do so. At a speed that was incalculable and undefinable even for the Flash, they hit the Iron Curtain of Time.

Barry had assumed that the Iron Curtain of Time would slow them down, the same way that the simple friction of a paper screen would slow down someone jumping through it, albeit minutely.

But he’d been reckoning based on the physics of the real world, where friction mattered. Here in the time stream, friction didn’t exist—it was a construct of three dimensions, not four.

Bursting through the Iron Curtain of Time, he found himself moving faster, not slower. Beside him, Superman’s face lit up with pleasant surprise. They bridged dozens of millennia with every step forward, their momentum increasing their velocity until millions of years blurred by with each eyeblink.

Superman’s expression of joy suddenly sobered. “There’s nothing, Flash,” Superman said, his voice strangled with awe. “I’m using my powers to perceive the physical world outside the time stream . . . We’ve gone so far into the future that the stars are dying. Worlds are frozen, tumbling through a darkening void . . .”

Barry nodded grimly. He had known, deep down, that traveling to the end of the universe meant going to a time when everyone and everything were dead. Had been dead for a long, long time. Iris—his heart clenched like a desperate, angry fist—had been dead for billions of years; by now, all that was left of her was random carbon atoms fusing to iron in the depths of the swollen sun, its convective zone having expanded to where the planet Earth had once been.

But I can go back. We can get Cisco and defeat Thawne and win the day and go back.

That thought and that thought alone propelled him farther, faster.

“I see something,” Superman said. “I see the end! There’s nothing beyond!”

Barry slowed his body’s vibrations, matching them to the surrounding physical universe. In a matter of instants, the rushing bands of rainbows around him subsided, dimming, then going translucent, then finally vanishing altogether.

He stood on a rocky outcropping that drifted in a black void. There should have been stars overhead, but there were none, merely spots that seemed a little less black than the surrounding emptiness. Asteroids of various shapes and sizes floated nearby in the abyss, suspended like eroding ornaments on a dead Christmas tree.

Barry stretched out his arms and felt a slight tug, like a tight-fitting jacket. The Legion of Super-Heroes had provided the team with a technology called a “transsuit,” which was a “polymeric transparent body encasement.” It worked similarly to the ring in which Barry stored his Flash costume—when exposed to a harsh environment, a tiny capsule sewn into the user’s clothing expanded into a nearly invisible sheath of special polymers that surrounded the entire body. It filtered oxygen from the surrounding environment, and in a vacuum it could even break down the wearer’s exhaled carbon dioxide, ejecting the carbon into space and recirculating the oxygen. They all had them, even Superman, who didn’t need one but could use its tech to communicate in a spatial vacuum. The transsuit was invisible and almost undetectable, save for the slight pull when he moved his limbs to their extreme limits.

“What is this place?” Ray asked in a hushed voice. The Atom, White Canary, Heat Wave, and Green Arrow had emerged from the Time Sphere and stood nearby on the dead soil.

“The end of everything,” Superman replied in a reverent tone. “This is the last outpost of reality, the final moments of existence before the entire Multiverse . . . dies.”

“Everything looks almost . . . bluish,” Sara said, her voice hesitant, as though embarrassed to bring it up.

Barry and Ray exchanged a glance, sharing a moment of science-think. “Blueshift,” Barry said in something like awe. “Never thought I’d see it.”

The universe—the universes, really—had been created in a single moment billions of years ago called the Big Bang. Basically, all matter in the universe had been condensed into a space the size of a single atom. At some point, the pressure of all the mass built up and the atom exploded—i t made a Big Bang, hence the term—and spewed matter out into the void, creating the universe.

As a result, everything in the universe was always moving away from everything else. This led to something called redshift—the faster and farther one object accelerated away from another, the closer to the red part of the electromagnetic spectrum it would appear to an observer. Since everything in the universe was propelled by the force of the Big Bang and moving