Escape by Ian Cardin (e book reader android .TXT) 📕

through the frontal lobe of my brain was whisked away by the intoxicating rush of a massive dose of painkilling medication. The wallscreen above the autosurgeon blazed to life, and I realized through the drugged fog of painkillers that a realtime picture of the interior of my skull was being displayed. Injecting brain machine interface nanites, the screen flashed, as the operating tentacle bulged disturbingly. I distantly realized that the autosurgeon was about to inject a swarm of submicroscopic nanobots into my mind, but the astronomical dosage of drugs kept me from protesting.
As the nanites flowed into my mind, I watched them skitter to countless points within my brain and emit a tiny blue flash, bonding with and burrowing into the delicate structure of my mind. Sudden and overwhelming dizziness struck, followed by total blindness as the nanites completed their final bonding with the last of my brain and the nerves in my spinal column and neck. I flailed around wildly just as the autosurgeon's restraining arms released me and managed to avert full-blown cranial trauma by opting for a barely controlled fall into the floor shoulder-first.
I crawled across the floor until I could feel a wall with my fingertips and propped myself against it, breathing shallowly. The painkiller was wearing off surprisingly fast, but despite my nearly stifling terror that the pain from my punctured skull was going to come roaring in at any moment, I remained not only painless but oddly ecstatic.
This is much better

a cold, inhuman voice observed from inside my skull.
I thrashed uncontrollably, seemingly unable to stop battered limbs from flailing. I tried to call out in the hope that the ship would have a voice-response emergency system, but the words didn't just stick in my throat, they never left my thoughts. With a growing horror I realized I had lost control of my own body.
As you asked

the voice stated, what I am

.
My vision functioned again, but even though I could feel my body inside the ship I was being shown a massive expanse of space. A supermassive black hole raged, Hawking radiation spewing from both axes in accelerated time, two streams of escaped energy racing furiously away from their birthplace. But unlike the other black holes I had been shown earlier, this one stood alone, framed only by the cold dark of the abyss, with no other stellar bodies anywhere to be seen. The energy streams thinned almost to a needle point and then suddenly the black hole itself burst, flinging raging gamma rays outwards in all directions as the singularity collapsed in a stunning display of cosmic suicide.
Several of the gamma rays struck the upper and lower beams of radiation, igniting them in a fiercely burning conflagration that shimmered with an unearthly light. Then, the two beams reached for each other and fused, folding out of and back into existence over and over until an eye-blinding weavework of pure energy writhed, suspended in blackness.
The weavework glistened and flung the blinding brightness of its birthing energy into space, the underlying abyssal knotwork of its true form coiling and slithering unnaturally into and out of itself. I was made to understand that this had been the moment of awakening for the intelligence; that its neurons were the information from the black hole that had been encoded in the Hawking radiation, and that the gamma rays of its parent's death had been the activating force that brought those neurons to life.
I am aware

.
The weaveform hurtled through space, covering interstellar distances in seconds. Somehow, it was using gravity to manipulate the fabric of spacetime; propelling itself not by reacting against the interstellar medium, but by altering the local gravitational metric in order to force spacetime itself to move and riding the resulting distortion of reality. The sheer emptiness of the universe it moved through was terrifying. No planets, stars, or galaxies existed; only briefly flickering individual particles could be seen, and then only rarely.
After what seemed like decades, the weaveform had not found anything larger than a grain of dust, and I watched as a darkly gleaming bead of itself dropped away and burned a hole in the cosmos. I was made to understand that the screaming vortex of mind-melting complexity that burst forth was a wormhole, and that the weaveform had grown impatient of slower methods of travel and was seeking contact with other sentient beings.
Several indescribable seconds later I had followed the weaveform through the wormhole and out the other side, only to discover more of the same endless panorama of nothingness. Burning several more precious drops of itself, the weaveform leaped through more wormholes, finding the same bleak vision at every destination, until the final wormhole it traversed showed an object blazing with radiation suspended in the cosmic night. After the endless vistas of emptiness, the object was painfully bright, and I could feel the weaveform's curiosity at finding something aside from sparsely scattered particles. As it approached the object slowly, I realized very soon that it was my ship, although there was an unfamiliar meteorite impact crater that had not been there before.
I was unceremoniously dumped back into my own body, shaking with shock at the revelations I had just witnessed, and simply sat for several minutes, gathering my thoughts and attempting to formulate some logical explanation for what had just happened. Eventually I realized that somehow the entity had gained access to the ship's mainframe and infiltrated the autosurgeon, implanting the nanites in my mind in order to allow for more efficient communication than the holoprojector could provide.
That is correct

.
I shook my head disbelievingly, as if I could dislodge the voice from the inside of my skull. "How can you possibly understand me, much less speak to me?"
Billions of years ago, long before my quickening, the singularity that would provide the material for my creation swallowed the informational structure of galaxies. Over the aeons it ejected that information in the form of radiation. This information was evolved into sentience by the gamma bursts that resulted from the singularity's termination. One of the galaxies absorbed contained a race that spoke your language

.
My head reeled. After several more minutes of struggling to process all of this, I realized something else. Even though I had watched the weaveform travel literally astronomical distances, not once in all its travels had it ever seen a galaxy, much less a planet or a star.
They are gone

, the entity observed dispassionately.
That made no sense. How could all of the stars and galaxies in existence have disappeared in the one day I had been in stasis?
It has been far longer than a day.
That didn't make any sense either, and it also didn't match with the elapsed time of the ship's systems I had checked upon awakening. I looked at it again, just to be sure - 23 hours, give or take a few minutes.
Then my flesh prickled and I cursed myself for being so stupid. I reached up to the cavity where I had stored my stolen goods and panicked, finding it empty. The immeasurably valuable vial of nanites I had stolen was experimental technology, designed to evolve and accelerate the development of any system, whether biological or technological, at an exponential rate. Remembering the gray silicate webbing on the stasis machinery panels that I had earlier dismissed upon awakening, I examined it more closely and felt a shiver of dread as my suspicions were confirmed.
Tiny shards of the glass vial that had contained the nanites were embedded in the silicate structure. The webbing shimmered, each nanite within it gleaming like a tiny star. When I fully understood what had happened, I fought madness for hours, a battle which I would have surely lost if the entity had not come to my aid by reinforcing my mind against the stark gibbering horror of the truth.
The impact crater I had seen from outside the ship must have been from a meteorite that struck the ship with sufficient force to dislodge the vial from its hiding spot. Flung across the cabin of the ship, the vial would have burst against the stasis machinery panels and gone to work - evolving and accelerating the system it found beyond the farthest reaches of its creator's imagination and locking the entire ship, and me with it, in total stasis for trillions of years.
4,197,724,172 years

.
I did not dispute numbers with the entity. I had, by now, realized that I was the only living human left in the universe, and that knowledge was unceasingly hammering against the remaining shreds of my sanity.
I will never know if it was an act of cruelty or mercy, but as reality ended, the entire span of existence ripped apart in a relentlessly accelerating expansion as all distances diverged into the infinite, the entity took me into itself to witness the final moments of the universe.
And it was beautiful.

END

Imprint

Text: All writing copyright Ian Cardin 2011. Cover picture is public domain obtained from Wikimedia Commons.
Publication Date: 07-25-2011

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