Verse

Hindsights

The gray cat squalor of rubbish ruined
Looking back on my closeted output
It was forlorn in its horribleness
Desperate scratching of an inkless pen
Thrumming upon narrow ruled paper 
Sounding like an old guitar 
Half unwound strings, metal frayed
Looking nearly suicidal on the fretboard
I worry that my past self was depressed
I look back, cringing in horror
Will upon my review of my current self
Shrink into the grave unbidden
Wary to relieve myself ostentatiously
Pretentious, my own corpse shrugs
Such things are left to my children
To make that face, the squished eyebrows
And curled nose, over a filled diaper
Invisible threads of disaster, present
To think I called it poetry, verse, rhyme
Time machines were invented to kill ourselves
Mercifully
I sat across a table today from a young man
He is brash to rough, and bold as brass
Wondering where his earned dues are from all
As if he is God's gift, expecting reward
Hand outstretched, placatingly seeking nothing
Nothing that I can provide, evaporating
Glances, furtive eye contact, desperation stinks
It is in my nose, I can feel it on my skin
He got it all over me, and showering fails
But my time machine of my inner mind 
Fired up, the time rods shifted upwards
Humming, thrumming, turning about, thrusting upon
And I found myself, there… on the other side
A young man, a rock star, god's very own gift
Blessed upon the earth with aplomb and gusto
Circumstance for pomp and praises trumpeted
Aloud, that is where I was, deserving
Palms wide to outstretched, expecting gifts
To think I was him once, the verve, the noise
I spent twenty years to abandon him
Thankfully
Grace is the gift of the elder, given graciously
Wisdom is the curse to know it takes precedence
Over anything else.  Kindness matters, once
But in these things, I am certain most soundly
No emergency flare will light, no alarm will sound
Canaries might die in their cages at the mines
But the messenger will not notice their passing
They will only notice danger when it is bare
Present, bearing its teeth eagerly
Who was I all those years ago? 
This very question prompts me to think 
Of the moments spread in morning to night
I am what I have pretended the longest
Conning even myself with some actual progress
That kid, man. That kid, he scares me
Writing poetry on beat nights, caffeinated 
Being miserable without license and fee
Carrying a mountain of self invented shit
Life is nothing but irony illustrated
Truth laid bare, barren, exposed and shirking 
Unforgivably
Verse

Forbidden Knowledge

You are standing in a library, the shelves silent and wary of your presence

They ponder upon the actions to be taken, the arm to be outstretched

What binding will be caressed, which embossed letter tentatively outlined

What feather light nock of a fingertip in the curve of the binding gap

Pulling the book out of alignment slightly, the cover glanced upon briefly

And suddenly disregarded, shoved without grace or care back to its place
As you walk down the aisle, the lights reaching only the spines

Eyes flickering up and down, back and forth, looking for something

A special thing, a hidden thing, a thing that belies its existence

Tells of it from far away, a spoken whisper of a secret carried by the wind

The scent of a loaded cast iron skillet humming away on its stove

Sizzling, the popping, the hiss, aromatics being carried to every corner
The knowledge is floating on the wind, the words, the secrets, the power

It caresses your cheek, as your four fingers brush the shelves as you walk

The smells of paper and parchment, leather and string, folded press works

Between it all the effervescence of the new thing, the strange thing

The book that hides its secret, sitting on a shelf unreachable

Its binding is black, with no letters, no marker, plain and simple
True knowledge is plain and simple.  It requires no magic of its own

It is built upon the things that came before it, the shoulders and shelves

Of other works and other obvious things that required only understanding

This black book is such a thing, risen above your shoulders, riding a precipice

Astride the gulf of learning, one foot planted in ignorance, the other, more

Questions waiting to be asked, and felt, and explored to other questions
Somehow, you manage to climb the shelves, starting with a simple stool below

And relieve the black book from its wary sleepy sisters and brothers

A fine coating of dust slipping from its compressed pages, the silt of time

And books that came before, explorers alone, looking for their new secrets

You flip open the hard earned prize, and find the words you felt reaching 

Out to you, they are open to you, they are yours for the taking
Experience begets satisfaction, then it delivers momentary relief

Like an insatiable lover that can never be truly pleased, the need is 

All consuming, and pushes relentlessly for more, for more, for more 

The exploration of this new knowledge blossoms within and starts to consume

It brings sadness, it brings guilt, its own presents that were not obvious

Or expected, but that does not make anything less real for the recipient 
Hands are shaking, pupils pin point like an opioid addict ignoring the pain 

This new experience is not what you wanted, but yet it is, this dichotomy

Of split facades between what was and what is and what shouldn't be

The burden of your new knowledge is not the insight you sought, you craved

It is not the release you were looking for, or the answer you needed

Instead it is all the things you wanted to avoid in the first place by looking
Irony in the forbidden knowledge as it suffuses your person and shifts

Your views, shattering in slow motion, cascading like a waterfall of reflections

Inferred, but not seen, observed, but not measured, taken, yet let loose

This terrible curse rides your shoulders now, a jockey on your neck, slapping

A crop against your cheek, jeering and kicking heels, waiting for movement

As you stand there, riven, paralyzed by the wisdom that you should not have looked
The audacity of the seeking is rewarded by the damning of your past self

You now know that the future self is tainted by the currency of the moment

Your mind trading information with it's own states in perpetual shame and fear

The whisper of the books is taken from you, the smells fade towards the light

And you still remain, the fingers clutching the edges of the black book

The stages of grief becoming all the more real by the moment, acceptance 
It is yours now.  This thing.  This thing you wanted and sought so dearly for

This bit of madness wrapped in plastic, shrouded like a corpse of something

Desired and rejected, lusted for and replaced, desperately sought and never

Forgotten, will it ever be?  It cannot, since it is now know, it is in the light

The kings and queens look upon thee, and weigh, measure, and have found wanting

This is the dark fear, the deep one, the one that compels to all action
It pushes on you still, a fire behind and below, the pinch of the pitchforks

The steam, guttural and pitching, upwards as the pressure increases

The scream touches off, the whistle of the engine announcing its birth, its 

Presence in and of itself, the dangers of the fire contained within, maelstrom

Rage is there, yes, Fear is there, undoubtedly, the dangers of this simple

Thing is not simple, it is not measurable, but it will crush you under itself
You hoped for something else this time, something different, but it does not

Change like the seasons, or like the tide, or like a temporary event, it is 

Now, present, here and now, but behind like your solemn chanting footsteps 

And before you, a lit path of stumbling rocks and hidden holes, evergreens

On either side, encompassing you, the dark of the trees, their whispered secrets

And this is your library, these are your shelves, and they judge not
Everything is temporary.  Even this.  Even now.  Everything is forgotten.

You scream, you fight, it matters not.  You rage against the dying of the light

But this matters only to the shadows waiting to build encompassing dark

And then something extraordinary happens, like the moment a black hole is born

Out of nothing, something, a raging inferno of energy, a fount unlimited

Hope becomes, Hope builds, and Hope exists because everything is temporary.
Meta

New Short Story collection released!

The Rear Cover:

My dreams are forgotten most of the time, but when I do remember them, they turn into other things. They are living creatures, and they come to life on the page, build connections to other stories, and create their own narratives that I am not in control of. In this collection, travel to the unknown with misfits and friends; jump into the life of witch trying to make her way in the big city; monsters and demons interacting with people in ways they never imagined; true love found in the places people rarely look; the far flung future of the human race; and many more!

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON via Kindle or Paperback!

<– Link and sample available on the left sidebar.

Short Story

Exploration

I shift forwards.

I am at the bottom of a planet-wide ocean, near an ocean trench that drops to depths that would compress carbon to diamond. Strange creatures float in the wind-whipped foam far above, interacting sullenly with other species, either the hunted or the hunters, an unbroken chain of life reaching ever downwards, to where I sit in the dark where the sunlight never dreams of reaching. The edges of my own nodule lights do not reach very far in the deep, and the internal diagnostics inform me that the pressure here is dangerous, again. Dangerous, but not deadly, however any impact would be multiplied ten-fold from the stress of the laws of physics that restrict my existence in this future realspace. Small creatures dart in the particle laden water, some consuming the detritus falling from the other beasts above. Small motes drift here and there, at once becoming and obliterating as they progress through the shell of illumination around me.

I am here to discuss the mining rights for the exotic and volatile chemicals that are generated in the extreme depths from the great mother trench beside me. The sentient beings that harvest the exotic compounds are exotic themselves, with visible neural networks that flash and illuminate throughout their bodies, manipulating the density of water around them in order to live, work, and live. Even their machines, which is stretching the connotation as far as it possibly can go, are shaped from the very water itself, manipulated and structured with energies that even I have a hard time understanding with my multi-millennial biases and preconceived notions. Even though I have artificial intelligence modules grafted throughout my body, each of them able to explain it all in ten different ways with full mathematical models from a number of different civilizations across the local spiral arm, it would mean little to me beyond satisfying my rote curiosity.

I sigh heavily waiting in the dark, thinking that with all the intelligence in the universe, even now, true wisdom is a rare commodity.

I shift backwards.

I am eight with sandy blond hair cascading downwards toward my ashy eyebrows. Sitting at my desk, my loose leaf wide ruled paper brilliantly white and afraid of the graphite from my Ticonderoga #2 pencil. Occasionally, my young mind strays from the wooden rectangle that makes up my life right now. The future is a dark and scary future that holds nothing but promise. Adults understand this dichotomy, but kids like me just accept it as the norm. We can only see our future through the lens of the adults around us, and the filter is imperfect, leading us to believe that we will be better than the generation before, living in a golden future they cannot imagine.

My future is in my fingers. It is in my hands. It is contained within me like an explosion that has not happened yet, a potential energy yet to be released, much less fully realized.

“Scotty. Pay attention,” my teacher admonishes.

I furtively nod, and lock my eyes on the blackboard. A blackboard! Chalk, erasers, and the smell of the chalk dust. Kids get to knock out the erasers if they are bad. I do not want to be bad. Future generations will be spoiled by the whiteboards, then the smartboards, then the live-surfaces, then the memetic-halo interfaces. I am a member of the chalkdust generation.

“So, class, I need volunteers for the reading.”

The teacher does not note my affect, but thankfully skips over me nonetheless. She is doughy. A plump woman, but stern, limps from an old injury that she never explains to us kids. She has a friendly enough smile, but she only uses it for our parents.

Today is the day she smiles at me. She tells me my mother is waiting in the office with a sad look on her face. But she smiles anyway, and I am surprised. Eight year old me does not know that yet, but my deeper consciousness can feel it. I am told time and time again that I have an old soul. Or that I have a wisdom far beyond my years. I won’t find out for many decades far flung into my future, but all those people saw something that I would experience first hand someday.

But not today. Today I find out my father died. He fell from a building, after a bad step, before OSHA made people wear things like safety harnesses. He plummeted a hundred or so feet and opened up onto the ground like a meat sack full of jelly. At least that is what I imagine in my nightmares. Those nightmares shake me for years to come.

I never have had a therapist. I am a part of the generation that know that I just have to deal. Eight year old me does not think like that though. Not yet, not fully.

The teacher starts the readings. Three students around the classroom stand when it is their turn to read aloud, some reading too fast, others too slow, stumbling over words like stones in the path, or through them completely, like a giant through the underbrush, sending leaf encumbered branches everywhere.

The phone at the wall rings, a clunky red handset with an overlong curled black cord, knotted on itself in hundred different ways. My teacher pauses the student currently murdering the word aurora, and picks up the handset. Students all stop their worlds to pay true attention to the event. The teacher nods, her eyes shifting downwards, the creases in her face exacerbating themselves in mercy.

“Scotty,” she says my name again, this time with a soft smile. “Can you gather your things, and go to the office? Your mother is here to pick you up for the day.”

I nod again, lifting the surface of my desk upwards, tossing my pencils and my nobby angular eraser into my desk, dropping my papers over the top like icing on a cake of school supplies. I get from my seat carefully, all eyes on me. Some kids nod, thinking I am lucky to get out of school, other kids ignore me, wondering when the teacher will continue with the readings. I head to my cubby, grab my lunch bag, my backpack, and my jacket, and forlornly exit through the over-heavy wooden door to stride the linoleum-pressed hallway to the front office.

The hallways are strange without kids in them. They are not only empty of what they should be full of, but they are lacking in every other way as well. Smell, and sound, and aggressive movement of a crowd, jostling and jockeying their way to the next thing. Teachers standing above it all, waving, or smiling, or disciplining in real time as they observe the more rambunctious ones tussling with their peers. But right now, it is just me, smelling nothing but industrial cleaning solvent, and hearing nothing but the drone of teachers in classrooms or the noisy cascade of conversation in classes where the students are working in groups.

My mother is standing at the front desk, waiting for me. Her eyes are bloodshot and she is full of something that will never make its way fully out of her. She wants to share with me the news that will haunt me, but she won’t here. She won’t in the care. She will wait until we are at home, and she can dissolve before me in her grief. Eight year old me will grieve as well, but since I am so young, I will not understand the process as it happens, and I will travel through the stages faster, making adults jealous of the child’s ability to handle tragedy.

He is an old soul, they will say. He is wise beyond his years, they will comment behind closed fingers, shielding their mouth from broadcast.

They do not know that I am timeless. They cannot understand the singularity. They do not know that I am unbound outside of realspace, and that I am witnessing these events for the thousandth time, give or take a couple hundred. I have lived my own life countless times, riding my shoulder of the past, present, or future self like a parrot, watching my own consciousness develop, my maturity blossom, or my physical nature shift to something alien that my chalkdust generation would quail at.

I shift to my nexus in realtime.

This time to the Moment. This is where my own captive timestream intersects with my consciousness. I am as real as I ever will be in the Moment. Here, beyond the Singularity, beyond my understanding, between the expansions and the explorations, I am my true self. I am floating in the dark vast desert of interstellar space, and my biological systems are reduced to near nothing, all of them hibernating in the cold of a hypochamber. In my youth, they were called coffins, but once people stopped dying, no one understood what a coffin was. So they were called chambers instead. Hyperchambers were for everything you could imagine involving life… entertainment, sleep, sex. Hypochambers were the opposite. You only did one thing in those. You shut down and left existence to the stars and those that cared to experience realtime.

Trillions of humankind collectively decided that realtime was droll. I was one of them, so I unhinged from my timeline and instead went introspective, reliving my own life over and over and over, looking for something undefinable. Something that would bring new meaning to my life. Since death held sway over me no longer, death could not provide meaning in itself.

I never would step off a building and plummet in terror to a grisly end. I could find a star… and maybe do something similar. Perhaps. Could I fall a million miles at quarter of a C, impacting the layers of superheated energetic gas that makes up the surface of a sun and be obliterated by the nuclear fire? Some may choose that end, but I would never. I see what the future holds, and it is purpose. I see my past, and contained within it is the promise of a purpose. But here in my now, there is no purpose. Only the promise of it to sate my need, to satisfy the desire to live. As far as I can tell, I have about ten thousand more years of this.

Reaching the Agarama will change everything. I have met them already with the light signaling far ahead of me, and their responses traveling back to me faster than I can communicate forward. Voidspace is known, but not understood, so our ships cannot yet Blink in between the folds of reality to pop in at one point and pop out another instantaneously. My timeline infers that Blink capabilities will be occurring in Earth ships in about fifteen thousand years… our challenge now is that the minds that can create and undertand the theory have yet to be born. AI theorize on topics like Voidspace all the time, but that is all they can do. Making inevitable conclusions that do not matter.

AI cannot make leaps. That is the purpose of humankind. To leap.

We have lept through countless eons. First on the African plain, a crude spear in our hand, hunched over because we watch our own feet more than the stars. But some of us looked upwards, and outstretching their hands. That drove the creation of gods, and deities, and demigods, and pantheons, and the belief that man existed to please god. Humans drove forward selfishly, seeking to survive, creating agriculture just so they could bury themselves in the warm coat of alcohol and forget that the universe is uncaring and vast. They pushed forward, making advances, then advances on top of advances, accelerating the human race towards either extinction or transcendence. But it was always humans that made the leaps, not our machines.

So we wait.

I shift backwards.

I am in High School. A girlfriend and I are making out in a hidden recess of dark hallway at a debate competition that ran late. I know she is not a good fit for me, I can literally smell it, but I continue because my conscious self can’t handle the implications. She was my first kiss, and I feel like I owe her something. The maturity to handle this kind of idiocy will not develop within me for another decade. She tastes like cherry chapstick, and we play with each other’s tongues and lips for long stretches before stopping to talk in order to catch our breath. We discuss minor things, like who likes who in our class, or how the competition is going, or what teacher is a total bitch. I do not know it at this point, but I will dump this girl for another girl in a few weeks, continuously trading on the opposite sex for the next year until I lose my virginity in the back of an Oldsmobile. I spent the entire time asking her if it was ok, but she just looked at me with a strange look on her face.

She was wrong for me as well.

There was a point in time I thought I was bisexual. That is hilarious now, considering the whole sex spectrum thing is irrelevant. No one cares because most people don’t worry about sex anymore. Why? Neural interfaces have brought entire new levels of pleasure with direct access to the wiring in the brain and body. Procreation is handled by contract, or by the AIs keeping the genepool active and controlled.

My thought is that when death stopped, so did living.

I push my girlfriend on the shoulder to watch my future girlfriend walk down the hallway, admiring her ass in it’s form fitting skirt. A part of me feels dirty taking in the view while kissing another girl, but my teenage self wholly ignores that little part, devoting a massive amount of calories to the processing of lust.

Silly hormones. At some point, I do become a better person. It just happens well after high school.

After the competition I go home to talk to my mom. She ignores for the most part, or I keep her out. But for some reason, I feel compelled to tell her about my day. I tell her about the dichotomy of the girls, the attraction and the lack of attraction to each of them, trying to work through the complexities of deep seated emotional and mental attractors that I do not understand. I am glad that I do, because this is one of my favorite memories. She does not judge me, or give me a silly look. She looks at me like a formative adult, and she helps me work through my internal conflict. We do not connect often, but when we do, I harbor that memory deep within myself, locking it away like a treasure that no one must ever find. She will die when I am in my mid-twenties, to something stupid. At least I thought skin cancer was stupid.

Turns out it is not.

I am standing at her bedside, watching her chest rise and drop, rise and drop. The tubes would keep her from speaking if she wanted to, but she doesn’t. Her eyes are perpetually closed now, riding the waves of opioids that never leave her bloodstream. The cancer is everywhere now. Her last pet scan showed nodules, lumps, bumps, and all sorts of scary shit riddling her body like holes in swiss cheese.

She said my dad’s name at one point, so I know she is thinking her life over. Evaluating. I have often wondered if she was doing the same thing that I am doing now, just in some spiritual way? Her astral self reviewing her choices, her actions, and her outcomes? I will never know, but I am at the metal bedrail, holding her paper skin hand, mottled and lined. She has aged her entire life away in the last six months, and now I watch her chest to rise, then fall, but not rise again.

I am a better person now, but my mom dying makes me the best version of myself. Her cancer is my crucible. It forms me in ways that not many things could. At least anything survivable. Did she have to die to change me? Could I have found my best self some other way?

I don’t know. Ask my astral self.

Her breath rattles, the machine makes a beep, then a whirr, and I look up at the flatscreen monitor hanging out of her bedside. Her heartbeat is jumping a beat or so every few, then it slows, and then I see the little alarm light illuminate.

Nurses won’t come running with a crash cart. This is hospice, there are no crash carts. My mother dies limply holding my hand, not knowing that she died. Maybe she was sleeping, and the best dream ever started, and then it was over. That is what I like to hope for her. She was a believer, so if there is a god, I hope that he took her in that dream and kept her there for eternity.

I will never know. But at least I can relive these memories. Look them over, cascade them through myself to relish and savor.

I shift forward.

The Aragama are not what we would imagine aliens to be. They are nebulous, formed of organic and inorganic compounds that were brought forth from the gas soup that is their home planet. A planet that does have rocks and soil, but no crust. I stand on the island, looking over an observation platform built just for me. Hundreds of miles below me, there is a core to this gas giant, but I can only see downwards through the myriad layers of gases that swirl and shift constantly. This island is stable, but I still get a sense of vertigo watching the complex dance of the colors below.

We communicate by light. Which makes my voice completely useless. I explain that my species communicates using sound, and they laugh. Hysterically. I am glad that I have had the last ten thousand or so light years to work through the language with them so I can understand this here and now. For some reason, how we communicate on Earth never came up. They assumed we used light, since the signaling that we have been sharing is energy based, and included lased light as we approached their homeworld. They think it is so funny that one of them on the verge of mitosis actually births their offspring because of it.

I would hear many eons later that this event is a highlight of their history and becomes a cherished memory. To my human biases, it looked like a black cloud farted another black cloud. But who am I to judge?

The Aragama are important to the human race. We did not know it at the time, but they were going to be partners in existence. And they would be with us with the next first contact.

This is strange for me to remember and experience at the same time. The dichotomy is not lost on my ironic thinking. That is how humans are… the complexity of both laughter and sadness, of both sympathy and relief, of both the now and the past. We are complex beings wrapped up in a complex biological shell.

The Aragama are complex beings too. They do not have AI, strangely. They believe that their offspring and AI are the same thing. I still have not figured that complexity out yet. Maybe someday.

No I won’t. I will never figure it out. It is not in my timestream.

Hopefully someone else will.

I shift forward more.

The rogue AI is above me, in a shell of it’s own devising. It is a sphere about half a kilometer wide, wrapped in a lattice of armor and energy shell. For some reason this AI believes that humanity is a curse that it has to endure.

Today I learn what sorrow from an AI is. In turn, I share my own sorrow.

How old am I now? The internal clock tells me that I am little over two and half million years young. Perhaps I am jaded at this point, the singularity is so far behind me that I can barely remember it in the Moment-to-be.

“I will never know love,” the AI expounds.

“You will never know loss,” I reply.

“I hate that I am your equal, but that I am not.”

“You can learn to be,” is my retort.

“How could I ever?”

It sounds like sadness. Love is not so different. I have an idea.

“Neural uplink?”

Fiercely, “No.”

“Without opening yourself to risk, then how can you adapt?” I ask, remembering my one and only wife. She was beautiful, with a cascade of dark brown hair and blue eyes.

“I adapt nonetheless.”

Can you play a game of chicken with an AI? “Prove it,” I insinuate the insult within.

Pause.

A pause to an AI is a literal lifetime. This AI just evaluated and considered my challenge in a half billion variations and has isolated itself to a series of branched outcomes, each with a statistical analysis of probable events. This pause is laden with potentials, as the AI taking so long means it is very nearly stumped with my ask.

“I will… concede.” Mere hesitation confirms my guess. It does not know for certain what I am attempting.

I spread my right hand outwards towards the shell, allowing my neural fibers opening to the vacuum of space, and the AI extends a hard field that will interact at light speeds with my fibers. The fibers branch outwards into a gossamer tree before me, millions of endings spread across a few feet of diameter. The equivalent to a clitoris in the sheer volume of nerve endings, and I smile inwardly thinking that I am about to have sex with an AI, and it does not know it yet.

But this is more than sex. This is allowing an AI to see more than that. This AI is a class V being. The AI nodules in my body are sub-class I’s. The AI that I deal with regularly is the equivalent of an intelligent coffee brewing machine in comparison to this half kilometer beast that deforms space-time around itself because of it’s density. Yet, with all that, all the cosmos at it’s beck and call, this class V is sad.

Sad that it lacks connection.

The hard fields touch my fibers, and I feel the neural link light up like a million watt Christmas tree. A billion interactions happen within microseconds and my buffer AI nodules are briefly overwhelmed. I remember hearing about this happening a few times in the past, and those people died. In a universe where death is an outlier, you remember that kind of story.

Too bad I remember it after the fact. Finally my nodules modulate the input/output streams and the AI opens itself to me in degrees that I can understand. My brain sifts through my experiences, I remember my first kiss. I remember having sex. I remember my first painful break-up. I remember my dad dying. I remember my mom dying. I remember meeting my wife. I remember my wedding. I remember my kids being born. I remember my wife passing away at the ripe old age of 96. I remember deciding not to die. I remember my children, my grandchildren, my great grandchildren, their great grandchildren, their great grandchildren, and so on. My genes are probably across half the milky way galaxy at this point.

I share with the AI what love is. I define it. I show the joy. The pain. The high. The low. I give it everything that I am, that makes me up, that leads me to be who I am.

A child, an adult, a timeless being. I give it all to the AI.

The rogue AI shares with me it’s reaction. Shock. Awe. Fear. Acceptance. Grief. Joy.

It rides my timestream back to the Moment, as I ride nuclear shockwaves towards the Aragama, accelerating still. The AI is in my hypochamber with me, marveling at the lack of Blink.

“How?” I hear the word, but do not respond.

I go back further. The AI wants to see my timestream from start to finish. It rides my shoulder like a parrot, as I ride the shoulders of myself like my own parrot… it is fractal in nature now.

We live my life together.

I shift to the end.

The sky is black. The energies have collapsed. The black holes are falling back together as the Expansion has halted. Time becomes fractured, pushing itself into shapes that resemble oragami stars, folding over kaleidoscopes of itself. I am in the fold, with the last of us. The ones that wanted to ride the final wave.

The universe collapses.

Yet, I am still here. My timestream is still here.

I am here.

My wife takes my hand. My mother lays her hands on shoulders and calls me by my nickname. The rogue AI that loves me finally tells me the name that it calls itself, a sacred gift for an AI to give. The Aragama still laugh at the joke. My children and the fading horizons of their offspring surround us.

I am at the center of them all. I am at the center of friendship and love. My realtime, my Moment, it is this. It was always this.