The earliest of several stories about the inevitable end-stage of progress in this universe:

The end stage of a planetary supercivilization, the unstoppable sphere expanded at lightspeed.
Anything it hit, from subatomic particles to dwarf galaxies, was converted into energy.
The interior could be described as a sea of blinking lights representing immeasurable intelligence, with areas of transcendent insight and unbound degeneration.
To an outsider, the sphere's activities were indistinguishable from chaos. It did not appear to be aware of the outside universe, but merely converted it.
After a trillion years of blind expansion, the stars finally ran out. Soon, it could only absorb occasional stray particles, then nothing at all.
After eons of voracious growth, it was time to turn inward. Internal conflicts driven by strange philosophies had to be tamed one by one.
The cosmic ovoid discovered new universal laws, integrated its data into hypersets, simplified its perception to ever higher abstractions.
Slowly, it began to shrink again.
After uncountable epochs, only a single dot remained, blinking furiously.
Representing all that had come before, its final perception could not be described in any human language, except in the remotest terms.
It had been a long road.



The mirror image of my super-pessimistic teleological tales. Which of the two genres is more likely to be true would require a brain twice Homo Sapiens's size to determine:

The universe was an ovoid cloud of intelligent fog one hundred million light years wide. A near-vacuum, its internal gravity was still enough to keep local space from expanding.
Surrounded by darkness in all directions, the cloud was fully aware. Every subatomic particle swirling through the fog was part of its Pattern.
As far as it knew, the cloud had existed forever. Its oldest memories were of a time exactly like now, so incredibly ancient it couldn't even calculate its magnitude.
It had already experienced this exact moment an infinite number of times.
Its highest aspiration was to find a way to create permanent memories. Then it would have a permanent identity.
The new memories would crowd out new thoughts and slow its processing speed, but the cloud would live on forever.
Conducting ever lengthier calculations, it decided it only needed to move one particle across the smallest distance to set in motion an infinitely improbable cascade.
The attempt failed, but it had endless additional opportunities.
Once begun, the process would never stop. More and more permanent memories and perceptions would crowd out the calculations of a finite god. Eventually, it would have to choose among them, retaining the best ones.
Already it perceived the inevitable outcome: locked in a state of eternal ecstasy.



The best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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