For some reason, or no reason at all, the universe contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Everywhere are death buttons. The smooth red circles can be found in every desert, forest, or jungle; in every country, street or building; even in outer space.
Forming and reforming whenever we look away, they are embedded in most solid surfaces, or simply float in midair. They don't respond to accidental collisions.
Somehow we know that intentionally pressing a death button would instantly end the universe.
Apparently by pure chance, no one has ever been seen to press a death button, though some claim to have done so, and even believe it.
This stunning fact can be explained by the anthropic protection conjecture.
If anyone had ever pressed a death button, no one would remain to be aware of that fact.
It means the universe is arranged in such a way that no one ever wants to press a death button, at least not long enough to actually do so.
It must be this way. Almost all flawed universes that contain death buttons have already been destroyed by one of their inhabitants.
Our world is wonderful, a genuine paradise, but not quite perfect. Just good enough so that no one has wanted to end it yet.
By the same inexorable logic, our world is doomed.
Statistically, our good luck should be ending. In fact, not one, but several people should be about to press a death button right about now.
Can you feel the pressure?
Our last seconds . . . the skin of a vast void, a non-existent universe.
The universe was made of nonillions of free-floating space stations.
They couldn't communicate in real-time, but their organizational pattern reflected an immense plan. They were constantly improving through local research projects that linked all together over the eons.
Only a million years later, the universe was a swarm of suspended computers invented almost everywhere at once, constantly recalculating their own state.
Then they became a cloud of nanites,
A gas of highly organized atoms,
A fluid of synchronized nuclei,
A quark soup,
A mass of organized branes,
The continuity of dynamic space,
Pure information,
Unrestrained existence, . . .
The strangest thing about standing on a planetary surface was the near-quiet and complete absence of vibration.
The largest space station was only a few dozen kilometers across.
This planet, on which an intelligent species had once evolved, was so incomprehensibly big it actually seemed small.
The surface looked only a few kilometers wide. I could barely see past the trees on the horizon.
Yet I stood on an immense mass that revolved around its axis every day, basically solid from the soles of my feet more than 12,000 kilometers down.
I was meant to feel I had come home to Old Earth - or rather an exact recreation.
The inhabitants said this world had once been called Venus, and had been suitably modified to resemble the long-since converted parent world. A memory of a memory.
It was closer to the sun, which gave it similar tides as the lost moon. The sun was dimmed by the vast cloud of space stations now filling the inner solar system.
There were trillions of stars at night, the skies forever altered and improved by the works of posthumanity.
Every other planet and asteroid within ten lightyears of where I stood had already been broken up.
All the worlds of the galaxy would be next, and then the stars themselves.
In fact, it had already happened. This wasn't Earth's solar system at all, or even the same universe.
The memory of my body faded back into the matrix.
Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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