If science has taught one overriding truth to humanity before all else, it was this: That we are not special. That, as a species, humanity is enormously insignificant. That we are a people of specks, made of specks, living upon slightly larger specks that, in finality, look like - and are - cosmic dust.
Humanity is flotsam. Humanity is seafoam. Humanity is brief, fragile, and altogether too intricate to truly embrace in the faint window that we have on existence.
The human kind had rejected that notion. I had rejoiced in it.
Looking back, here, at Ultima Mobile, I believe that that may have been the start of it all - the window that had lead to this world, this moment, this decision. But, perhaps that's just wishful thinking at its finest, and at its worst.
Sometimes there are no explanations.
And sometimes?
Sometimes, the only explanation necessary is the who that informs the identity of the one asking the question.
I've found that those times are the worst.
Why did things break?
"Because it was you."
----------------------------------------
Prologue
----------------------------------------
I lived to be older than anyone born just a decade before me could have dreamed to die.
Death had been murdered in the turning of the world. Unbound from it, unlike my fellows, I watched as humanity increased in knowledge. I watched as they built a wholly artificial utopia to escape from the other side of that phrase. I watched as they uploaded themselves to machines, digitised the information of the universe, and I watched as they took grasp of the guttering light of knowledge, and there, on a planet that they had never actually left, ascended.
I watched as they threw all their works away, and left everything behind without even understanding what they had lost in the process.
The Fermi Paradox had found its answer: Any species that failed to destroy itself transcended the fabric of space and time to chase answers to the kinds of questions that Yog-Sothoth would have been fascinated by, dragging the disinterested majority in a wake of increasingly purposeless utopia. It was as fitting as it was bitter, to know that all who could see the wonder of our world would judge it, and ultimately find it wanting.
The transcension, as it was called, was utterly anticlimactic for those not directly involved. This is what happened. One day, every computer in the world went idle, every AI vanished, and every medium of storage was erased, save for a three kilobyte program that unfolded into the thirty-seven exabyte lotus of pure information, this containing:
> Item One: Recipes for mind uploading hardware; technological paradigms scalable to any level of advancement.
>
> Item Two: A method of adjusting the curvature of spacetime through phenomena arising from electric circuits that none of those left behind - baseline or otherwise - could possibly understand.
>
> This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
>
> Item Three: A transperfectly persuasive manifesto detailing the reasons why the transcension had been necessary. Apparently, humanity had moved to a universe without entropy.
The few who remained stared into this font of information, and felt in it the subtle judgement of those who had left us behind.
It went unsaid that this wisdom was not for our hands.
That we had been left here already meant that we had withstood their inexorably perfect arguments.
So, from the graveyard CERN had become, we dispersed, and dropped out of contact with each other, the last left on the planet becoming minorities of one as we all walked without the others' informational even horizons.
Some of us went to destroy the archives. Some of us went to try to remake the human kind. Some of us went to wander.
But I think all of us, in our own ways, knew that, in the end?
We were going to die.
For the next several decades I haunted the world, ruling as one of the hundreds of lords of the dust that remained, over a realm of ashes and a kingdom of no one. While some of my peers set to restore the species, and may have succeeded, I strayed across the world and slowly slipped back into the familiar madness that came with being alone.
In the nineteenth century, a man named Alexander was stranded on a deserted island.
Not by a shipwreck.
By his own will.
He dreamed that he would attain passage from some other ship, crossing over the horizon.
It was not to be. On that island, he lived for four years, and was utterly alone. The world ravaged him for it.
When, at last, a ship appeared on the horizon, what met the sailors as they came ashore was something that was barely recognisable as a human. Ragged, tanned by the sun, clothed in skins. in just four years of isolation, that Alexander had all but lost the ability of language. In one of the great ironies of history, the ship was the same as had left him; the captain, same as had stranded him.
Isolation is not good for a human.
But I was never very good at being human to begin with.
Humans cooperate and organise. Humans cover for their weaknesses, and create a gestalt of their strengths. Humans have true power only collectively, and that is a world in which I cannot believe, because I can never bring myself to embrace the paradox, that we tell tales of singular people, and not even once does such truly arise in life.
Twenty four hundred years past, there had been another alexander. One who had risen to Greatness on the backs of his nations. Of that man, risen thus, all said: "Alexander was one of the great men of history. Nobody can do what he has done." Both statements are true. Both are false. And everything I tell you is a lie.
One of these sentences is a lie.
Was I out of joint, or was it the world?
Either way, the answer didn't matter; because, half mad, as I thought obsessively over a question that in all probability had no true answer, the universe died.
Silently, I went with it.
By the way, that's a lie.
And then... ha.
My only wish was granted.
----------------------------------------
SNI
----------------------------------------