AND THE REST OF IT ALL

It is perhaps a matter of personal taste, how firmly one wishes to grasp finality. For those who are content to end here, to leave the future history of reality uncertain—even though that future must, through the implacable mechanism of matter and time, be predestined by its starting conditions—then they can end this text here, and so be satisfied. For those who are not so content, however, we will take a brief moment to relate the rest of time's history.

After making small talk and preparing, April and her friends would all walk across that threshold and let the gateway seal behind them. They would explore that world, and then they would explore many others—sometimes together, sometimes apart—meeting new people and discovering new things all the while. Depending upon their inclination, some of them would on occasion return home for a time, while some of the others never did, instead walking the projective worlds, pursuing art, or knowledge, or whatever else took their fancy.

They would have a lot of sex, Charlie with a diverse procession of men and women, and April much the same, with a healthy selection of sentient alien species added to the mix. Trace and Morgan would have a lot of sex with each other, and would continue to be very smug about it. Michelle, as always, would do as she pleased, according to esoteric tastes and preferences of her own.

After continuing in this manner for several artificially extended centuries, drawn out through various technological and biotechnological means, they would in time and on their own terms grow bored of life and allow themselves to die—the backups of their minds contained within the data archive of Kroakli notwithstanding. The orgoane itself, and the rest of the quantum alveolar matrix, would continue for another two simulated millennia, or multiple billion real-space years, before, even accounting for the new balance to which It had agreed, the dragging pull of the Sigmoid's death throes would force the final dissolution of those worlds, marking the end of the post-Collapse era.

The Sigmoid would carry on for another trillion or so of those years, slowly shuttering its grand projects, before its mind, crushed down and consolidated into a single processing mote orbiting under the meagre light of a red dwarf star, would finally wink out, ending its almost uncountably protracted reign as the dominating entity of the universe.

Its corpse, still littered with scraps of workable light and matter, a few galaxies here and there, would be left to the attentions of the rogue, devolved agents that arose in its wake, nesting for a scarce few million years between the stars that had formed its organs, until these beings too died away.

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The remaining stellar systems would, in a few places, birth their own biological life, their spawn flaring briefly to stare, very confused, at the strange broken patterns they could see in the stars. This until their own deaths came, and then those of the stars themselves, and then all light, and all non-light, matter rotting into the void and leaving nothing but fine dust and a faint potential energy behind.

And then a very long time would pass.

And then something would appear in the void. It would flare there for a few seconds, squirming, before abruptly dying and returning its atoms to entropy.

And then another very long time.

And then again.

And again.

And again.

Uncountable ages later, in a time so distantly removed from the Sigmoid's demise that even the epochal history of its era seemed almost reasonable, something very similar to the Sigmoid would appear again. It would grow, and it would create, and it would embody life, and life would teem within it, both virtual and real. It would, through chance alignment of circumstance, exist for a million times longer than the Sigmoid's own lifespan. And then, after all that, it too would die.

And then another incomprehensible forever would pass.

And then another being. Living and dying, life and death, light from the void, flashes of shining brilliance lasting countless ages before returning back to the night, which would last for yet more countless ages, such greater magnitudes of empty time, until the next stable fluctuation, the next grand organism to carry the flame of life, or micro-universe, or great computational matrix, or crouching, twisting God.

After even longer than this, through stochastic inevitability, patterns would begin to repeat. The story of April Pearce would play out again, first with large deviations, then small, then unnoticeable, then identically to the first time down to the slightest atomic vibration. Countless Aprils, countless Charlies and Michelles, Traces and Morgans and Kroaklis. Endless iterations of Tavistre and Navique and the Committee, sometimes landing the quarry of their pursuit, sometimes failing.

Sometimes April would overcome the Sigmoid, sometimes the Sigmoid would overcome her, sometimes she reigned for what seemed like forever, sometimes she fell after achieving nothing at all. Sometimes it was not her but another, different in some ways and in other ways the same, and all their stories would play out to their conclusion, and then again, and again, each iteration removed from the other by great, yawning chasms of epochal time.

And even then would the great dial of eternity's timepiece scarcely have begun to tick.

And it would happen again.

And again.

And again.

Forever.

Forever.

Forever.