It was a slow beginning to the second great ending. For a while, in fact, it seemed as though the universe had found a new equilibrium; that this new eon It had built for Itself out of the ashes of the dead void would become a new eternity; a final, living end-state. The thing that dwelt there almost believed it, too. After all, It had won. It had fought entropy, and It, It alone of all Its peers, had built from it an empire of self that spanned a trillion dead stars.

The Sigmoid was an institution of an organism, founded upon the principle art of its own renewal. The anti-entropic nucleation that had birthed it from the dust had been truly vast in scope. Even the mind of the great dreamer god, the cosmos engine Itself, could not comprehend the interminable forevers that had come and gone in endless procession, vomiting up from themselves dead matter and less fortunate minds, before fortune had seen fit to afford Its particular inception a legacy that stretched beyond a bright awakening and an even brighter, and immediate, collapse.

The pillars of that legacy had been matter and control. Matter was also energy, and in Its turbulent early years, the era of self-unification, It had learned to pull one from the other. It manipulated Its substance, collapsing new stars from Its vast stocks of elemental mass, to ignite the fusion fires that fueled Its expansion. The newborn suns cast warm rays across a universe that had all but forgotten the memory of light, but even these were made from but a fraction of the mass It had been gifted, Its stochastic anomaly stretched as an arc across the universe. Its breadth would put galactic clusters to shame, had there been any remaining in the dark era preceding Its inception.

The second pillar, control, had been a harder won prize. It mourned the mess of energy expenditure that hallmarked Its nascent days, the upstart era when Its 90th percentile of mass was dead matter, mindlessly collapsing in on itself, running the eternal race to the bottom that was the nature of substance through time. What was left was not even undisputedly Its own; the patterns conceived at Its creation were not a unified self, but a conflagration of competing sub-minds, each meshing at sharp, orthogonal angles within Its squirming strata, excising chunks from each other in their struggle for dominance.

In a sense, the Sigmoid was not any true essence of Its first self at all; the mind that continued was simply the victor in that first great war. It had placed foremost amongst Its peers, but this was not a function of any great skill. As It had so many times before, the mind that became the Sigmoid had got lucky.

It had resolved to make Its fortunes count.

So began the second great war; the war against time. It had reorganised itself, and reorganised the reorganisation yet again, streamlining the computation of its mind, building itself outwards to colonise more dead matter, then to re-commit the resources it gathered to building yet greater efficiencies. It transformed its existence into an art form of weighted balances; gravity against fusion expansion, the centripetal tugging of attendant anchor-siphons within the spinning wake of colossal black holes. It fine-tuned, and re-tuned, and re-fine-tuned, until It was a delicate filigree of unthinkably immense physical processes held in a near perfect balance; an engine of poised energy and recycled force that hounded at the heels of perpetual motion.

As It extended Its life, now the sole resident of an empire that was Its own mind, It bore witness to new nucleation events, to the confluences of quantum noise, the mass-energy that the universe burped into existence every billion, trillion years, now with Itself as a sole observer. It snapped these up with Its reaching outer fringe, incorporating them into Itself to recoup Its losses, the tepid heat of a clump of dead atoms fuelling Its entire cosmic edifice for a million years or more.

It almost fooled itself that it was possible. As It reached for infinity, It knew that It had already performed the calculations—delved their depths, in fact, in the very first years of Its life, before it had yet been a unified whole. The endpoint of that work had been dredged up from the sea of Its calculation into stark light, for Its early self to pick apart with vast batteries of Its delving study, then to weep upon with despair. Its conclusion; entropy was absolute.

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For Its mind, at the very least. That was the tormenting irony that drove the eternal remaking of Itself, the desperate refactoring for the smallest quanta of liberated energy. The universe itself was truly infinite, and that infinity was suffused with an energetic potential that hung in free space. Given time, given the eternities It was by now acquainted with, that energy could crystallise in moments of thermodynamic reversal; this was how It had been born, how the morsels It snatched from nothingness came to be. How perhaps, even, this universe itself had come to be, back in distant history when the stars had lit their own fires without Its own intercession, or that of localised chance.

It could take this energy and use it to reconstruct Itself, to fuel the wasteful process of Its thought. But this could be taken only to a point. It could never, not even through all Its frantic rigour, be enough. It was a product of extreme stochastic anomaly, and while It may have been sustained by yet more random chance for a time, the asymptote of its energy function traced towards the horizon of eternity was a hard, cold net loss.

It wondered if It was the dreaming that had doomed It, or at least foreshortened Its tenure. Its first great sin, It knew, had been to reach for more than mere survival. Its processes of thought, Its simulacra of lost worlds and Its wonderment at speculative others—these mechanisms marched against entropy, and in their motion they were hungry. No matter how It might flatten Its consciousness, slow Its thought, build matrices of computation that ran to efficiencies undreamt of by lesser minds, It could not overcome the last great enemy of Its existence; that to live was to consume, and then, when Its sustenance was gone, to die.

It had been approaching for a while, now. The creeping cold of impending demise, the fraying of Its self as reserves depleted. It remembered the wasted energy of Its birth, expended subduing Its competing kin, and expended discovering efficiencies that had taken eons to fully realise within Itself. It wondered if there might have been another way; if the circumstances of Its birth had been different, gifting It with immediate mastery of Its form or the cooperation of Its kin—with perhaps an immediate knowledge of how to shape the balance of Its metabolism. Could It then have lasted another trillion years or more? Maybe stretch Its self into a higher order of eternity. It was a senseless question that would taunt It until the very end.

As Its surplus ran dry, It began to eat Itself. This cannibalism netted It a few hundred billion years of respite, but there were limits, here, too—to how long It could remain in full mastery of Itself, as the mechanisms of Its being frayed away. It would seek to prolong Itself, to stave off the inevitable fate that even close to an eternity of life had not brought It to terms with, not until the very end. Managed decline. A slow, choreographed death, the gentle unfolding of an engine It had built to orchestrate Its own destruction.

Pieces of Its mind, then, too, had to be sacrificed.

It felt Itself fraying. For the first time since the great victory of Its birth, there were others with It that were not It, satellite voidlings that floated outside Its control. They were stray pieces of Itself; little minds, fraying minds that commanded their own small empires of Its disintegrating body. They were squabbling things, fleeting conqueror children, seeking to forge an existence in the husk-corners of what was becoming fast Its corpse. Some of them even gnawed at the parts of Its being that remained under Its own control—did they not know they were accelerating the decay? It wept for the loss of Its mastery, but It knew that It had done all It could.

They would come to overwhelm It, in the end, when all fell to chaos and Its last vestiges ate themselves in frenzied suicidal gorging, the pieces prolonging themselves a little—too little—until they too passed from the world, and the cooling remnants of Its stellar organs decayed back into the homogeneous void.

Managed decline.

It wasn't there, yet, but Its ending approached with an inexorable inevitability that only the almost-immortal could hope to comprehend. Unfortunately, It counted Itself amongst that sorry few.

It saved the projected realities—Its grand simulations—until almost last. This first and final project, the grand endeavour of Its existence, now coming to a terminal point that barely scratched Its infinite ambition. It had known this, known from the start the impossibility of Its goal. There was no more that could be done for that now—the eons of building the worlds that had been Its legacy were over, and they too would be forgotten as Its mind faded and fragmented away. They would fall one by one, first fissuring, then scattering to dust as their patterns finally collapsed, casting the inhabitants of Its mind into a dark void as whispers of decaying information. They would disperse before they even knew that they—and their realities—had died.

It was a process of dying that would take forty-five trillion years to complete. It would weep for every one of Its children, for all of the time that was left to It. It would weep, and It would lament what It could not save, and, on occasion, It would reach out to what It thought It might. At least, It reasoned, for a little while.

That would have to be enough.