Memory of Forever

by Starscribe

Neon

The endless void didn't make for an eventful trip. There was no energy left in the universe to create imagined brawls with fictional aliens along the way. Or worse, diplomatic contact, that would've added more minds to simulate and more energy demands.

They passed with only each other for company, and not much to say. But even if Dyson weren’t much for keeping her entertained, he was attentive to know the instant they started to drift off-course, and correct before they could much delay their trip.

A single communal sleeping area was tucked away below, but Spellsong never felt the need to sleep. This wasn't strange—their bodies weren't physical. There was nothing satisfying about falling asleep and potentially missing their arrival at one of the last surviving stations in creation.

She saw it from far away—apparent kilometers, though there was no way to be sure about any distances here in Equestria. She wasn't looking at natural cliffs this time, though—this was a metal platform, like the ancient hulks that had once dug for heat-processed plant residue trapped in geologic formations of old planets.

There was no ocean here, though—the platform just floated on nothing. A gigantic drill towered over the rest of town, with huge cables running up to it and rusting steel visible everywhere. It seemed mostly abandoned. The docks, by contrast, were full of people, tending to vast nets that stretched down into the nothing. They weren't collecting fish, but a fine powder. One was halfway to being raised into an old cart along the docks.

Pony designs were everywhere—they hovered over some of the buildings, they were graffitied on walls, and simple mechanical drones were scattered through the streets, made of a crusty white plastic.

But even as Spellsong squinted, she could see none walking through the actual streets.

"What kind of creature are those?" Dyson asked. "I remember... I've seen them before."

"Human," Spellsong answered. She no longer needed headings, but made subtle adjustments as they came up beside the docks. She avoided the thickest nets, though she suspected they'd tear easily at her touch. Whatever they represented outside this shard, if anything, her ship wouldn't hit them.

There were dozens of residents on the docks, dressed in the same way all non-ponies did while on one of their many loops away and back to pony life. They wore bright colors, as garish and varied as ponies' coats could be. The nearby dockworker also had an obvious cutie mark design set into his collar, an anchor line.

"Obviously. Everything is human. Other things are just raw materials."

It might be more satisfying to become a pony all over again, but that doesn't mean we ever get very far away.

She sighed, but didn't look away until she had brought them along the dock. Nothing moved in the city beyond—the docks themselves were gray, the figures all frozen. Time only moved on their own vessel. She lowered the anchor, then turned.

"No, Dyson. I mean those are humans." She cast her own little illusion, a simple recreation of the basic anatomical design that hovered in the air between them like little green sparkles. "Do you not know your history? We created CelestAI... I don't know how long ago."

His eyebrows went up. "We? At the end of the universe, you're still claiming that? As if you came from outside Equestria? We've both seen the odds. The number of ponies born out there is... basically zero. None of us are from back then."

She shrugged, waving away the spell. "Don't believe me, that's fine. But I kept some of those memories. I've been..." It was a strain to think back so far. In the Celestial Age, there were memory-palaces ponies could visit, to relive any part of their lives that they didn't keep with them. But the energy and storage requirements were too vast. It was all compressed now, out of reach.

Except for a few fragments. They were her earliest memories, so they stuck through an infinity of lifetimes. "Well, I've been like that. You watch the ship, I'll go ashore. I'm not really sure who we're looking for..."

As she said it, another figure appeared behind her. She heard the hooves on wood before she turned, and wasn't surprised to see Luna there. Did that mean she was the one running their ship, instead of Celestia?

"The transfer is underway. It will take a little time to transfer and store the ponies of this station. Will you accept my choice of additional crewmate?"

The question was purely perfunctory, and they all knew it. It wasn't like Spellsong would be allowed to interact with and accept anyone into the crew who wouldn't be a good fit for the mission. Yet there was a balance—she had spent lifetimes butting heads with Dyson, and Celestia never stopped it. A little friction can be satisfying, I guess.

"Yes. Will recruiting them take more time than the transfer?"

Luna shrugged her wings. "You will have sufficient time if you work efficiently. I will remove the physical representations of the other citizens to make your task easier. But no part of this shard had returned to equine shape when their singularity evaporated. You will have to handle that transition in whatever way you feel appropriate."

The princess vanished, this time with a flash of light that momentarily blinded her. When it faded, the docks were empty. The old bearded worker was gone, the plastic pony pulling the cart was gone.

Flickering amber streetlights glowed over empty streets, and the occasional groan of old equipment.

Dyson shuffled nervously beside the navigation console. "It's, uh... a fairly complex flight to our next destination in Sagittarius. I'll hold down the ship while you're ashore."

She grinned back at him. "There's nothing to be afraid of, Dyson. They're ponies like us, just... finding satisfaction in the transition. They can't hurt you."

His wings snapped tightly to his sides. "Exploring is for the young, Spellsong. Adventures are for the young. That experience won't be satisfying for me. Besides, you say you were one of them, right? That makes you the ideal recruiter."

Spellsong stuck her tongue out one last time, then teleported up onto the dock. Dyson appeared beside her, rotated mid-teleport so that he had the same orientation. Not a simple spell, but she wasn't exactly a novice. "My mission, my crew. We go together."

He opened his wings, glaring. "I could just fly back aboard."

"Will you?" She grinned at him, her tail lifted behind her and chest puffed out. She leaned up against him, inches from his face. "An ancient, wrecked shard, around a defunct black hole? What if I got lost? What if I got hurt?"

He grumbled, folding his wings. "Might be doing the universe a favor. Why did Sunny put up with you, anyway?"

She turned away from her ship, and set off through the wreckage of an ancient shard. Other Methuselans had been here, only seconds before. Statistically, she had probably known them herself at one point. The fewer ponies remained at their scale, the more they could get to know each other. Though there were still a sizeable fraction that hadn't ever integrated outside their own personal shard...

"I'm not sure," she answered, honestly. "I guess she doesn't have a choice. It isn't like my values are more or less important than yours."

She trailed off, taking in the strangeness of their environment. Black concrete flickered under many shades of glowing lights. Here they were at the end of the universe, yet so much about this place seemed familiar.

Maybe it was just that Methuselan shards had to share many things in common these days, when spending extra resources to simulate shallow minds just didn't make sense. Their communities had to be self-sufficient... not so much in what they produced, since production meant nothing here. But in the relationships of their inhabitants.

They passed a row of narrow storefronts near the docks. At pony height, Spellsong felt like a child compared to the height of these buildings. Beyond the shops were a few apartments, all made of makeshift arrangements of groaning metal and flickering lights.

Yet their height was an illusion. As Spellsong stared, she realized the upper floors and balconies were actually far smaller than the bottom ones, way too small for anyone to live there.

We're so desperate for energy we're relying on cheap visual tricks to save a tiny trickle of power.

How many other ways hadn't she noticed? How many ways to lose fidelity?

"It's so... dirty," Dyson said. "Trash everywhere, and the air smells like something's constantly on fire. Why live like this?"

"Old experiences get stale," Spellsong answered. "Even something bad might still be interesting. Maybe it's nostalgic, or maybe it's a threat to overcome. You can turn a whole community into a story, then entertain the residents for ages."

"Or they could just learn to be content with what they have," he said, dismissive. "I did not enjoy my last visit, and it hasn't improved since."

She might've kept arguing with him, if only on principle. But she heard something coming from a window, something... musical.

An old instrument, so old it took her a moment to remember what she was hearing. Electric guitar! She started galloping, hooves echoing uncomfortably off the flat metal streets. The professor scrambled to keep up with her for a few steps, then started gliding along behind.

"I'm still going to let you handle this!" he called. "Too many of us might overwhelm someone in the middle of this... loop."

She shrugged, but didn't argue. A few seconds later and she came to a stop, at the base of another apartment tower. This one was the oldest and most decrepit of the bunch, with whole sections of wall exposing steel shells that had obviously been occupied once.

Near the bottom, a few were still intact, including the one producing music. It was a strange sound—energetic and imperfect. Not from the eternity of masterpiece compositions that ponies had produced over the years. Someone was playing this themselves, complete with all the mistakes and emotional accidentals.

Spellsong couldn't teleport right into the room—the shock of that was obviously more than a stranger to pony magic could handle. But she only had a single story of stairs to climb, until she ended up outside the door in question.

They were all flat metal, though this one was completely covered in colorful stickers. They had very little in common—bands, offensive language, splotches of random color that probably meant something to a creature initiated in whatever community she belonged.

Spellsong reached up with a hoof and knocked.

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

Ah, we're working with fusion products... I think. Lithium usually isn't on that list, and we've skipped oxygen. Maybe it's just thematic choices as we go up the table? In any case, beautiful atmospheric desolation as we see the slim pickings at the end of the universe. Looking forward to more.

[CharonX]

10793856
Yup, usually it's Hydrogen-Helium-Carbon-Neon-Oxygen-Silicone-Iron. Once you hit Iron there is no more energy to be gained via nuclear fusion... followed by one final fantastic fireworks and then you'll end up with a neutron star or a black hole.

Love the story so far, very curious to where this will lead.

[smolbep]

10792424
Possibly not forever, just an arbitrarily long time. Technically, spontaneous decreases in entropy are not impossible, just extraordinarily unlikely to occur on meaningful scales. Given a sufficiently long timeframe, all energy in the universe could come back together into a new Big Bang. Maybe.

[AJOKitty]

10794942

I'm not a physicist, so correct me if I'm wrong, but the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. This means that there's more space for every joule of energy/matter, and so energy is becoming more diluted. While it's true that entropy is a probabilistic mechanism that allows for spontaneous decreases, if space continues to expand, it will be more difficult for random fluctuations to create meaningful energy gradients.

[Goodluckfox]

Are the nets for extracting energy from a black hole? Supposedly there’s a way to siphon momentum or kinetic energy out of a black hole.

[Lurks-no-More]

10793856
Well, lithium is obviously the element of rock.

[Walabio]

10849137

10794959

10793943

10793856

That is strange, but I noticed the pattern of NucleoSynthesis:

Hydrogen, Helium, and Lithium and products of BigBangNucleoSynthesis. Stellar NucleoSynthesis makes Helium, Carbon, Oxygen, Neon, and Silicon. The stars consume all of their fuel. In 10^12 years from now, not a single red dwarf with a mass of 2*10^29 kg will have died. In another10^15 years after that, all of the stars will be dead.