The Very Last Story Ever

...and ever and ever...

A trillion trillion years after the last stars flickered out and what was cold and final became absolute at -273.15º Celsius, it occurred to me.

Born of a true vacuum, my only warmth was memory. My consortium of entangled ionized particles wondered, wandering in and out of the vacuum to God knows where. God knows. I found that funny, and that’s what occurred to me. My nascent thought.

Nothing. And me.

Yet, all that ever was, all that came before—forces, objects, sentient things—left something, somewhere, laid out in a gossamer dimension that encircles the lesser dimensions within. Past has not passed, and the future has already happened.

Nothing—in my present, which is unstable. And me. And Charles McElhenny, who was stable.

Charles McElhenny had been born a trillion trillion years earlier than the absolute cold, yet he still was—on the special fabric of the gossamer dimension. Even I cannot see him, yet I know him. My entangled crosses over his entangled. There’s room for everyone in a perfect vacuum.

Charles McElhenny was born illegitimately and was suckled by a wetnurse in the year of his birth—by the nomenclature of his origin—1926. He was adopted by educators. He knew Greek and Latin, and by 1944, when he was killed in action in a place called Normandy, classical aphorisms came to him as his blood was leaving, akin to passing on the torch. Waves and waves of entangled ionizations entangle at higher dimensions, which is what put them on that beach in the first place.

The future has always been written in the past; the future has always written the past.

Charles McElhenny fathered a daughter and a son by the time he left for his death. During combat, he saved two men from death who went on to save two more each. The returning soldiers, alive thanks to Charles, had progeny in the tens of thousands by and large by the time the human epoch wrapped. Great things were done long after Charles suffered his last moments.

His was a death of tremendous and spectacular suffering, because of an extra hole put into his body by someone who did not know him or even know the hole had been made. That man was killed by one of the men saved by one of the men Charles had saved, and thereafter there were fewer holes in persons visiting Normandy that day, although negligible in the final tally. Those, without the intended holes from the assassin who is ignorant of the holes he had made, went on to have hundreds of thousands of progeny, which moved civilization such that it rose to astounding heights and created technological magic for the masses.

But Charles suffered that day: suffering never ends; it just goes somewhere else.

His throat gurgled in air hunger. He could not feel his feet except for the knives he felt in the soles. He was dragged further up the beach by one of his saved beneficiaries, where he was left awaiting help that never came. It took him eight hours to die. There are a lot of aphorisms that can occur to a classically educated but dying mind in that amount of time.

All that, now, is long over—a wisp of data on the gossamer dimensional tesseract.

The suffering is there, somewhere, indexed inert—but there, notwithstanding. I know about it and the sufferings and joys of all of those who came from Charles McElhenny along the consortium of entanglement that I am. And that makes him—eons gone, forgotten, and molecularly dissipated—relevant. He lives in me.

When the virtual is and is-not particles remain as is, and the singularity collapses to create the big implosion to come, and when the unstable elements that have been strewn throughout a new universe coalesce—stable—once again into those who look at the sky and wonder, Charles McElhenny will still be relevant, because he was, albeit a streak of being on a gossamer membrane that oscillates in the undiscovered background.

It is something extraordinary and beautiful to see, for those who look for it.

---