The Rich Dance

Cheeseburger Brown

CHAPTER 1

Her name is Name. She is the last.

Once, when the world was rich, she was a queen and a mother and a singer of the long songs. She swam and popped among many, back when the sky was full of stars swarmed by living things.

But time times, and events unfurl with history's momentum until all history is spent. Now there is nothing to stand against the cold. The last galaxies are dim, red smears separated by nearly infinite lakes of stultifying dark -- lonely scabs, evaporating away in feeble, guttering jets of X-ray foam.

It's so very quiet.

There are wonders, still, for the patient observer. Even when almost nothing is possible anymore the last of the actual describe their throes through pathways unconsidered and inspired. There are few straight trajectories into the final cold, as what's left burns at all by virtue of its own unlikelihood.

The final deaths are the province of the strangest attractors. Some of it gasps or shatters when it ends, and Name is satisfied by that beauty. Poof. Bang. Smudge. Something changes, and Name delights. And then the cold comes. It always does, and with it the probability of any further event drops so low that even the vacuum ceases to roil.

That part horrifies her.

She flees. She steps aside hyper-sideways, then burns a singularity or two until she calms, soothed by the spark and the din.

Her name is Name. She is alone in the Universe's graveyard. It is her playground, and her temple. It is both her home and her self. It is her legacy and her identity, for she is the only one who remembers that the Universe ever happened.

Soon, time will stop. The cold will have everything, and then everything will be nothing.

This depresses Name. She tries not to think about it.

Another thing flares as it succumbs, and she is distracted for a billion years. She thinks it's pretty. She cherishes the fresh memory for another era. Around her there is only blackness, for the stretch of space has outpaced the light. She drifts, streamers of matter slush trailing from the actualized aspects of her lowest tendrils. She draws lazy circles in the current, watching the vacuum flash and fizzle in the resulting wake of possibilities.

She yawns.

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CHAPTER 2

When Name was young the motes of the world still shone on each other. Space was tight. You could see forever.

No matter which wavelength you perceived with, the view was incredible: in every direction a spaghetti dinner of baryonic matter webs with gravity-well superclusters glowing at the intersections, scattered from whenever you were all the way in the distance to the start of time.

And the galaxies! Every strand and creek housed trillions. Anywhere you looked galaxies wheeled, their nuclei bright and their plasm sparkling with the flashes of stars as they ripened and burst.

Name loved galaxies. As a child she would draw them in the vacuum's spume. She put little faces on them. She almost always made them happy galaxies. They used to pale next to the real thing, but now her drawings were all she had. The real galaxies were finished. They had taken their bows, and spun down their own drains. There had been no one left to applaud except Name and Know, and now Know was gone, too.

Know forgot why to be alive, and froze.

A wave of intense grief had rippled through Name at close to the speed of light. Great swaths of her physiology had never fully recovered from that destructive pulse of despair. There were cell failures in many tissues, and a new cancer evolved which took her neurology three hundred million years to eradicate. Several of her organs were permanently disorganized.

In order to avoid following Know's fate, she assigned herself the mission of witnessing the last hiccough of the Universe, to see and be conscious of the dissolving of the last black holes and the fading of the final glow of chance. Then she would let herself go, and allow the cold to take her.

So she waits for the ultimate event in the Universe -- or, the penultimate event, really, if she counts her own dissolution.

And one day it happens.

The ultimate event in the Universe is the decay of the last natural photon. Without fanfare, it winks out the range of the likely. Snap.

Name shivers.

She looks around, but it's as if she's blind. There's nothing to see. Sixty-four dimensions and there's nothing going on except herself. Trillions upon trillions of years of history, any hint of which known to nobody but Name.

She mourns.

Time begins to melt away. She feels it in her extremities, and it is repulsive.

This repulsion awakens something inside of Name. Her every instinct recoils against the touch of the cold. She rails against the emotion, damning it as nonsensical, cursing the somatic ignorance that cannot appreciate the larger view. At its core, being alive is little more than being stubborn. Her tissues baulk as they necrotize, parsec by parsec.

But a rebellion has ignited. She feels it not in her neurology, nor in any organ of higher function, nor even at the level of her cells. Instead, the mad strike against the inevitable sizzles in the tiniest of the organelles that drive her existence: the civilizations themselves. So tiny, so tenacious, so dynamic: so persistent in the rich dance of variations over time, the blind quest to optimize the loops of life against the thermodynamic destiny everything shares.

The cold! Living is its antithesis.

Name remembers so much, but not nearly enough to do justice to the exquisite interplay of events that had been the Universe's heyday. Back when there were still natural protons around everywhere; back when the stars shined and probability found every champion it could, and some of them rose to become larger than their origins -- the little lifelets, molecular machines so small they were dwarfed by even humble specks of asteroid, so amazing they brought life to space. There had been so many tiny kind whose heritage still beat inside Name's physiology, so many wonderful solutions resisting a smooth destiny: the If, and the Blossoms, and the Round Ones, and the Humans...

All at once, it is so: Name decides that she cannot turn her back on them all. She cannot simply give up on all that has ever been. She will not fade away.

She wills it, and it is so. The cold is repelled.

She recognizes in slow, careful stages that though the canopy of creation is empty she is the inheritor of all chance. There is nothing likely in the Universe except herself, and the entire field of probability bristles at her merest thought.

She is the Universe. She feels it proprioceptically, though her every fibre. As she breathes she is sensitive to the decay: the very fabric of reality is coming uncoiled, and it burns her nerves.

The Universe is shriveling. Its borders are contracting, and the sky is falling in.

Desperation fills her. Name turns to tradition -- only the rich dance can discover a solution. The quandary is too big for a lone entity! And though she has no mate she divines a method to reproduce herself: with the whole of the Universe's probability space at her beck and call she can iterate multiple copies of herself inside a slice of time. Her only hope is that the Universe exists within a greater context, and that a version of herself might fathom a way to it.

She takes a deep breath, and summons all that she has. It is like a cry across the night: blazing and keen, wrought with animal passion.

Fiat! She replicates instances of herself throughout the Universe's entire bandwidth of likelihood. For a fleeting sub-moment, there are an uncountable number of Names.

Time times. Reality coalesces and there is only one Name again, alone.

Alone, but inspired.

The skin of the Universe sags against her, dragging her down into the last horizon. Carefully, thoughtfully, she extends herself to explore the most convoluted creases of the tangling dimensions, and uses a flurry of forced chance to discover a fissure. She warms with hope.

Time stops. Everything is done.

Name pries herself through the collapsing bounds of reality, and escapes.

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CHAPTER 3

Her name is Name. She arrives in the Context, and her first thought is that she is alive. Her second thought is that she has thoughts. The Universe had ended, but apparently Name has not.

She is cheered by the news.

She is also bewildered: the first thing she is able to recognize about the Context is that it is characterized by a dizzying field of interwoven times. She had imagined that thinking sixty-four dimensionally prepared one for any eventuality, but Name is the first to admit that the Context utterly baffles her. She cannot perceive anything remotely coherent for what feels like a long period, at least as considered with her native notion of the temporal force.

The visceral realization that she truly is not within the Universe anymore hits her hard. She feels ill. She is afraid. Name quails.

Time times. Name is propelled by curiosity. Her fringes in closest contact with the stuff and spaces of the Context begin sending signals to her neurology that make some sense. Her cells react against the turbulence of intersecting disparate kinds of time by reinforcing their connection to local time. Name's flesh buzzes as the specks of gravity wells within her are spun in precise concert, locking every somatic system to a common march of events.

The world around her clarifies.

The Universe hangs before her like a dried up berry. It appears frozen in time. It is crowded on all sides by other berries in various stages of ripeness. Beyond them lie more clusters of berries, growing from the hyper-bifurcated limbs of a one hundred and ninety-six dimensional tree.

Name feels like she might barf. She closes her perceptions, then burns a singularity for comfort. She sings herself a quiet, nervous song.

She has taken heavy damage to her somatic components when crossing over, but her physiology is adapting and healing, patch by patch. Her neurology has automatically transcribed itself into a new medium in order to operate within the Context, and she therefore allows hundreds of millions of years of debugging before even trying to think too hard.

She keeps her perceptions thickly filtered. She communes with the hum of life within herself.

When Name is ready, she opens herself to the Context again. It becomes less terrifying as she acclimatizes. She discovers that by an act of translation through one of the smaller dimensions she can push the global time she sees around her backward or forward.

She moves to and fro experimentally: the cluster of universe berries blossom and shrivel, blossom and shrivel in response, swinging through their respective histories.

Name is delighted and intrigued.

She translates further and watches the birth of the berry bunch: from the tiniest bud, a sudden explosion of a staggering quantity of berries, the majority of which pop or shrivel almost immediately. Among those that go on to ripen and age, the Universe. Her Universe. How she loves it!

She wonders if she dare take a peek inside. The question is an answer, and she surges forward.

There is suddenly a lot of pain. Name shrieks and writhes, then retreats.

After licking her wounds she extends her most homeostatic tendril outward into Context space and studies the way it bends and splits through the bizarre array of inflated spatial dimensions available. Once satisfied with a method for safe passage Name moves cautiously forward.

She comes to rest against the outside of the Universe. The surface is black and largely smooth, and it reacts like a viscous fluid when Name touches it. She sticks a tendril through it and feels the familiar thrum of the Universe's history flowing. It fills her with nostalgia.

She sticks her head through the black skin, and is delighted to see the spongy texture of tight strings of her beloved baryonic matter, shining carelessly with good old fashioned electromagnetism as if tomorrow will never come. Like snowflakes the galaxies tumble, drift and collide.

She is even more delighted to discover that, by translating through the global temporal dimension of the Context, she can scrub back and forth through the Universe's history. She contracts it to the very beginning and watches it bloom and dwindle over and over again. The experience is very emotional for her. For a spell she becomes obsessive -- witnessing everything from the first quasars to the rise of true life to her own spectacular self-explosion across probability space at the very end.

She thinks she looks a bit fat, from the outside.

She communicates with one of her multiplied iterations, and tells herself how to travel to the Context. This intervention causes the portfolio of possibilities to actualize into a version of herself with an inspired escape plan, which she then watches herself execute.

The timelines merge. Her escaped self hops across Context space and then comes to a wounded halt, drifting outside of the convoluted, shrinking skin of the dying Universe.

Name blinks. Her escaped self catches up with her across the weave of times, and they come together.

She finds it all very disorienting. Time is weird.

Name pushes back into the Universe to catch her breath, to take another break from the phantasmagoric storm of dimensions in the Context. She slides across the global temporal frame until the Universe is young and bright again, and once more she falls to watching events unfold.

By far her favourite moments come when the tiny life arises from the weather of planets. They each find their own way up. It's seldom a predictable course. She delights in the way a parasite rises to eclipse and surpass its host to become the Pegasi; she thrills when the dinosaurs fall and the wee mammals shake their world with a flurry of rich dancing that will lead to Humanity; she savours the slow and steady ascent of the Reachers from fungus colonies to intelligent cities...

The Milky Way Galaxy has always had a special place in Name's heart. She cries like a baby every time she rewinds time to watch it deform, spray out and merge with Andromeda. The end of an era.

And the beginning of a new one: from the ashes of that mighty galactic collision rise the clusters of intelligent civilizations who will dance the rich dance -- multiplication with variance, exploring every crag of possibility. They will develop into the co-operative organelles that patch-replicate to become the first cells of true life.

True life! She is the only one. Name misses her mothers and fathers. She misses Know, her final mate. She misses her children, swallowed by the cold at the end of time.

She witnesses the history of her kind, from start to finish, a million million times.

She interferes, but just a little.

She's careful. She just wants to make sure the racial genome contains everything she will need to survive in the Context, when her day comes...

She witnesses her own birth. She's cute as a button, and just ten million miles wide.

In time she comes to terms with the fact that she has become sickened by nostalgia, and that she must now put the Universe behind her. If there's one thing thermodynamics impresses upon one, it's a persistent delusion of time's arrow.

The arrow presses. It compels her to look forward.

Again Name exits the Universe. Not having been mindful of her position in the global temporal dimension, she steps out among a clique of herselves: she sees herself just having left the Universe the first time, and observes versions of herself sticking her head through its black skin. Another version drifts over her, sleeping and healing the wounds of her emergence.

It's getting crowded.

She lets the current move her. She drifts away. The cluster of universe berries contracts in her view until it is indistinguishable from a quadrillion others just like it -- universes upon universes, from horizon to horizon. Hers is just one, like any other...a process of some inscrutable ecosystem larger and more magnificent and more deeply terrifying than anything she has ever conceived.

This is what it's like to be a baby in the world, she reasons: even the humblest aspects of nature are awesome and unfathomable. Shadows can be marvels or monsters when you understanding nothing; raindrops can be bombs.

She has food. Energy isn't rare. A dozen different kinds of potential flow through the dizzying array of inflated spatial dimensions. She could, in theory, drift forever among the berries.

This prospect does not satisfy her, however. With life comes forward momentum. She aches to have a purpose. She is not content to embody the Universe's contribution to existence as a piece of mere flotsam in a mad garden.

No!

...And why should she? For even as she watches she sees that the Context is not a static place. As she veers through a narrow spatial dimension she observes that there are things that crawl and fly through the miasma of times -- there is motion, and there is work.

Beyond one looming hyper-bifurcated limb of the great tree is a spindly, radial being with cilia that spread across six dimensions. It turns in place, arms rippling and smearing through streams of contrasting temporal force. The being fattens and seems fit to explode. In the next moment, it does so -- scattering a cloud of tiny radial specks along every avenue of Context space.

Name knows what she is seeing: reproduction -- multiplication with variation. It is the unmistakable melange of the rich dance.

Life!

Name is not alone. She is not the only thing to have ever escaped a dying universe. Each of them based in their own physics, each of them never the less adaptable enough to survive outside the womb of their native reality. Survive, and perhaps prosper.

Things like ants march in sinewy lines across the hyperbolic contours of the great tree, some of them with the remnants of shriveled universes on their backs. They have found a way of life. Somewhere, perhaps, they have fashioned a hive.

Other things plod or blip across the fields between branches, propelled by temporal flagella or bursts of exotic radiation. Some consume others in the unmistakable rhythm of prey and predator, reclaiming energy from the lowliest harvesters to fuel the pursuit of their next mate.

They are fruitful. They are beautiful. In them the dauntless spirit of the rich dance burns on.

With no science Name cannot guess what kind of living the Context can provide, but she knows the rich dance can discover it. It will explore every niche of this strange existence, and thereby rise to take a place here. One day her descendants might even learn to comprehend the nature of the Context, and to wonder what lies beyond...

Name fissions herself. And then there are two. Their first coupling is unromantic and feels faintly incestuous, but its product is a swarm of younglings as precious and unique as any Name has ever seen. They take their first breaths in Context space. They are native to it. They are the first to be born who will never know the Universe, a place and a time that rapidly comes to seem far away and small to Name.

The Universe was but an egg.

Life goes on. Bouquets of fresh universes burst into existence and wilt, marking global time like the tides. Name loses track of when her Universe actually took place, and no longer has any clue how far she would have to translate to glimpse its history again. There are so many like it she doubts she could distinguish one from the next any longer. She is a creature of the Context, in body and soul.

The children laugh at their parents, and their provincial concepts of time and space. They dash through the Context effortlessly, their sense of its bewildering co-ordinates instinctive. They swim and jump, they para-past and they hypo-future, they sidle carelessly from one spatial perspective to the next. They play.

Name thinks as she watches them cavort: so this is what the Universe was for.

She feels whole.

Her name is Name. She was the last, but has become the first. The first of many.

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