God's Mind

For Dad. Hope to see you again soon, you weed smokin' old hippie.

It was the most daring undertaking of mankind; to send a probe to find the ultimate frontier; the end of the universe. If  it had an end – some argued space is limitless, just like the human mind. Go on for long enough and you'll just end up back where you started.

The probe hurled across the vast, silent void long after its original designers were gone. Built to go on indefinitely, repairing itself if any of its parts broke or wore away, it flew faster than the speed of light, as centuries grew into aeons.

Generations came and went on its home planet as the on-board computers beeped away time.

Colonies on Mars were established, as Earth became more and more uninhabitable. Eventually, mankind managed to eradicate itself in the wars for the dwindling resources and the rest was taken care of in the following nuclear fallout. Life did eventually recover and within a couple of centuries flocks of birds were flying in primeval rainforests and herds of beasts roamed the plains on the planet that looked pretty much as it did before the coming of humans, apart from some crumbling ruins slowly disappearing under the vegetation.

The colonies on Mars died out due to a series of conflicts over the scarce water supplies, that couldn't support the ever-growing population.

Constellations fell apart and new continents formed, while the probe kept on sending signals that no-one detected.

Oceans boiled away as the Sun heated up the atmosphere. Turning into a Red Giant, it gobbled up its nearest planets, Earth among them. The White Dwarf that the Sun dwindled into left behind a veil of leftover material and gas particles; a planetary graveyard.

It picked up distress signals on its way from other colonies outside the Solar System, cries for help from distant worlds and strange, long forgotten civilizations.

On the probe flew, unaffected by galaxies collapsing into each other, stars blowing up one after the other, plunging the universe into cold, lifeless darkness.

The only structures left in space were black holes that swallowed the last particles of matter, the last decaying nuclei. With time even black holes evaporated to explode in a final, spectacular show of fireworks, that illuminated the universe for a brief moment.

The last to go were rogue photons flashing out of existence. Still the probe traveled on; its on-board computers displayed a time no human mind would be able to interpret, were there any of them left. It kept ticking away time when time itself didn't make sense anymore.

It floated in primordial darkness past time and matter, when its sensors lit up. There was an obstruction ahead.

It was some kind of wall, going on forever in every direction. After an unimaginable amount of distance it seemed to curve inwards. The probe's sensors picked up another baffling detail. Had there been a mankind to speak of, it would have shaken its most fundamental beliefs of itself to the core. The wall was made of bone.

Find more by Susan Anwin in the Author Index.

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