The Milky Way galaxy, the pinwheel of stars that humanity called home, colliding with Andromeda, its larger neighbor, the two pinwheels intersecting, interstellar gas aglow.

And still he traveled on, ahead, into the future.

It was nothing like the first time — but then what in life ever is?

The first time the visions had occurred, the switch from the present to the future had seemed instantaneous. But if it took a hundred thousandth of a second, who would have noticed? And if that hundred thousandth of a second had been allotted as 0.00005 seconds per year jumped ahead, again, who would have been aware of that? But 0.00005 seconds times eight billion years added up to something over an hour — an hour spent skimming, gliding over vistas of time, never quite locking in, never quite materializing, never quite displacing the proper consciousness of the moment, and yet sensing, perceiving, seeing it all unfold, watching the universe grow and change, experiencing the evolution of humanity step by step from childhood into…

… into whatever it was destined to become.

Of course Lloyd wasn't really traveling at all. He was still firmly in New England, and he had no more control over what he was seeing or what his replacement body was doing than he'd had during his first vision. The perspective shifts were doubtless due to the repositioning of whatever he'd become as the millennia went by. There must have been some sort of persistence of memory, analogous to the persistence of vision that made watching movies possible. Surely he was touching each of these times for only the most fleeting moment; his consciousness looking to see if that slice through the cube was occupied, and, when it discovered that it was, something like the exclusion principle — Theo had emailed him all about Rusch and his apparent ravings — barring it from taking up residence there, speeding onward, forward, farther and farther into the future.

Lloyd was surprised that he still had individuality; he would have thought that if humanity were to survive at all for millions of years surely it would be as a linked, collective consciousness. But he heard no other voices in his mind; as far as he could tell, he was still a unique separate entity, even if the frail physical body that had once encapsulated him had long since ceased to exist.

He'd seen the Dyson sphere half-encasing the sun, meaning humanity would one day command fantastic technology, but, as yet, he'd seen no evidence of any intelligence beyond that of humans.

And then it hit him: a flash of insight. What was happening meant there was no other intelligent life anywhere — not on any of the planets of the two hundred billion stars that made up the Milky Way, or — he stopped to correct himself — the six hundred billion stars comprising the currently combined supergalaxy formed by the intersection of the smaller Milky Way with larger Andromeda. And not on any of the planets of any of the stars in the countless billion other galaxies that made up the universe.

Surely all consciousness everywhere had to agree on what constituted "now." If human consciousness was bouncing around, shifting, didn't that mean that there must be no other consciousness in existence, no other group vying for the right to assert which particular moment constituted the present?

In which case, humanity was staggeringly, overwhelmingly, unrelentingly alone in all the vast dark cosmos, the sole spark of sentience ever to arise. Life had proceeded on Earth very happily for four billion years before the first stirrings of self-awareness, and still, by 2030, no one had managed to duplicate that sentience in a machine. Being conscious, being aware that that was then and this is now and that tomorrow is another day, was an incredible fluke, a happenstance, a freak occurrence never before or since duplicated in the history of the universe.

And perhaps that explained the incredible failure of nerve that Lloyd had observed time and again. Even by 2030, humanity still hadn't ventured beyond the Moon; no one had gone on to Mars in the sixty-one years since Armstrong's small step, and there didn't seem to be any plans in the works to accomplish that. Mars, of course, could get as far from Earth as 377 million kilometers when the two worlds were on opposite sides of the sun. A human mind on Mars under those circumstances would be twenty-one light-minutes away from the other human minds on Earth. Even people standing right beside each other were separated somewhat in time — seeing each other not as they are but as they were a trillionth of a second earlier. Yes, some degree of desynchronization was clearly tolerable, but it must have an upper limit. Perhaps sixteen light-minutes was still acceptable — the separation between two people on the opposite sides of a Dyson sphere built at the radius of Earth's orbit — but twenty-one light minutes was too much. Or perhaps even sixteen exceeded what was allowable for conscious beings. Humanity had doubtless built the Dyson sphere Lloyd had observed — in so doing walling itself off from the empty, lonely vastness on the outside — but perhaps its entire inner surface was not populated. People might occupy only one portion of its surface. A Dyson sphere, after all, had a surface area millions of times that of planet Earth; even using a tenth of the territory it afforded would still give humanity orders of magnitude more land than it had ever known before. The sphere might harvest every photon put out by the central star, but humanity perhaps did not roam over its entire surface.

Lloyd — or whatever Lloyd had become — found himself pushing farther and farther ahead into the future. The images kept changing.

He thought about what Michiko had said: Frank Tipler and his theory that everyone who ever was, or ever could be, would be resurrected at the Omega Point to live again. The physics of immortality.

But Tipler's theory was based on an assumption that the universe was closed, that it had sufficient mass so that its own gravitational attraction would eventually cause everything to collapse back down into a singularity. As the eons sped by, it became clear that wasn't going to happen. Yes, the Milky Way and its nearest neighbor had collided, but even whole galaxies were minuscule on the scale of an ever-expanding universe. The expansion might slow to almost nothing, asymptotically approaching zero, but it would never stop. There would never be an omega point. And there would never be another universe. This was it, the one and only iteration of space and time.

Of course, by now, even the star enclosed by the Dyson sphere had doubtless given up the ghost; if twenty-first-century astronomers were correct, Earth's sun would have expanded into a red giant, engulfing the shell around it. Humanity had surely had billions of years of warning, though, and had doubtless moved — en masse, if that's what the physics of consciousness required — somewhere else.

At least, thought Lloyd, he hoped they had. He still felt disconnected from all that was playing out in individual illuminated frames. Maybe humanity had been snuffed out when its sun died.

But he — whatever he'd become — was somehow still alive, still thinking, still feeling.

There had to be someone else to share all this with.

Unless—

Unless this was the universe's way of sealing the unexpected rift caused by Sanduleak's neutrinos showering down on a re-creation of the first moments of existence.

Wipe out all extraneous life. Just leave one qualified observer — one omniscient form, looking down, on—

— on everything, deciding reality by its observations, locking in one steady now, moving forward at the inexorable rate of one second per second.

A god…

But of an empty, lifeless, unthinking universe.