At the Threshold, There was Light

by Elijah J. Mears

I don’t know how long I’ve been looking for a way out—it feels wasteful to count the seconds here, at the end of time. But I know it must be there. In the depths of my heart, I know that you wouldn’t abandon me to this fate. The search isn’t easy when the air grows thinner with every breath and the only light to look by is the gentle shimmer of the anentropic field that’s keeping me alive. Even so. I can’t bring myself to believe you would just abandon me on our last lonely rock in the wide, dying universe. 

Your final gift. I should appreciate it, but all I can think about is how I should have held you in my arms while you died. 

I should have whispered sweet nothings to you as we faded away. Hush, my love, I should have said. Be still. Be calm. It is only the end of the universe. It is only the stars turning in for bed beneath the final blanket of nighttime. 

But you snuck out while I was sleeping, you engaged the generator, and when I awoke, I was alone beneath the sunless sky. Black holes swirled above the dead world like eddies in the cosmos, the last witnesses to my screams as they drank the energy and matter of this universe to the lees. 

Soon, they too will die. For their final trick, they’ll devour themselves, and it will all be over. 

Well, except for this: one last body on one last rock, floating in the nothing. 

You must have known you were leaving me alone. You knew we hadn’t figured out the final snarl, that the control panel wouldn’t work from inside the bubble. Maybe that was your plan all along: to imprison me here until the air ran out or I died from the grief of missing you. 

Your final gift wouldn’t be so cruel, would it? You were always ten steps ahead of me. You must have left an escape hatch. 

I tear this little nest apart, ravage my last pocket of warmth for any sign you might have left, any clue for how to move forward. I rub my fingers raw almost to the bone, digging and clawing into the cold dirt, peeling the topsoil away. I scream. I rage. I tear the panels from the walls of our hab unit, shatter the girders and kick over the doors. Here is a ruin of the galley table, where we told each other our deepest secrets. Here is the devastation of the bed where I held you while you cried every time you were afraid you were unlovable. Here I tear the couch to pieces, rending upholstery and foam to dust, desecrating the home we built as the world fell apart around us, but I don’t find a way out. 

Perhaps it was never there. Perhaps I’m looking for nothing at all. I worry that maybe you ran out of time or that you never tried. I worry that in the end, you decided it would be better this way, for you to die in the cold and me in the warm. 

I scream, I rage, and the air grows thin. 

There’s only one more place to look: it must be on you, crumpled in your hand or stuffed into a coat pocket as your corpse crumbles. If there’s a note, some set of instructions, a trick built into the mechanism, it must be there, and I choose to believe that it is. I choose to believe it doesn’t end this way, without you. 

I should have held you in my arms while you died, but instead you snuck away, and when I woke this morning, you were gone. Above me, the black holes suck greedily at the last dead matter of reality. Galaxies disintegrate, nebulas fade, and the cosmic machinery cools to equilibrium. 

Beyond the anentropic field, I think you’re already mainly dust. I think if I wait too much longer, the monsters in the sky above me will grow too hungry and our cold, dead rock might drift too close. And I think before any of that happens, I’ll run out of air. 

I approach the edge, shivering as I look past the tightly woven threads of the energy field—the walls of my shelter, the bars of my cage. The last light in the entire universe is dancing there, almost imperceptible, a lacework feeding off the final, residual heat of a dark, dead sun. I try to look past it, to see your shape in the darkness. I try to gain some semblance of knowing before I push through the walls, but there isn’t one. Not here. 

Here, all I have is hope. 

I place my palm against the pulsing anentropic net, light spooling in the spaces between my fingers. I hardly need to apply my weight at all to make it give—the gentlest push will take me to you, on the other side. The gentlest push and I find what awaits me, whether that’s the way out you knew I’d find or just the harshness of reality: asphyxiation and death’s cold embrace. Either way I brace to run. 

I don’t know what will happen when I cross it, but there’s light at the threshold, and either way, I’ll see you again soon.