The Death of the Universe: Hard Science Fiction (Big Rip Book 1) Read online

  Kepler took a deep breath. Then his thoughts gave the command to begin.

  It was cold. Freezing cold. He searched feverishly for curse words to distract him from the cold. Bloody cold. Fucking cold. His heart was hammering. He tried to call up his heart rate into his field of vision, but nothing happened. Then he remembered he was back in his body. If he wanted to see something his five senses weren’t made for, he needed an external device. He rubbed his hands together. His muscles didn’t obey at first, but gradually things improved. He touched his body. Where he couldn’t feel anything he rubbed vigorously. He warmed himself up from the outside in. Maybe he should have raised the room temperature first. Then he noticed how warm it seemed to be. The butler must have thought of that himself.

  The pain gradually became bearable. He pulled his legs in toward his body. The muscles tingled intensely, but obeyed his command. He gripped the edge of the casket with his arms and pulled himself upright. Why is it so difficult? Of course. This planet was significantly larger than the Earth. If he were to plan any long hikes he’d need an exoskeleton. But there was no reason to spend long periods on the surface.

  He was sitting. The feeling was coming back into his skin. He had done it. He was back in his body. He was no longer all-powerful and invincible. In his body he was vulnerable. Without tools, he wouldn’t survive long. It was as if this alone had given life new meaning.

  Kepler knew the feeling well. He’d lost count. How many times had he already been through this? The body only ever lasted a few hundred cycles, then he had to move on. He was more or less addicted to traveling. Travel was his drug. It helped him to block out the current state of the world. The Curies were right. He was on the run. He was running from pure existence. Each of the maybe ten thousand humans that still existed solved this problem in their own way, because it was difficult to watch others die. It would be unbearable if the universe itself were to die a slow death.

  Cycle YA7.5, K2-288Bb

  “Do you know where this ash came from?”

  The Curies were crouching in front of the fireplace in which the fire had burned two days ago, fingering the remnants with their left hand.

  “No idea,” he said.

  “The ash is still slightly warm,” said Pierre’s voice.

  “The butler turned up the heating in here yesterday, to make my transfer easier.”

  The Curies stood up. Their face smiled stiffly. “You’re lying, but we’ll leave it at that,” said Marie.

  Of course he was lying. He couldn’t exactly admit that he had allowed the entropy to be increased in such a senseless way. The universe was about to die because it was losing energy and chaos was increasing, and he was burning essential resources to ash?

  “No, I’m not lying. I didn’t light a fire.”

  And that was true.

  He cleared his throat. “I actually came here to be alone,” he said.

  “You’re here to be alone?”

  “Yes, that was the idea.”

  “That was the idea?”

  That’s what the Curies were like, their reputation preceded them. He shouldn’t let it get to him. Kepler crossed his arms and smiled. All was quiet for a while. Marie was obviously waiting for him to say something, so that she could parrot it. But he wasn’t going to do her the favor, even though he wanted to know why they were here.

  “You have to admit you could have gone almost anywhere. The Milky Way has 300 billion planets. We searched them all. Well, nearly all. Almost none of them present any threat of company. And yet you chose K2-288Bb in particular, where Wang Zhenyi has constructed a base. You must have realized that the risk of meeting her here was quite high.

  “Yes, I was quite lucky she wasn’t here.”

  “No, Johannes,” said Pierre. “We inquired about you, even though it took a few megacycles. You have a shared past with Zhenyi. What did you want from her?”

  “Nothing at all. I just wanted to be alone. She’s rarely ever home.”

  “I don’t find that very plausible,” said Marie, “given the many alternatives where you would have been guaranteed solitude.”

  “I don’t care,” he said.

  That wasn’t true. He found the questions uncomfortable, and the Curies were intimidating him. But he couldn’t let it show. He’d chosen his destination deliberately. He’d hoped to meet Zhenyi here. And he was still hoping she would arrive someday.

  “We’re wondering why you’re not telling us the truth,” said Pierre. “Why are you really here?”

  “I already told you.”

  Marie sighed. “We’re not getting anywhere with this,” she said. “You don’t need to be afraid of us. We’re friends!”

  Friends? He didn’t know anyone who was ‘friends’ with the Curies. Gagarin and Armstrong, maybe. Or Hahn and Meitner, the other physicist couple. How long has it been since I’ve seen those two?

  “I’m not afraid. I just don’t know what you want from me,” he said.

  “We don’t want anything from you at all,” said Marie. “It’s about Zhenyi. We heard she’s undermining the Rescue Project.”

  “And what’s that got to do with me?”

  “You traveled a few hundred light-years to visit her?”

  “Fine, I wanted to talk to her and couldn’t be bothered waiting hundreds of cycles for a reply.”

  “You could have put yourself on ice like everyone else does,” said Pierre.

  Kepler shook his head. It had in fact become common practice to sleep for long periods while waiting for a reply. If your correspondent was 100 light-years away, you could still speak entirely normally with each other as long as you spent the 200 cycles of waiting time in a state of unconsciousness. But the time that was left to them was no longer endless. Since he had become aware of that fact, he had been trying to do without such methods. But in that case, he’d rather not bother with conducting conversations.

  “That’s not for me,” he said. “I find it wasteful.”

  “Fine,” said Pierre.

  The Curies wandered up and down the room. It looked as though they were deep in thought. But in reality they were probably conversing with one another without him being able to hear them.

  Kepler stood up, went over to the fireplace, and crouched in front of it. The ash really was warm. He ran his fingers through it. He really must take care of this body. If something happened to him like what had happened two days ago, there could be dire consequences in spite of the nanofabricators.

  His index finger touched something cool, round. Kepler wanted to take it out and have a look, but he thought better of it. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence. The object must have been hidden in the wood. Had Zhenyi left him a message? He couldn’t read it as long as the Curies were still here. He stood up again and wiped his ashy fingers on his pale cotton pants. The butler would scold him when he saw the stains. The pants had only been made yesterday.

  Kepler sat down on what was still the only chair. The butler had cleared away the caskets, but he’d not brought an extra chair—he didn’t particularly like the Curies either, it seemed. Kepler couldn’t blame him. They were brilliant scientists. They had developed the process that was supposed to lead to the rebooting of Sagittarius A* as a quasar. And now they were obsessing over such trivialities as his visit to Zhenyi? Something wasn’t right.

  “So, what did you want to talk to Zhenyi about?” asked Marie.

  “About my experiences on HR8799b. You can’t imagine how dense the asteroid belt is there,” he said.

  “You know that we can effect an extraction of your externalized memories?” asked Pierre.

  “But for that to happen, I have to be under suspicion of having committed a crime. You need a warrant from the judge AI on Terra. The Earth is far away. The request alone would take a few kilocycles, the answer even longer.”

  “That’s true,” said Marie, and her tone sounded conciliatory. “That’s why we wanted to speak with you personally. You have nothing to fear from
us.”

  Kepler wasn’t so sure about that. Marie articulated the last sentence in a way that made it sound like a threat. She was really good at this. If he had known something, would he have spilled it? But he didn’t know anything!

  “What even gives you the right to interrogate me like this? You’re wasting your time,” he said.

  “I have that impression too,” said Pierre. “We should go.”

  “Yes, we should.”

  When the couple spoke aloud to one another, they almost seemed insane. Was it really such a good idea to surrender yourself like that to someone else? Kepler was glad he’d never needed to—even with Zhenyi, whom he had truly loved a long time ago.

  Cycle YA7.6, K2-288Bb

  Kepler bowed, as was customary for goodbyes. The Curies climbed back into the casket. The butler had suggested providing them with a spacesuit, but they had declined. The lid closed and the oblong glass object made its way on its little legs back to their ship.

  It had been a short visit. What would they be saying about him now? They obviously didn’t believe him. He had come here to meet Zhenyi. He had hoped that maybe she still felt something for him, and that she’d lend him money. His constant fleeing was expensive. You couldn’t get a ninety-niner for under a hundred thousand gigs, even for a short trip of a hundred light-years. One gig was a gigawatt year, itself quite an enormous amount of energy. But to accelerate a ship to near light speed—that consumed a lot of energy and was therefore expensive, even with the newest technology.

  The technology itself hadn’t developed in the last few megacycles. The remaining humans had other things to do. They were preoccupied with themselves—or with the Rescue Project. Every individual received, for their personal use, a fixed proportion of the total energy produced by humans. But even the number of Dyson spheres, which sucked energy from the stars, was no longer growing. And at the same time the stars were gradually being extinguished. The universe had grown old, and humanity had become stagnant.

  Zhenyi had allegedly inherited huge energy reserves from her ancestors. She was rumored to be epically rich. No one knew where or how she was storing her provisions, and she hadn’t even confided in him so far. Kepler guessed that it was stored somewhere as potential energy in a gravitational field, but she could also have stored it chemically. He imagined a solar system in which the planets consisted of frozen hydrogen.

  He had queried her when they’d last met. He must have chosen the wrong moment. She was probably expecting a more romantic utterance. Women! No loan had been forthcoming. She had simply recommended that he forego the extravagance of traveling in his biological body. A modulated laser beam only needed a third of the power from a medium Dyson sphere. But Zhenyi didn’t understand. He needed this body, not just any old surrogate. Even when he was always on the move he needed something to make him feel at home. How was that supposed to work with a robot body manufactured at the destination?

  Just once he traveled as pure energy. He hadn’t been able to get hold of a ninety-niner before the Convention in the orbit of Sagittarius A*. The human fleet had already been decimated by that time. He looked back on the experience with nothing but horror. The outposts were overflowing. Ten thousand visitors. The organizers probably wouldn’t even be able to imagine such a massive number of people anymore. Today it was an incredible coincidence for three individuals to find themselves in the same place if you excluded multi-beings like the Curies.

  Kepler had only vaguely followed the discussion itself. It had been about the Rescue Project. The arguments for it, presented by Pierre Curie, seemed to him conclusive, which was why he had voted in favor. However, a vocal minority had turned against it. He could only remember a few names. Einstein, Plato, and Scott were among them. He hadn’t heard anything of them since, but that didn’t mean anything. Of the roughly 10,000 present in orbit around the black hole, he had only heard again from three—the Curies and Zhenyi. And he hadn’t even seen his friend in that time.

  “Johannes? May I prepare you a meal?”

  The butler pulled him out of his thoughts, but he didn’t mind. “That would be very kind,” he answered.

  “What about an English breakfast?”

  “I would prefer lunch. Zhenyi says you prepare an excellent steak.”

  “Well, I have to give the credit to the nanobots, but the recipe, as far as I know, is only available in my memory stores.”

  The butler lowered his head a little. This reemphasized his modesty. Excellent work, thought Kepler. The AI knew precisely how to influence humans. It was definitely higher than a level 1. But it didn’t matter to him. In the past, he had developed and optimized artificial intelligence. If only he had optimized his own intelligence enough to have thought of ensuring the presence of his hostess before the journey began! But he had simply trusted that Zhenyi would be staying at her base.

  The problem was that his provisions were now so exhausted, he would never be able to leave here again without a hefty credit. So, he’d have to wait for Zhenyi, for better or worse.

  The moment the butler served the steak, Kepler stopped resenting having to stay there for an indefinite period. Even the aroma was indescribable! If he excluded the unlikely possibility that Zhenyi was running a cattle ranch, then it was genuinely masterful nano-programming. The tiny machines didn’t just have to constitute the ‘meat’ from its raw materials, they also had to emit, at just the right moment, precisely the aroma his nose expected from the perfect steak. He couldn’t even name it.

  The butler stood next to him with pepper grinder raised. “May I sprinkle some Madagascar pepper over your steak?”

  “Please.”

  The grinder was flourished in an elegant motion about twenty centimeters above the steak, so that a fine mist of pepper was strewn across it. Kepler was reminded a little of the ashes in the fireplace. They were the same color. The metal orb! Hopefully the butler hadn’t disposed of the remnants! Kepler looked over at the fireplace. From here he couldn’t tell whether it had been cleaned.

  “Is something not right?” asked the butler.

  “The steak is perfect.”

  “But?”

  “I was just wondering about the fireplace.”

  “The fireplace? Should I light it? I’m afraid I must disappoint you. Ms. Wang clearly instructed me to light the fire only once, and under no circumstances to clean it.”

  “Didn’t that make you wonder?”

  Maybe that was the wrong question. If Zhenyi had left instructions specifically for him, then she must also have known he was coming! But how? She must have come across his transport order from HR8799b, like the Curies. So then why in the world had she not waited for him? Was she afraid, perhaps?

  “Well, Johannes, it’s not my place to wonder about my mistress’s decisions,” said the butler.

  “I feel a bit like you’re mocking me right now, at the risk of sounding impolite,” he answered.

  “What do you mean, Johannes?”

  “You’re at least a level 2 AI, but I’m guessing more like a level 4. But even as a level 2 you’d have no other choice than to wonder. It’s part of the definition of that level, to evaluate every decision and every command.”

  “Well, that may be true, Johannes, in which case I obviously evaluated the instruction and found it to be correct. But I’m not obliged to give an account of it.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Thank you, Johannes. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that your steak is getting cold.”

  “Thank you.”

  Kepler reached for the cutlery again. So, the orb was waiting for him in the ashes. He could take the time to enjoy a good meal. He should always make time for that. Who knew what tomorrow would bring?

  He lay the cutlery aside and the butler cleared the table. Kepler leaned back. His stomach was uncomfortably full and under his shirt sweat was running down his back. He needed to get used to his biological body again. Life was much more intense in it, but
that also had its downside.

  “A cognac for the digestion?” asked the butler. “We have an exclusive selection.”

  It was an enticing offer. He wouldn’t put it past Zhenyi to have somehow come into possession of a physically distilled cognac, maybe even one from Terra. No, that was impossible. No beverage kept that long.

  “Thank you for the offer, but I’ll decline,” Kepler replied. “I’m very warm. Could you please lower the temperature by two degrees?”

  The butler bowed his head. “Gladly.”

  Kepler stretched out his legs and let his arms hang at his sides. It was good he was alone. If Zhenyi were on the other side of the table he wouldn’t want to let himself go like this. Solitude had its undeniable advantages. And the butler didn’t sulk when he contradicted him. He wasn’t sure why. If it was a level 4 AI, it had a complete emotional spectrum.

  He should get up and have a look at the orb. But there would be time for that later. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.

  Cycle YA7.7, K2-288Bb

  Kepler woke up bathed in sweat. He was lying in bed. The blanket had wrapped itself around his left leg. He kicked it away. He must have been having an intense dream. But hadn’t he still been sitting at the table when he fell asleep? Kepler patted his body. He was clearly wearing pajamas. The butler must have brought him to bed and removed his clothes. Or removed his clothes and then brought him to bed. He imagined the elegantly attired butler throwing a naked man over his shoulder and carrying him to the bedroom. How had he managed it without waking him?

  His body was probably to blame. The first few days after being reunited were always tiring. For his body, only a few weeks had gone by aboard the ninety-niner, but biological muscles resented not being used for that long. He had complained many times to the manufacturers of the cryostasis chambers, but there was no more progress there. The demand for the transport of biological bodies was minimal, because most humans were content with robot bodies. And every engineer and researcher who was still active was occupied with the Rescue Project.