I once wrote a book about time travel. Most of it wasn’t that good, but one chapter stood out. Last week I stumbled across it again and decided to revise it with major character and plot changes. This is the result. Though I did a small amount of editing, I could have done a lot more, so this is far from polished but as an incidental little story it works. If there’s anyone out there reading this, I hope you enjoy it.

When the flash had receded from the time traveller’s eyes, he dared to open them. They might as well have remained closed. Outside, there was nothing. Not merely darkness, but darkness beyond the farthest reaches of all darkness imaginable. It pulled on him, asking him to join in a macabre celebration of non-existence.

The traveller floated in zero gravity. He plunged his hand into the unknown, feeling for the switch to illuminate the vehicle’s dashboard. A shaking finger found something solid and hauled the rest of his arm towards its safety. His hand ran over the panel, the familiar metallic hills and valleys. It found the switch. The time machine bathed in a slight green glow.

The traveller read the now lit-up display. Digital numerals slid from right to left at breakneck pace, trying their pitiful best to encapsulate a number requiring a thousand lifetimes to display in its entirety. Somewhere at the end of these trillions upon trillions of digits would eventually come the letters AD.

“Is this it?” the traveller asked the void, “Have I arrived at the end of time?”

His voice choked, passing through his withering vocal chords with all the force of a slight breeze. A coughing fit grabbed him and wouldn’t let go. He was the last life in the universe and he was on the verge of death.

A buzzing object shot past his ear. A shaft of shadow in the meagre artificial light revealed a fly trapped within the confined space, flitting against the visor as if it were a house window and not the last barrier between something and endless, eternal nothing. The traveller was not the last life in the universe. He smiled, then felt sorry for this innocent, doomed creature.

The traveller sat watching the view, or rather the lack of it. He’d expected his head to fill with thoughts of the profound, the ultimate questions of the universe, but he could only think about the fly lost in blissful ignorance. Every time it jumped between surfaces he grew more annoyed, angry at its incessant buzzing for ruining his perfect ending.

He snapped. Fine, he would deposit this creature back in the world of the living, then return to die peacefully. Sighing, he reached for the lever and wrenched it towards him. The blue flash of time travel had grown so dull, he thought as he waited for the machinery to spool up and send him on his way. Nothing happened. After a few seconds of increasingly tense waiting, he tried again. The experiment yielded the same result.

The traveller cursed his stupidity, realising the vacuum outside, more complete than any vacuum that had ever existed, meant no particles could be harnessed to start the process. At any other moment in history, even in deep space, there would have been at least a few scattered atoms. Here, those atoms had decayed out of existence an eternity ago. The universe had gradually waltzed towards a state of total disorder, maximum entropy. Nothing remained to mark the difference between the past and future. The arrow of time had stopped.

Defeated, the traveller slumped in his chair. The fly kept buzzing.

“Why don’t you just shut up?” he cried, slamming his fist against the visor to crush the insignificant little pest.

The sound stopped. Now, finally, he was the last thing alive in the universe. Or so he thought.

What did you do that for?

Here, at the end of everything, a voice. It came from nowhere in particular, a formless, overlapping rush of words both incomprehensible and perfectly audible. At first the traveller was taken aback, until he decided it must have come from inside his head.

“You’re hearing things,” he muttered, hoping death would take him before madness did.

No I’m not. It’s physically impossible for me to hear. There aren’t any particles to carry sound out here. Besides, I don’t have ears.

Fear hit the traveller’s body, tightening around his heart and lungs as his wheezing breath quickened.

“Who’s there?!”

You see, that’s an ambiguous statement. Either you’ve already given me the name Who and are making an enthusiastic declaration of the fact I am in the perceivable vicinity, or you’re asking for my identity and will go on to ask further questions concerning my whereabouts and circumstances. Which is it?

The traveller tried to move his lips. He found them frozen in shock.

I’ll assume the second, the voice said with an air of annoyance, Hello, I’m Brian. Nice to meet you. You were born in the year 2248, correct?

“How did you know that?” the traveller said.

Oh, I know a lot of things.

The traveller leapt at the visor, craning his neck to find someone, something in the gloom, the source of these ridiculousness words.

“Where are you?”

There we go, a question about my whereabouts, as I predicted. I am everywhere. I am nowhere.

“Show yourself!”

Well, if you say so…

A white light came into being metres from the edge of the time machine, forcing the traveller to shield his eyes. As it faded, he learnt he really was going mad. There, in the vast emptiness of space where nothing had existed for an unfathomable number of unfathomable timespans, were two eyeballs. They floated freely yet moved in tandem, as if connected to an invisible body.

Hmm, I like having a physical form, the voice said, now appearing to come from the severed visual apparatus, Maybe I’ll stay this way from now on.

Another coughing fit racked the traveller’s body as he struggled to comprehend his situation.

You’re dying.

Once the spluttering stopped, he found the strength to reply, “I am aware.”

The fly you so heartlessly squished was also dying, though she refused to admit it. I told her she had 22 seconds to live and was awfully sorry about it.

“You told her?”

Yes. For the brief opportunity given to me, I entered her mind as I have entered yours, communicating in thought patterns decipherable to a fly, talking in her own language. Fly thoughts are so much less ambiguous than those of humans. Your language is so confusing and inefficient. Perhaps though this is what allows you to express such wondrous emotion.

In spite of everything he had experienced, everything he believed and everything he had come here to do, the traveller laughed.

“I’m definitely dreaming, aren’t I?”

No, in neither sense of the word. You are not experiencing hallucinations normally confined to the state of being your species refers to as sleep, nor are you hopeful of a better future.

“How can you tell? The second one, I mean,” the traveller said, becoming sullen once more.

I am reading your thoughts. Thoughts are merely patterns of particles within your head, not difficult to read if you know how. Due to the absence of any other meaningful method of communication, I am exporting my own thoughts to you.

After thinking for a moment, the traveller asked a question his rational mind was horrified by.

“Are you God?”

I may be – that’s one thing I don’t know. Certainties of such magnitude are hard things to come by in my experience. True, I am varying levels of omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent, but whether I am in fact an all-powerful being worthy of universal devotion escapes me.

“If not God,” the traveller said, “Then what are you?”

Good question. I am Brian. I am a Boltzmann Brain, or at least that’s the name a human scientist attributed to the phenomenon of my birth. In the enormous lengths of time the universe has spent in this state of inactivity, every possibility, no matter how unlikely, has had a chance to realise itself. The probability of an event may be near zero, but when the time available in which it might take place is near infinite, the two cancel each other out. I am the product of a random quantum interaction between the few particles left. I encompass all the energy the universe possesses. I can observe and manipulate it.

The eyes bobbed with each word, as if the invisible body around them was in the midst of a jubilant conversation. The traveller took in Brian’s words and decided things made more sense and less sense at the same time.

“How did you know the fly was going to die in exactly 22 seconds?”

You like your questions with long answers, don’t you? Well, we do have all the time in the world. Or we would, had the world not ceased to exist many moons ago. Which would be an understandable expression, if the moon was still around. I’m running out of cliché human phrases with which to express how long it has been since your time. You really have no sense of scale.

“Just answer the damn question,” the traveller said.

Sorry. As you might expect with nothing in the entire universe except me and the remnants of what was once matter, it gets boring. I wanted to escape. Call me an escapist. The one thing I could do to alleviate that boredom was learn what had come to pass to create me, to study the positions and trajectories of the sub-sub-atomic particles I share this emptiness with. I was able to deduce how they had moved throughout their lives to arrive here.

“But that’s impossible. You would need to violate the laws of physics.”

Correct. You call it Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: a universal limit to the maximum knowledge of a particle’s location and momentum one can know. I discovered this quite early in my investigations. After much thought – for which I had more than enough time – I found a solution. I simulated every possible universe which could have produced any of the arrangements possible. I know not only the history of this universe, but of every possible universe. Knowing the fly was going to die was simply a matter of weighing the probabilities of those universes in which you return home with memories of me.

The traveller nearly drowned in the explanation, but the final line caught his attention. His heart raced once more. Maintaining some semblance of composure in his own eyes, he looked straight into the floating orbs.

“I am not going to return to my own time,” he said, the wrinkled, thinning skin of his face shifting as he spoke, “Or any other time. If you’re really all-knowing, you tell me why.”

You are suffering the same fate as this universe, inevitably wasting away. The best treatments from all of time and space can do nothing to help you. Your natural lifespan is prolonged a hundredfold, yet in the end it is not physical weakness which ails you, but the lack of a will to go on.

“And why am I here?”

You’re the inventor of time travel. You have spent ten thousand years perusing the four dimensions, yet you realise time cannot be changed. Now you question what the point of it all is. Nobody has supplied a satisfactory answer. Hence, in your final moments, you’ve come here, wishing to die as poetically as possible as the universe itself dies.

The traveller’s dried-up tear ducts filled with liquid for the first time in at least half a century according to his perception of time. Everything the disembodied eyes said was true, and to hear them spoken from another gave them more weight than he could have ever imagined. He found himself sobbing, hunched up to hide himself from Brian even though he knew Brian could see all in the universe.

“I’ve watched the death of humanity dozens of times,” he said, “Each time I try to find some survivors, some way out, but each time there’s nobody. We’re doomed.”

I wouldn’t say that.

“Why? Is there any hope for any of us if the universe ends up like this?”

I think revealing that would spoil the ending, wouldn’t it?

“You’re just trying to comfort a dying old man.”

All the mysteries of the past have been solved. The answers are beautiful and exciting and you in your privileged position as a temporal voyager have seen more than most. But there are mysteries still to resolve – mysteries of the future.

“There’s no future for this universe. What could possibly happen to change it?”

I happened. I know little about myself. As soon as you leave, I will lose my last reference on knowing what my own actions will be. I feel something I have not felt in many eons: confusion.

Against his better judgement, the traveller sensed hope returning to his addled mind. Would he find the answers he sought here? He rubbed the tears on his jacket and sat up.

“Can you save humanity?”

No. You can.

“What?”

I only have agency over the future. You are more a god than me, for you can travel back to a time when there was time to travel forward to.

“And I should take this to mean…?”

As suddenly as they had appeared, the eyes vanished in another white flash. They left the traveller once again in darkness, save the still-rolling list of digits flying by on the dashboard intent on reaching their impossible goal.

I had to think about it, Brian said, his voice coming from somewhere unfindable, The probabilities are fuzzy. But in the end I trusted whatever substitutes my heart and took pity on your strange little species. I decided to change the future. Millions of miles away, there is now a new universal singularity. In a few moments, it will enter a period of rapid expansion. The last time this happened, scientists in your world later called it the Big Bang.

Knowing full well he could never see it, the traveller peered out the window to search for this singularity.

“What am I supposed to do then?”

You see the incredibly long number flying by on your dashboard? After you return to your home time, you must go to that date plus a few billion years. With any luck, you’ll arrive in a vibrant new universe waiting to be inhabited by the descendants of this one.

The traveller had no time to take this in. His mind filled with questions, all of them he knew Brian must be reading at this very moment. He figured the cosmic entity was being polite by only answering those he decided to actually ask.

“But I’m dying, I can’t do that,” he protested, “I don’t have…time.”

Then you pass the responsibility onto others. Those you can trust.

Others. It had been so long since the traveller had seen another human. He almost resented the thought of returning to their stuffy little planet. Mostly he resented the thought of meeting the one person he had trusted with the knowledge of his true identity. The woman he had loved but could no longer bare to know because she, like the rest of them, was doomed.

If Brian’s plan succeeded, she wouldn’t be doomed any longer. He could take her and others away to a new universe, carrying the combined knowledge and culture of humanity. Warmth returned to his heart.

Yet the traveller had forgotten one thing. The hope vanished.

“I can’t time travel here,” he said, “There’s no matter outside this vehicle.”

I can fix that.

The traveller waited.

“Well?”

The second Big Bang has begun. The edge of the new universe is moving towards you faster than the speed of light. You won’t see it before it rips the time machine apart. But if we can get the timing right, the compressed wall of matter it collects as it travels will have just the right density to ignite your time travel device. Listen carefully – I will give you a 30 second warning. Set a countdown running, and when it ends, pull the lever as if your life depends on it. Because it does. You got it?

The bewildered traveller answered honestly, “Probably not.”

Yes you do. Your language’s capacity for sarcasm is commendable.

Several seconds of silence passed. The traveller’s eyes found the remains of the fly, at least what he could see in the green glow. The last thing to die in this universe. He felt so sorry for it, so much regret for what he had done, the most regret for anything in his ten thousand year life. He would mourn it when he returned home.

Now! Brian said.

The traveller did as instructed. The endless date disappeared, replaced by two digits, now descending through numbers small enough to comprehend. He readied his hand on the lever.

“Before I go, I need to know: what is the meaning of it all?”

42.

The traveller wondered why he even bothered.

Apologies. I quite enjoyed the work of Douglas Adams, so much so I fear it has become part of me. In my experience, there’s no meaningful meaning of life. I’m as ignorant as you and the entire universe you have scoured looking for an answer.

The clock continued counting down to the final escape, the escape of the universe from its entropy prison.

“There are so many more things I want to ask you.”

We have a few more seconds. Ask away.

As the clock entered single digits, the traveller pushed back another cough to say, “Just tell me this: what happens between me and…that woman?”

You’ve travelled all the way to the end of time just to ask that? I’ll never understand you humans.

At the agreed mark, the time traveller pulled the lever. Machinery clanked about behind him as he wondered so many things which couldn’t be rendered in speech. He’d visited every end of the universe yet was no closer to mastering the impossible task of social interaction.

A blue haze shimmered across the visor, then in a flash soon to be drowned out by the infinite intensity of the light from the new universe, the time machine disappeared. Time began again.