You Promised Me Eternity So I Used It Up

“I wish I would have told you all of this sooner,” Dr. Spat said to his daughter, Loody. “Before the bombs started to drop.”

Dr. Spat left the living room for a moment and walked back in with a small gray box wrapped with a pink ribbon. He looked out the window and experienced a moment of genuine awe, noting the juxtaposition of the hot red explosions and clear blue sky. He took a seat in his favorite leather chair, rubbing the dark beard on his cheek. Loody sat down next to him, her brown eyes almost falling out of her head.

“There are groups of people in this world who don’t like one another, my dear Loody, and never have. Like molecules, they’ve existed alongside one another, vibrating, pushing off one another, but never really bonding. Since the beginning of humankind, these interactions have created a heat, an energy that was unsustainable if we couldn’t connect to one another and put it to use. Unfortunately, this planet has reached maximum entropy. We are going to die.”

Loody, celebrating her eighth birthday on this afternoon, wasn’t fully following. She scratched her chewed-up fingernails through her ginger hair. She did think it was quite loud outside.

“I realize this doesn’t mean anything at all now, but I bought a present for you,” he said as he handed her the box. “Or maybe it means everything. The inscription is actually quite perfect.”

Loody opened her gift; inside the box was a pink-gold heart-shaped locket.

“Go ahead,” Dr. Spat directed. “Open the necklace. Read it.”

As Loody struggled to open the locket, the neon green heat death of an atom-splitting detonation came in through the window and left not a human body behind.

. . .

Then came the apocalypse. The first one. Then quite a few post-apocalypses after that. The apocalypses actually started running on a pretty tight schedule after they were established. Rebuild, return to hating thy neighbor, redestroy, don’t rinse for lack of clean water, repeat. The last of the humans did their best to survive (but not exactly); within a handful of generations, they were extinct, like the universe had planned all along, but the humans really rushed to get done early.

Then the cosmos just did its thing on its own time, letting itself go for years, the number of which a human mind could never truly comprehend.

. . .

The odds that molecules in a void could randomly combine to create something, like a human brain replete with memories, completely out of thin air are highly improbable.

Improbable.

But if there are odds for a thing to occur, and the thing is given enough time (like a near-eternity), then the thing will happen. And that is how, in the deep and endless void of the far-distant future, where only random particles and debris from past lifeforms waited together for the last moment of existence, two eyeballs and a Boltzmann brain appeared as though from nowhere.

“I am Loody,” the brain thought to itself, and true enough; the brain had all of Loody’s memories, and Loody’s brown eyes. She looked around, not sure of where she was or when. Was this heaven? Was it hell?

The odds of a brain spontaneously forming is astronomical, but so is where it was formed. As Loody’s eyes rotated in the void, she noticed a familiar pink-gold locket floating past.

It had been opened.

It turned to her, slowly, and she read the inscription:

“To, Loody. I will love you until the end of time.”

A tear formed in one of Loody’s eyes, and with that single act of emotion, she used the very last drop of energy in the entire known universe.