The Other Side of Forever
A science fiction short story about a far distant future, the end of time, and the search for meaning that comes with it
We worshiped the sky, trillions of stars casting their light over billions of years to reach our eyes. When our sacred festivals were held, we revered the sacred starlight. Yet the stars were our greatest mystery. The swift suns shifted and hid around the great blue gas giant, Aeternitas, which filled half the sky throughout our one-thousand-hour days. Its tidal forces fixed the rotation of our moon, so our civilization spanning the planet side lived with the world as an eternal reminder above.
I was a young explorer tasked by the seven elders to chase the cosmic light, further than the bounds of infinity if I must. They sent me on a mission to the dark side of our moon to investigate the mystery of the stars, to explain their strange motion.
Before I was born, the elders united the planet side of the small moon we inhabited. They promised a future among the vast universe we revered, a civilization that spanned not just our world but countless others. Their promises drove my life’s work. I dreamed of standing on distant worlds, of basking in the warmth of pure sunlight. I sought to explain the stars we would pursue, to understand the universe we sought to expand into. We sought to prove our faith in the divine expanse, yet what we learned made us doubt our purpose, the dread nearly crushed our hopes.
First, we learned to fly. For years we could not cross the treacherous seas that separated our lands from the dark side of the moon, towering tidal waves the size of mountains had toppled our attempts. Now, I sat in a biplane over the sea, looking back on the Singularity.
After every long day, a supermassive black hole set on our horizon. Aeternitas fell in a steady orbit around the black hole’s immense gravitational force. The Singularity stole the light of distant suns to form a disk of radiance around its utterly black sphere, the event horizon. It held my awe between its abyss of perfect black and spirals of distant white light.
When the Singularity succumbed to dusk, I looked across the cabin to where my companion, Albrin, slept. Sometimes, he would mutter or walk about in his sleep. The elders had insisted I take him with me. He was the leading expert but I wondered if we could still work together.
Nearly a year ago when I left the university, Albrin stayed shaking his head behind me. As children, we shared musings on a distant future, suggesting wild answers to the mysteries of the universe. He once suggested that everything in the sky was simply a sculpture crafted by an omnipotent artist. Perhaps that was the only explanation for its elegance.
When we entered the university, we excelled above our class, clawing towards the top, attempting to throw each other down when we tied. We studied cosmology, yet I held an interest in experimentation and application that he lacked. He said that he was a student of everything and that everything is infinite, so he stayed to study it, and resented my departure, claiming I “forsook the search for answers.”
I left to bring us closer to the universe. I oversaw great feats of engineering and science. After years of trials, our people created a revolution, building moving machines, and learning to fly. We even theorized that with powerful enough vehicles, we could lift ourselves off of our moon, into the expanse.
For so long, we failed to explain the motion of the stars. We knew that there was something deeply hidden in our theories. We could describe and track the motion of aircraft with the utmost precision. We understood the orbits of the Aeternitas’ moons, yet when we looked beyond, stellar orbits broke down. The stars moved far too quickly. They baffled me so I sought a clear sky to study them. Without Aeternitas above, the dark side would grant us a perfect view.
I stood in Albrin’s room for what could have been years. The single fireplace failed to light my corner. I navigated a maze of piled paper. Rank air invaded my nose with the scent of body odor and burnt parchment.
His hand scrawled across his desk, clutching a pen. He had let me in then ignored me. Eventually, he began muttering to himself, “I see myself traveling, faster and faster, ever on, beside streaks of light, but there is a limit, how would I see the world?”
“You’re insane.” I nearly laughed.
“But am I insane enough to understand?” He had always caught my sarcasm.
He sought the greatest prize, a theory of everything, a single expression of further dimension, a resolution to the universe. Now he focused on the quantum side of the theory, picturing himself traveling alongside photons moving at one of the few limits the universe imposed: the speed of light. Most had given up on such a theory. Some ridiculed him to their fellow scholars. But I had always held hope in the pursuit to understand.
I was dizzy after some time of inhaling burning carbon and filth. “Come with me. You will be amazed by what we have accomplished. We are able to reach the dark side.”
“Sir, I am trying to work.” He began scribbling what looked like waves on the walls of his room in ink.
“Do you not want to resolve the stars? Imagine the clear skies without Aeternitas in view.”
“I can imagine perfectly well right here.”
I walked towards the door, considering his cryptic ways. “Seemingly stagnant moons relative to a backdrop of swift stars, Aeternitas always gone.”
Albrin stood, I thought I heard his joints creak. “What did you say?”
I smirked, holding the door open.
“Still moons… but the stars…” He stood silently for a moment that seemed eternal until his eyes lit up and he began mumbling again. Something awakened in his mind. “I had nearly given up on looking up at night. Yet an understanding of the light beside immense suns… Perhaps I can show you what I have learned since you so rudely departed.”
I was surprised. “Look, I’m sorry but I wanted to experience more, more than the theories could provide and …”
“Please, spare me. You’ll only slow us down. Let’s see this view you speak of. So be it! To solve the universe, we will first solve the stars, then….” He grabbed a stack of paper, seemingly at random, and strode out, I followed, having already plotted our voyage.
Our plane landed on the dark side after hours of flight. The pilot waited by the aircraft. We were among the first of our people to reach this land.
After hiking for hours, we found a sea of dead grass that shined gold in the light of the setting Singularity. We laid out a cloth sheet of white and sat. Albrin, on his back, looked above and rolled over every other minute to scribble some calculations, diagrams, and elaborate drawings of suns and orbits in ink on the sheet. The telescope I held brought my eye millions of years into the past.
The night brought complete darkness. Points of divine radiance formed indigo galactic spirals in the sky. We drifted on our small world’s surface through this immense galaxy, an open dome of vast space above. Four outer moons were visible and seemed fixed beside the moving stars.
I squinted down at the numbers and symbols spanning the ground. “We’re missing something.”
“Stating the obvious does not make it any more true.”
“Come on Let’s think…”
“What do you think I’m doing?” Albrin was ever approachable as usual. “These equations don’t work.”
“They have worked in every other scenario.”
“Then they’re only part of the picture.” I saw the galaxy reflected in Albrin’s eyes.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Do you really think we understand it all?” I looked over his long beard into wide sincere eyes.
We roamed desolate plains along the moon’s dark side marveling at the galaxy above us. It felt as if we drifted alone amongst the stars, with vast spaces, our souls, and distant suns taking up all of existence. It felt like years had passed, our perspective changed, we grasped a new understanding of the cosmos’ dark expanses, for the first time I felt insignificant, I felt alone in the dark without Aeternitas above. I felt separate from the cosmos without the great blue gas giant watching over me.
Breaking deep silence, I asked. “What’s your predicted mass of the average star?”
“Not enough.”
“And their velocities?”
“Absurd.”
“And relative to the speeds of the moons it’s impossible. They physically cannot be orbiting this fast according to everything we know about gravitation.”
Albrin flipped onto his back with a thud, eyes closed. Finally, he whispered. “You keep saying the word relative.”
“We understand relative motion.”
“But is there not always more?” He turned back over. He sprung up and paced. “Why should we claim that our reference frame is correct?”
“Then there are others? But time is absolute.”
It was less than a whisper, “What if there are infinite others.”
“Wait. In all your calculations there are constants. There are limitations that time affects.”
“But what changes is the question.” He said. “I thought we had avoided arrogance, we know we are not the center, we probably are not alone, we mean nothing to the expanse, why should our time be correct. What is it we do not see?”
“The Singularity. It is beyond our comprehension; I revere it but…” I shook with the impact of the realization. “If the speed of the light of the stars does not change, as we have observed…”
We said it at nearly the same moment, “time must.”
I thought for a minute, my understanding of reality violently turning. “The stars are not moving faster. Their time frame is and if the stars are shifting… eternity will pass us by.” My mind felt free of our limited reference frame, yet fear shook me. “We have to alert the council.”
The Singularity rose. It held us in a sphere of forever. I thought of the end, of death and dissipation.
We tracked our years by rotations of Aeternitas around the Singularity, for a year on our tidally locked world was the same length as a day. Each Aeternitas year was approximately ninety, one-thousand-hour days. It took several of these years to work out the mathematics. Albrin and I spent entire sleepless days at the university working together. The pursuit unified us, we worked out the mysteries of the cosmos we did not have time to quarrel over petty past opinions. Our successful theory gave us a victory to share. Yet we did not celebrate because we understood the implications.
We were heralded as “geniuses” who “solved the mystery of the stars.”
In the weak daylight of the event horizon, we climbed the sky-scraping stairway of the
pyramid from which the elders ruled, its shimmering marble sought to blind my black circled, sleepless eyes.
We stood before the elders who sat on their high dais in the great hall, a room the size of a small island. Albrin spoke of the theory, our newfound revelation of the curvature mass elicits upon space and time. Curvature we call gravity.
When Albrin concluded, I stumbled forward. People from across the moon were admitted. Even the dark siders came. We had found few individuals who inhabited the dark side, most seemed crazed by the long nights, open sky, and moving stars. They spoke of their history filled with wars over such a small part of the cosmos, a mere continent on a single moon.
Eyes wide, the thousands who filled the hall hoped for answers. I hated to disappoint.
“As we live our long lives, mountains on other worlds are reduced to nothing by the winds of time. One of our years equals millions of years on a world orbiting an average star.” The elders shuffled uncomfortably. Any smiles in the crowd began to fade. “Mass warps space-time and we sit on the doorstep of infinite curvature, the Singularity. It sees eternity. And mocks us as we wait for an end. But our equations break down at this point, it is a veil of mystery. Yet we are certain of something else.”
“The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, our observations confirm this. Now, here is a concept we understand well: entropy. Energy spreads out. And if this is the case then the universe itself will spread thin.” I could almost hear their hearts. “It will dissipate infinitely until space itself is meaningless. The stars will blink out, compress, explode, and expand, they will not last. And we once thought we had time, forever, the lifespan of a black hole. But it is the Singularity itself that steals time. The universe lived out most of its life while we remained ignorant. Forever has almost passed, for to us forever is little more than a generation.”
My eyes ached every time I held them open. Whenever I laid down, I could not tear my thoughts from the entire civilizations that would rise and fall as I slept, the lives and cultures that would fade away in seconds. I thought of the death our civilization would soon face as the universe grew cold. And for what? That was truly what kept me awake pacing my halls: why? Why live just for your entire species to die so soon?
What cruel game did the cosmos play?
I had to escape.
If we could flee the Singularity’s sphere of influence, the relativistic effects would fade. Time would pass consistently, I just hoped there would be enough left. Yet no matter what, life would all end. The universe will die, that fact was once meaningless for the end was so far away. As the scale shrank, we had to face mortality, not just of life, but of everything. It was unbearable.
Only one thing kept me going, the dream that had driven my life’s work. Perhaps we could still create the future the elders had promised. I refused to abandon that hope. We would see true sunlight before we expired, we could still sail among the stars.
The news of our theory spread fast. We all lost sleep. We questioned our faith, but we still looked up.
I no longer worshiped the stars, because now I understood them. Our people lived long lives, often over twenty Aeternitas years. It took multiple of these years to leave our moon.
The sky became scattered with white dwarves and pulsars. The nights grew cold and dark. Many of the stars we saw from home had long since faded away. If we did not escape, we would eventually die with the rest of the universe in a cold, inevitable sea of entropy.
The majority of our population dedicated their lives to technological advancement and theoretical research. Necessity and cosmic intuition drove us. My people’s faith in a divine universe guided our pursuit and never opposed progress. We never discouraged questions. Our faith required that we accept how little we understand of the great expanse. Our leaders pushed innovation and never sought to get in its way. My faith now resided in an elegant cosmos, in a promised future.
It surprised even me how soon we reached space. I jumped in excitement at the sight of launch vehicles escaping our world’s tight grasp.
Particle accelerators that spanned hundreds of leagues were constructed. We began to peer deeper into the universe and the minuscule building blocks of nature.
As Albrin once did, I dreamt of traveling beside beams of light and drifting towards the stars. Yet he warned me: “the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time.” Approaching lightspeed would only bring us closer to the end of the universe. So I dreamt of bending space, of influencing the very fabric of existence and shrinking distances instead of increasing speed. I wondered what god possessed such power.
There were other ways to escape the time dilation in our mad chase against an hourglass running low on sand. I took a crew and a research team to an average-sized rocky outer planet within our system. The Singularity’s supermassive frame attracted many worlds. We lived on the only one that was not hellish or cold. One year on our moon equaled over two on that planet where the black hole held less effect. It bought us fleeting time to scour the cosmos.
All I wanted was some sign of a habitable world, a single microbe of life, a few more days to live, or anything that would allow a future for our people. We stepped off of fusion-driven starships onto a desert of gray and rust-red rocky plains. Composite suits kept us from slowly freezing. Dust, sand, and time seemed to be all this world had to offer.
We built research stations and self-contained habitats. We looked deeper into space and further back in time than we ever had and saw signs of thriving civilizations through the vast lenses we constructed. But the signs did not linger. They had flickered away billions of years ago, only to be carried here and land on our eyes then absorbed by our Singularity. We sent small probes propelled by light. Some fly by distant systems to report uninhabitable conditions and white stars like specters in the sky. Many of those worlds had once held life, we had seen it. We began to believe that we were the only remaining life. It was too late for our dreams. The cosmos was breathing its last gasps. I felt like a child longing for an impossible future. This universe had already lived its life, now it looked back at an existence we had missed, a future we never got to experience. Soon dust would be all we had.
Back home, Albrin continued his search for a theory of everything. He had arisen to the esteemed position of the Physicist’s seat on the council while I led our research. He tried to pull me from the hole I felt was continuously digging itself at my feet. He said that there was meaning in striving, that seeking to understand provides its own meaning. I had tried, but the end was too immediate. I thought perhaps we would know the answers in the end, but I only dreaded the moment. Adrenaline bored a hole in my chest. Perhaps we can rejoice while it lasts but so too can the fool dance while fires spread around him, the criminal feast before his execution, and the fish swim while the seas dry.
Then the archeologists came. I had not given much thought to the idea of long-dead life on this world. Still, they excavated. I did not believe them at first. They dug up vast cities, ancient pyramids, and structures that filled entire plains far beneath our feet covered by sand. Since we were close enough to the singularity, we could still make out the shapes of the ancient cities and artifacts before they were reduced to rubble. But on any world orbiting an average star too much time would have passed, it preserved us and our long-dead neighbors, for now.
This was all the cosmos had to offer, dead worlds with civilizations that had long ago passed. This was our destiny, to die with the rest of life. I despaired. This was once a mighty, flourishing civilization. Any power life could produce was meaningless next to cosmic time scales. How many civilizations were just on our doorstep such as this one? How many had almost survived, almost made it in this universe before one of the infinite possibilities that time presented wiped them out? At that point, I knew that there was no hope remaining. Anything this universe had to offer had gone.
The elders once spoke of optimism beyond one world. Now all we could do was try to save ourselves, the last light of consciousness remaining among the stars. It was more than hopelessness within me that grew. It was beyond that of a small creature attempting futilely to influence an infinite cosmos, for not even that influence would remain. The universe would become an endless sea of basic particles where atoms could not even form.
Every other planet was uninhabitable, soon ours would join them and civilization would be buried. We were alone, screaming silently into the cosmos with no one to hear. On any other world, all signs of life would be gone, even if they had been chiseled in stone, the remnants would have long since been blown away by the winds of time.
It was too late for expansion, there were no suitable worlds to escape to. My hopes for the future were shattered. It was only us, the Singularity, and the light it stole from a dead universe, now trapped in a sphere of forever.
We risked everything on a theory.
I returned to the homeworld. Albrin watched as my shining silver craft landed vertically in front of him. I aged twice as fast as he had, I lived years that sped him by. I descended from the vessel and hugged him. He held back for an instant, but I persisted, it felt like an eternity since I’d seen a friend.
Our world grew colder each day as starlight disappeared into the event horizon. We generated vast amounts of energy, but it bled out no matter how efficient our reactors were, then our world heated before entropy cooled it once more. We would either freeze or burn.
Like all life, we sought one thing more than anything: indefinite survival, always. It was a species-level pursuit. We dared not forsake our bodies, to transport our minds to the quantum computers we constructed lest we lose the natural need to survive. And the computers would fade as they had for every other dead civilization. We were intently forged of cosmic ingredients, we had to survive to preserve our sacred existence. My faith had faded yet I relented to the elders.
Albrin and I walked across the path from the landing pad to the elders’ pyramid.
“We have made strides in concepts to use the excess heat,” he said.
It took me some time to lift my eyes and their incredulous look. “You can’t reverse entropy.”
“What do you want me to do then? You said to look to the stars, and you return with only stories of death and dust. Can you blame me for trying to make the most of our own world?”
I was too wary to argue.
“There is only one way forward.” He knew of what I spoke, we proved it was possible together. “This universe will soon die” I shook hearing myself say the words aloud.
“But I am so close to solving it. I might just have time.”
“You could go on forever, you have said yourself that there is always more to know.”
“Yes, but once we have the theory, we will not be grasping so desperately. There are too many risks to your plan, the Singularity could tear us apart.”
“What if it doesn’t? We do not understand The Singularity. It is the one place our theory breaks down. What if it is the missing piece of our understanding?”
“What if it is…” He stopped, stuck in thought.
“It is better than staying and freezing. Either wait and die or go and have a chance. It is the only way.”
We must leave the universe.”
We embarked in the night. Millions left the homeland. We had always kept our lights low at night, but now we strained to see the dying stars.
The people were given simple hope in nothing but a theory of escape, but it was something, it was more than potential salvation. I imagined their eyes each time we reported a list of dead worlds, every time a beloved star burnt out. Some were reluctant to leave, but the council knew there was only one way forward and urged them to join us.
I traveled our world and oversaw the exodus. I stood before crowds and convinced them to follow. I looked into the eyes of mothers and fathers and promised a possible future for their children. I spoke to old men who had lived on this moon for their entire lives, what was ages on any other world, and told them to forsake their home. Perhaps it was wisdom that drove them forward. Some refused initially until the frost began to eat at their vitality.
We constructed a fleet at a maddening pace. Thousands of tubes of subcooled fuels ready to combust stood aloft. We did not leave a single soul behind. Aeternitas was dark on that night. It was time to say goodbye to our world. We walked under the darkest sky we had ever seen, entering our vessels. We took with us as much life as we could for that was truly rare, we carried plants and beasts, creatures from across the planet.
When we die, we believed we could return to the universe, and at some point, our particles would return to new life and new stars. But nothing new could form in a dying universe. In death perhaps we would return to the singularity. We worshipped the sky, divine light trailing galactic spirals on an infinite canvas of black space-time. But now the only light was that taken by the Singularity. We sought to chase it beyond this universe’s bounds of infinity.
Crystal sparks flared and ignited. The force of a supervolcano eruption followed the lighting of thousands of bell nozzles whose ringing shook the core of our crust. Flame followed. We had never seen such light. Near absolute zero fuel became hotter than a rod of lightning as our rockets lifted. An inferno engulfed the atmosphere. For a moment it was night no longer.
After our species escaped the fading world, our starships entered a transfer orbit, ejecting streams of fusion particles, putting us on a direct course towards the Singularity.
We drifted in freefall. I released my straps and pushed off my seat, floating, looking back through round windows. Time’s passage slowed as we flew closer to The Singularity.
Our planet died in front of us as time sped in our reference frame. The atmosphere slowly bled off as it was bombarded with comets. Seas boiled and froze in swirling white rings that lasted mere instants.
Then the moon became a pale gray dot in the sky beside Aeternitas’ gargantuan frame. It was not long until Aeternitas too was just a speck beside the infinite vastness. We turned and the black hole rose, looming above us.
As we passed the last chance to eject into a wider orbit, I nodded to Albrin, our eyes met, and eventually, he nodded back.
We approached the event horizon.
We fell in at a mind-boggling pace. Trillions of years began to pass. The blue dot in the distance faded to black as it spiraled towards the black hole. We saw stars instantaneously pop out of existence. Even other black holes would have dissipated. Our people who had not yet passed through would have seen us linger in one spot forever on the edge of the horizon. But we watched as they followed.
Our universe ended, all its remaining time was spent in minutes as we approached The Singularity. We entered the event horizon where not even light could escape. There was no turning back. Just as tomorrow had always come, our path towards The Singularity became as inevitable as time.
In seeing the end of eternity, I understood what Albrin had once told me. That existence itself is truly rare and beautiful, for we knew that we were the only ones to still possess it. I realized that to truly live or to simply exist was better than to never live at all. Clawing to the top only to fall to nothingness as so many civilizations had done would have been worth it just for the pursuit. We knew that we were near impossible, that according to every law of probability, life should not exist, yet here we were. The end could not steal that fact.
If all must end perhaps that which lingers carries with it the impact, the immortality in influence. That which fades gets to marvel in having lived at all. So, we carried with us the lives and intent of every single infinitesimal particle that composed our universe, we were the products. It did not end for nothing. We were the legacy of a past universe.
We traveled beyond infinity. We saw quantum events in an impossibly dense point, a spinning ring of the most basic building blocks. We understood the end. Not even time or empty space could exist. We understood the beginning. New time sprung. We understood everything, a simple expression of further dimension. Our minds transcended their finite nature as infinity and eternity became one, died, and were reborn. The answers did not lie beyond on faded worlds orbiting dead stars, we carried the capability, and The Singularity held the evidence.
We awoke on another side of eternity, an alternate forever, another space-time. We basked in the light of a trillion stars below a single sphere of concentrated heat seeing only pure white sunlight above.
