Submitted for the July 2024 prompt: This Mortal Coil

I stared through my Nexus Sphere’s massive armorplast porthole. Beyond lay a smothering emptiness bereft of stars.

 

Not all gone, I reassured myself — just old. Ancient red dwarfs still burned, too dim for the naked eye. Galaxies beyond the local supercluster long vanished over the expanding universe’s cosmological horizon. Only darkness remained.

 

“As dark as your soul,” Argyle had cursed at me eons ago. The recollection triggered a cascade of ancient memories.

 

Argyle's research team, jubilant at the results scrolling past — stable telomere regrowth for any cells, not just germ or stem cells. Ewan and Chardy high-fiving. Diana’s ebullient tears of joy. A mere wisp of myself, pointing out, “it’s only the first problem solved.” Argyle, ignoring my staid realism (pessimism, he’d called it), proclaiming, “We’re going to live forever!”

 

Telomere regeneration made cells immortal. But invariably transcription errors crept in, accumulating until cell function collapsed.

 

Argyle died in cancerous agony. With his last breaths, he damned the universe. And my black soul.

 

* * *

 

A personality shard spoke, interrupting my reminiscences.

 

“The nano-bath is ready.”

 

I clambered into the waiting medical chair. It reclined itself, rotated, and swung over the nano-infused biogel pool before descending. As the viscous goop seeped down my throat, I glanced again out the porthole. I missed the stars much more than I did the others. They always haunted my rejuvenation dreams.

 

Diana emerging from our original crude infusion therapy, purified and serene. Ewan and Chardy bouncing, hugging each other. “So we’ve made the vessel immortal,” I said, “but what about the mind?” Diana smiling wanly, “Oh, Khalid, let’s relish our success.”

 

The nanites, created too late to save Argyle, scoured away accumulated replication errors, re-transcribing frayed strands. But I’d still been right. The brain’s hundred billion neurons provided two million gigabytes of storage — enough for maybe four hundred years of data.

 

Eight centuries later, tormented by an unrelenting cacophony of disjointed memories, Diana opened an airlock without her suit.

 

* * *

 

I woke to Id whispering (as if Ego wouldn’t hear), “Dark matter projectile complete. First launch window in twenty-seven minutes.”

 

“I reiterate my objection,” Ego said. “Further calculation refinement is still possible.” I felt his (its? my? what exactly is the correct pronoun for a splinter of one’s consciousness?) simmering disapproval.

 

“We’ve modeled this for centuries already,” Id responded. “Variance is below a billionth of a percent.”

 

“Yet trillions more years remain before Milkomeda’s final stars burn themselves out.”

 

“Conditions will not improve. And Sphere mass is becoming prohibitively large.”

 

This was an incessant argument. Hope (or recklessness?) and caution (cowardice perhaps?) battling for dominance.

 

“Any progress on the fragmentation problem?” I asked.

 

“Negligible,” Ego replied. “With more time for interface modeling—“

 

Id interjected. “Time! You’d run calculations until the universe's heat death. Transit to a new universe and we’ll have all the time and resources we need!”

 

I sat up, stray pearls of biogel sloughing away. I stretched and rubbed the back of my neck just below my neural interface implant. Through it, I could feel my myriad splinters, calculating, imagining, yearning, and, of course, bickering.

 

“I contain multitudes,” I murmured while savoring the irony of being a homunculus nestled inside my own Jupiter-sized quantum computer brain. Plenty of memory space now.

 

But solving the third problem only generated another. The larger the mind, the more memories required integration, the more prone to fragmentation it became. At least my fragments were harmonious (mostly). Ewan had splintered into viciously competing selves. One had overloaded his Nexus Sphere’s fusion cores. Was it Chadry’s own fragmentation or her grief that sent her Sphere careening into a black hole shortly thereafter?

 

Light from this system’s wan stars now shone through the porthole. I directed my Sphere’s sensors to scan the inner core. A shell of white dwarfs orbiting two tidally locked neutron stars. It had taken millennia to create this arrangement. A launch window warning pinged. I had seventeen seconds. I paused, remembering my lost brethren.

 

All gone now. Even the countless who’d followed Ewan, Chadry, and me down the transhuman path Diana had eschewed. Be it from fragmentation, loneliness, ennui, or despair, they’d all chosen death over eternity. I alone couldn’t let go. I wanted to live forever.

 

But not in this dying husk of a universe.

 

I launched the dark matter.

 

Every splinter’s attention merged into one, hyper-focused on the projectile’s trajectory through the intricate clockwork of stars. Waiting, dreading, hoping for the gravitational shear to curl the fabric of spacetime into a portal to a brave new world.

 

It didn’t happen.

 

And suddenly I was splintered again — analyses, hypotheses, accusations whirling through my mind like a maelstrom.

 

“A billionth of a percent variance?” Ego asked smugly.

 

“Now we have real-world data.” Id replied. “And as you’ve pointed out, we’ll have plenty of time to try again.”

 

Except that wasn’t to be either. The dark matter bullet had generated a quantum-sized puncture into another universe. A hole through which that other universe’s entire gravitational force pulled. The perfect balance of my crafted star system collapsed. The neutron stars collided, quickly drawing in the circling white dwarfs, and everything else within a five-light-year radius.

 

In an instant, the merciless compression squeezed every perception, memory, desire. Down to. Just. One.

 

End!

 

I refused.

 

Then the newly created singularity exploded.

 

My consciousness blossomed in a hyper-inflative release. I experienced countless pinpricks of matter/antimatter particle annihilations, a sense of cooling, reheating, and cooling again as my mind percolated through the quantum foam. Next came eons of almost imperceptible change, a slowly building accretion until an echo of a long-ago memory formulated in my unfathomably vast consciousness. I recognized the pattern — a brand new universe! Except the pattern was inverted. I wasn’t a mote in this universe, I was the universe looking within!

 

I focused my will on one massive cloud of hydrogen molecules. I teased it into filaments and then compressed, initiating gravitational collapse.

 

Let there be light!

 

And within me, stars sparked to life.