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Biography of an Immortal His pulse beat with the eons. Entire solar systems were created, developed,
and died between heartbeats. His entire system was slowing to the pace
of the universe, and it took a very long time before he realized that
something was tugging on him. He felt it on some subconscious level
but tried to ignore it as long as he could, until eventually the pull
grew too strong, and he opened his eyes to the blackness surrounding
him as he drifted in the void and looked around for whatever it was
that had grabbed him with invisible fingers. Nothing immediately obvious.
Maybe the stars were flaring into existence at a slightly slower rate
and blinking back into oblivion more quickly, but that was the only
change the man could see between now and when he closed his eyes a billion
years ago. An unknown amount of time went by, impossible to measure. He blinked
at his surroundings, tumbling slowly. No answers presented themselves,
while the pull grew stronger. He was glaring at the stars moving sluggishly across his line of sight
when it struck him. The stars — they were moving in reverse. And
they seemed to be accelerating. Accelerating, in fact, towards the very
pull that held him now. The reason for the change, for the pull on his
body, the reason for it all came to him suddenly. My universe,
he gasped silently. My universe is collapsing. The universe,
this universe, his universe, had expanded for countless millennia, since
eons before the long-living man was born, since the Big Bang if the
scientific guesses were to be believed, but existence itself had now
reached the end of its gravitational tether and was collapsing back
on itself. The man had a name. At the very least, he used to have one. That name,
if names meant anything anymore without another soul to say it, was
John Erasmus Pounds. He had answered to a thousand other names over
the years of his impossibly long life but never really stopped thinking
of himself as, simply, John. John smiled as he watched the stars falling inward. It's happening.
After all this time, it's really happening. For so long it had seemed
the final generations of scientists on Earth had been wrong about the
universe collapsing; that it would go on expanding forever. Now that
time was over. No more mystery, no more wondering. The end of the universe
was approaching at an accelerating rate. John Pounds was immortal, but his universe was dying.
A smile stretched into quiet being on his face, gradually over a million
years. He didn't even notice, his attention focused on the eternity
collapsing around him. The End was approaching. A dream he gave up a
billion years prior was soon to be realized. There would be no one else to witness The End, just as there had been
no one to witness The Beginning. As far as John knew, anyway. Of course,
there was no way to know that. No way of knowing what it had been like
at the beginning of time, the birth of space, the childhood of the universe.
Was it like his own beginning, unaware as he had been that its brief
childhood would be followed by a painful eternity of adulthood? An unconscious flinch shrugged the burgeoning smile from his face.
Childhood was something John had not thought of since... since when?
There was no way to tell, no clock but the steady birth and death of
the stars around him to mark the passage of time. As if time held any
meaning anymore. That didn't change things, of course, and now it was impossible to
get the images out of his head. They floated just behind his eyes, refusing
to be pushed away. The memory of London, where John was born early in
the summer of 1474, was just as clear and real as the burning spheres
of gas that kept him company in the vacuum were now. He could picture
every wrinkle on his father's stern face, each of the numerous freckles
on his mother's much gentler one. Even his oldest brother, trampled
to death by his own horse when John was three, could have been right
in front of John and be no clearer than the image in his mind.
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