The woman I loved left me. I never thought I’d leave this place. My home. My planet. My time. But I had nothing to sustain me. Forgive me. If anyone sees this, tell your people about me. I just want someone to know who I am. Or who I was, somewhere before the end of time. 

She was the one who inspired me to look at life with childlike wonder. We lived together for eight years before she decided she didn’t love me anymore. I was on the verge of losing my job at the Quantum Space facility when I decided to steal the Ark Spacetime Machine and everything with it. It was to be launched into space, with the rest of the molecular samples of Earth, in case of an apocalyptic event — the end times as it were. Mission directors for the Ark were busy arguing over who should go on the journey, if there should be a human pilot at all, and how they would inform the public that this would be a suicide mission. I made the decision for them, having engineered the life support systems (ironically) and launched the ship, leaving behind everything for the sake of preserving Earth’s history, and ridding my mind of my own history. All that’s gone though, the house, the garden, the job, the town, the park, the flowers, the trees, humanity, all gone.

My name is Esmond and I’m a time-traveling stowaway. After I awoke from cryo-sleep I found that I couldn’t remember certain details of my past, including my birthday and the date I left Earth forever. The consoles at the pilot’s chair showed the date and time as blank, along with the viewport in round front of the chair. Complete darkness. There should have been stars. The star map in the Ark database was also empty, devoid of any indication there ever was a universe. Naturally I checked the logs stored in the Ark mainframe, and after some decoding, discovered a macroverse recording which revealed what happened to the Earth in a digital recreation, displayed on the large circular viewport in front of me.

A part of me didn’t want to know. Some things were better left unsaid but I had all the time in the world. I re-played the sequences, starting at the time I departed Earth, focusing on a view of the green and blue planet. Hesitantly I pressed and held the forward button and the viewport display zoomed through time within a few seconds, each millisecond seemed to rush through several years. White clouds swirled and twisted like creamer in coffee, mixing with plumes of storms and flashing by over a thirty-year period. The Earth grew darker with more storm clouds, turning the planet gray, gradually worsening over another fifty-year period. Several times I had to lift my fingers from the controls to gain my breath, overcome with deep sighs and loss. It was like watching a family dog struggle to stay above water, slowly drowning under the pressures of a tumultuous whirlwind. The same sickening feeling continued when the gray clouds faded to black and then red clouds. It became hard to distinguish between storm clouds and smoke as the distant view of the Earth revealed only the aftereffects of some natural or man-made disaster. I couldn’t decide which one, or perhaps it was a combination of both.

My only anxiety came from the knowledge that everyone I knew was dead and that my wife, whose name I couldn’t even recall, had long since moved on, probably remarried, moved to a place that made her happy, had kids, whose lineage would have extended for at least another one-hundred and fifty years, died peacefully of old age, been buried, and then exhumed by the likely earth erosion that occurred. I couldn’t watch anymore, of the Earth being deposed of its majesty, of my past being shredded into a million pieces, and of knowing I was the only person to see it.

I continued anyway, pressing harder on the Forward button. Earth became consumed by fire and ice, alternating every few hundred years. The land masses shifted slowly, crushing each other and then spreading out ever so slowly in the flash-forward. Barren lands, gray and desolate, covered the planet, removing any signs of green or blue. The blue, the once dominant oceans, mixed with the gray and became indistinguishable from the rest of the surface. I imagined what the landscape would look like, dry and lifeless, perhaps rock formations where there were once skyscrapers. Eons passed by with no hint of color under the weight of my finger. If only the hard, cracked surface could have been kissed by the moisture of a rain cloud, or even a flood to watch away the hopeless terrain, turning it into the blooming paradise it once was. The Earth, gray and black, should have risen from the ashes, but it never did.

Time almost appeared to stand still as thousands of eons flashed by, too many years and centuries to count, and took me to an unimaginable place. Earth, dying and bleeding from the cracks in the tectonic plates, became consumed by a blast of orange as the sun that provided so much sustenance to our planet, exploded and devoured it. People would often forget that the night time was the natural state of the universe. As I stared at the empty screen as the debris faded into specks and the stars in the background I realized this was the natural state of things. Everything I thought was important didn’t seem so relevant anymore, seeing as only eight seconds of holding the Forward button down washed away three generations of human life. Every argument, every complaint, every painful moment, every horrible act I’d ever committed, even the kind ones, were buried by the sands of time, suffocated, deep, and forgotten.

But as I contemplated whether or not I wanted to see more I came to muster a strength in me that wanted only the truth, to know what came next and why the stars faded. Seeing the stars in the place that Earth used to be gave me hope that something beautiful could exist there again. My finger became tired pressing the button for so long, bruised, aching, and wavering. Stars began to twinkle as such a prolonged stretch of time passed so quickly. These too simply faded out, creating only darkness on the round screen. The Earth had been gone, the elements on the Ark could easily rebuild it if there was ever another planet sizable to sustain it. The Ark itself couldn’t travel in time but it did have a defense mechanism for when time or space might collapse. A quantum bubble, in simpler terms, surrounded the ship, protecting it against time-drifts from black holes and even might have protected it against entering one. But as I looked out the viewport, as it is now, I realized the universe itself may have been consumed by one, or the universe, like the Earth, simply died out from another cosmic catastrophe.

I waited and waited, my finger growing numb, but nothing came out of the darkness. This was it. This was the void at the end of time. There was no space, no time, only the quantum bubble around the ship that was likely to fail soon and blink me out of existence. I should feel lucky to have survived, to see the complete collapse of reality but instead I wonder if I would hear a ripple if I threw a rock into this abyss. Perhaps I was the rock, drifting through emptiness, eroding, fighting against the suffocating loneliness in my chest. I try to close my eyes and the abyss is there too, in the darkness –it is the darkness. And I become lost in it. Lost in the silence. My mind cracked and showed me faces and things that weren’t there. I saw her face, imprinted in the blackness, smiling back, kind, sweet, and overwhelmingly warm. And then I realized that time had been an illusion for me, an attempt to fight against the inevitable collapse and decay of the everlasting stream. But what was the alternative? Sitting here in darkness, waiting for the quantum drive to fail? Life, existence, my time within it, hadn’t been all bad. The illusion was a splendid one and full of hope, while it had lasted. 

My options became clear. Either let the void collapse and crush me out of existence, or…I overload the quantum drive and cause it to explode, the results of which might create an outward stretching blast wave of molecular matter from the Ark, or it would simply kill me. If this message survives…and reality is reignited, please forgive me for nearly giving up hope, as it is the only thing that could conquer the void.