The End of Time.

The hum of the engines was a lullaby, a constant, vibrating assurance against the vast, cold silence. Elias called it the Chronos Gazer. Its purpose was etched into every gleaming panel, every intricate circuit: to bear witness. Not to the present, not even to the near future, but to the end. He had to know. The question had gnawed at him since childhood: How does it all end?

He launched from Earth, a pale blue marble shrinking rapidly behind him. The first year, he kept constant contact. Messages from home, crisp and clear, detailing mundane news, then the growing anxieties of resource scarcity, the rumblings of interplanetary disputes. He deployed the gossamer observatory, a vast, shimmering net of sensors and lenses designed to capture light from the deepest reaches of cosmic history.

As the Chronos Gazer accelerated, year after Earth-year, the light from distant stars began to shift. The vibrant blues of young galaxies stretched into somber reds. Time, as measured by his internal chronometer, remained stubbornly consistent, but the universe outside began to rush.

"Earth calling Chronos Gazer," a frantic voice crackled through the static one simulated month later on his ship. "The war has escalated. Mars has declared full autonomy. We're diverting all power to defense. It has all gone to he..." The last message was a garbled shriek of white noise, abruptly cut off.

He knew, intellectually, that centuries had just blinked past on Earth. He felt a profound, aching loneliness, deeper than any vacuum of space. His home, his people, were gone. Not dead, perhaps, but changed beyond recognition, absorbed by the currents of time he was so desperately trying to outrun.

He adjusted his acceleration. The G-forces, once a comforting push against his seat, now felt like an impossible, omnipresent weight, a constant reminder that he was tearing through the fabric of reality. Yet, he held steady. The feeling was a profound constant, pushing his intrinsic time vector against the accelerating flow of time outside. He was breaking away from the universe's natural current, charting his own temporal course. The G-forces became a tether to a reality he was swiftly leaving behind.

Millennia now passed in what felt like days. The messages from Earth had long ceased. The very constellations began to distort, smearing into arcs, their familiar patterns warped by extreme relativistic aberration. He watched as the Milky Way, his home galaxy, became a distant, spiraling spark, then just a faint glow, fading into the background of countless others.

Billions of years rolled by in a blur of weeks. He saw galaxies merge, forming titanic super-galaxies, their gravitational dance a slow, majestic waltz that concluded in brilliant, short-lived bursts of light. He saw new stars ignite, live their furious, brief lives, and then collapse into nebulae or quiet black holes. He saw the universe thinning, the vast cosmic web stretching and unraveling.

The light from distant objects, once vibrant, now strained and ancient, redshifted almost beyond detection. The expansion of the universe, once a theoretical concept, became a visceral experience. Space itself felt like a colossal rubber sheet, perpetually stretching, pulling everything further and further apart.

His observatory, despite its impossibly thin construction, began to struggle. The light from anywhere meaningful was so sparse, so stretched, that it barely registered. The cosmos was becoming a vast, empty canvas, speckled with ghost images of what once was.

And then, the light began to dim. Not suddenly, but with a terrifying, inexorable slowness. Stars, all stars, exhausted their fuel. The final red dwarves sputtered into black dwarfs, silent cinder-worlds adrift in eternal night. Black holes, the last titans, began to slowly evaporate through Hawking radiation, their immense gravity gradually fading into nothingness.

The universe became a cold, dark void, punctuated only by the occasional faint flicker of an evaporating black hole, a final, dying gasp of energy. He saw clusters of these ghosts, then single ones, then none.

Elias was alone. Utterly, definitively alone. His life support systems, powered by the very last reserves of his ship, barely functioned. He had seen it. The entire span. The grand cosmic play, from genesis to ultimate silence.

His last coherent thought was of the blackness, swallowing everything. The universe hadn't ended with a bang, but with the quiet, chilling whisper of a light that simply wasn't there anymore. He felt the faint, comforting push of his own intrinsic time vector, the constant hum of his very being, still vibrating in the infinite emptiness. But there was nothing left to measure it against.

The last indicator light on his console blinked, then faded. And all went black.