The Last Light

Kira felt strange in flesh again. After ten million years of existing as pure consciousness in quantum substrates, the weight of bone and blood seemed almost comical. She flexed her fingers—five stubby appendages that her species had abandoned eons ago—and marveled at their clumsy precision.

"It feels appropriate," said Marcus, his new larynx struggling with the ancient words. Around them, thousands of others were making the same choice. The Eternal City's bio-forges worked tirelessly, crafting traditional human forms from genetic templates preserved since the dawn of their civilization. "To meet the end as we began."

They gathered on the observation decks that had once been mere curiosities, relics from when their ancestors needed physical vantage points to observe the cosmos. Now, in humanity's final epoch, these spaces had become sacred. The traditional bodies pressed against the transparent aluminum, eyes—actual, biological eyes—turned toward the heavens.

The Fade had been progressing for a thousand years, but recently it had accelerated. Dr. Chen, one of the few who had remained in her enhanced consciousness throughout, manifested beside them in temporary flesh to share the moment.

"Andromeda went dark last week," she whispered, her voice heavy with the weight of eons. "We're down to local group galaxies now."

Kira nodded, remembering when the sky had been ablaze with distant quasars, when the cosmic web stretched in glorious detail across the heavens. Their ancestors would have seen even more—the sky of ancient Earth had been rich with light from galaxies they could never observe now.

"The children don't understand why we chose flesh for this," Marcus said, watching a group of recently-incarnated youngsters—mere millions of years old—stumbling awkwardly on legs they'd never used.

"How could they?" Kira replied. "They never knew mortality. They don't know what it means to see with eyes that can close forever."

A murmur rippled through the crowd. In the southern sky, the Magellanic Clouds flickered and vanished, red-shifting beyond visibility as their time rate accelerated toward its ultimate destiny. The crowd stood in reverent silence, watching light that had traveled for millennia simply... cease.

Years passed. The gathering had become permanent now, humanity's final congregation. They had returned their great machines to the earth, abandoned their stellar engineering projects, let their vast computational networks quietly shut down. There was no point in building for a future that would end in perfect darkness.

Proxima Centauri was next. The red dwarf, humanity's nearest stellar neighbor, had been their first interstellar colony destination four million years ago. Kira remembered the celebrations when the first probe had arrived. Now they watched it fade from red to infrared to nothing, swallowed by the expanding temporal horizon.

"Even if we had stayed as energy beings," Dr. Chen observed, "we would be experiencing this. The singularity affects all reference frames equally."

"But we wouldn't feel it the same way," said Marcus, and Kira knew he was right. There was something profound about witnessing the end with mortal eyes, about facing infinity with finite flesh.

Alpha Centauri followed months later, its brilliant binary dance fading to memory. Then Wolf 359, then Barnard's Star. Each disappearance was mourned, remembered, honored. The humans had become shepherds of light, keeping vigil as the universe slowly vanished around them.

The sky grew steadily darker. Where once stellar nurseries had blazed in brilliant nebular glory, now only the nearest dozen stars remained visible. The children born into flesh during these final years would never know the glory of the galactic plane, the sweep of spiral arms across the cosmic vault.

"My grandmother saw the Orion Nebula," whispered a young voice in the crowd. "She said it was like looking at the birthplace of gods."

Now even Sirius began to fade, the brightest star in old Earth's sky red-shifting toward invisibility. The gathering had grown quiet, contemplative. They no longer spoke of scientific theories or temporal mechanics. The equations had been written, the predictions confirmed. There was nothing left but to witness.

The Sun began to dim on a Tuesday that felt like any other. At first, just a subtle reddening, as if sunset was approaching though it was midday. The ancient human eyes adapted remarkably well, pupils dilating to catch every precious photon.

"We should have been extinct ten million years ago," Kira murmured, feeling the weight of mortality in every breath. "We were never meant to see this."

"Maybe we were," Marcus replied, his hand finding hers with primitive, beautiful accuracy. "Maybe consciousness exists precisely to witness the impossible."

The Sun grew redder, dimmer. The solar panels that had powered their civilization for eons began to fail. Emergency fusion generators hummed to life, but everyone knew it was merely prolonging the inevitable. The city lights seemed brighter now, more precious against the dying sky.

Weeks passed in the gathering twilight. The Sun, once a blazing yellow star, now glowed dull orange, then deep red. Plants began to wither despite the greenhouse domes. The temperature dropped slowly, but the humans had lived through ice ages before—cold was nothing compared to darkness.

"Look," Dr. Chen whispered one morning. The Sun was barely visible, a dim crimson disk that provided no more light than a candle. "We can see our own star dying from temporal acceleration. No species in history has witnessed this."

The city lights became the brightest objects in the sky. Humanity's final monuments to light, blazing defiantly against the encroaching void. Children pressed against the observation deck windows, their biological eyes straining to see the last solar disk.

And then, without ceremony or fanfare, their star winked out.

The gathered humans stood in perfect silence. After four and a half billion years of daylight, Earth was now lit only by the dying glow of their civilization. In the distance, fusion reactors hummed their swan songs. Emergency lighting cast gentle pools of illumination across faces that would never see sunrise again.

"How long until the city lights fade too?" asked one of the children.

Dr. Chen consulted her instruments—primitive things, calibrated for biological eyes. "Not long now. The temporal acceleration is approaching asymptotic infinity. Even our own light sources will redshift out of visibility soon."

They watched in wonder and terror as the streetlights began to dim, shifting toward red, then infrared. The great fusion torches that had lit their plazas for millennia faded like dying campfires. One by one, the monuments to human achievement vanished into darkness.

The observation deck's emergency lighting was the last to go. Red, then barely visible, then gone entirely. In the perfect darkness, ten billion humans stood together, their hearts beating in unison, their breath creating small clouds of warmth in the cooling air.

"Can you feel it?" Kira whispered into the black. "Time itself is stretching toward infinity."

"The universe is still there," Marcus replied, his voice steady in the absolute darkness. "Every star, every galaxy, still burning bright. We just can't see them anymore."

A child's voice, impossibly young in the ancient dark: "Will there be light again?"

Dr. Chen's answer came soft and certain: "Yes, little one. When time resets, there will be light again. Different light, perhaps, but light nonetheless."

In the perfect blackness, ten billion humans waited together for the temporal singularity to carry them toward whatever came after the end of observation itself.

And in the darkness, time stretched toward infinity, carrying them all toward the moment when everything would begin again.