SILENT STEEPLES

The Entropists were right. The chaos crept closer and there was nothing we could do to stop the stars from going out and the dark from getting darker and the cold between our fingertips from becoming screaming agony and although they said we should have stopped, done less, been less, lived less, what would that have done but move the still, small end three steps further from us?

The Entropists were right. No, they were correct, but they weren’t right. They handed out blame like that’s what would save us. This was all our fault, all their fault, but whose fault is physics? They took charge and slowed us down, but still that endless winter came and when it did they preached nothing and did nothing. They cowered in their temples, still as stone, hoping that their breath might not cause too much chaos, too afraid to tell others not to move lest they themselves become the last mover.

And those Truthseekers, for all their pleading with the Unknown, for all the hope we had placed in their wizened hands, not even they could stop the inevitable.

They fought, we all did, for so many millennia. We abandoned planets, we abandoned suns. We found our life in the darkness, in the black holes and iron stars. These shadowed corners became our tombs as the galaxies and the light beams between them were pulled from our reach, yet still we writhed on. We became immortal. The universe did not.

The Entropists were wrong, they should have just accepted that this would be the end, that all must end. But death was not enough for them. Their ideas had to live on. Their ideas would save us. Only their ideas would save us.

They failed.

Their silent steeples will be dust soon and I can’t say I dreamt anything different. Soon, absolute zero will be the only number. Soon there will be a universe of distance between one atom and another, between nothing and more endless nothing. We were told the end would be cold and quiet, but now it’s here… Silence screams far louder in the dark.

Our one hope is that this is not the end, but a new beginning. In the slimmest of probabilities, this world bounces back and starts anew and these thoughts shall remain, encoded in the echoes.

And should miracle bring miracle, then perhaps you, hopeful, impossible reader might not know who we were, but instead know that we had so little time and spent the last of it obsessed with not spending it. Do not remember us for how we raged against what was always coming. Do not remember us for the sorry acceptance that we’ve now found only too late. Remember us for when we lived not knowing that there was an end or a beginning but only that the story still unfolded. Remember us for when we lived.

ANAX

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