THE LOOPHOLE AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE

Marcus checked the readout for the third time that hour. The numbers hadn’t changed; they never did anymore, but checking them again (and again) gave him something to do besides think about the view outside.

It wasn’t much of a view.

The last star had died sixty trillion years ago, give or take a few billion. After that, the universe became a forever-expanding, empty void where nothing at all happened.

And yet, Marcus lived. Millions of people, in fact, had continued to live. They were healthy, vibrant, and had plenty to do to occupy what, for all intents and purposes was a practical (secular) “eternity.” Outside their habitat, the universe was dead: Planets, stars, galaxies, clusters... all of it had long-ago gone cold. Even Marcus and the others had gone cold.

Marcus (or what was left of him) was nothing more than 1s and 0s, a constant stream of some computational consciousness existing inside what everyone called The Loophole. If there was anyone alive outside to examine it, they would see only a large flat, hexagonal panel. If anyone was around to crack it open, they might find the now-unfathomably ancient gel-based “hard”ware that kept its connection alive. From the outside, Marcus was just a string of 1s and 0s. Inside the Loophole, he was as fully-fledged and “alive” as he could be.

The Loophole was humanity’s final monument, a battery the size of a solar system that had spent the last one-hundred trillion years gathering every scrap of stellar material it could find. A little hydrogen here, some helium there, the occasional carbon atom drifting through the void. All of it was collected, catalogued, analyzed, and “saved to memory” before the heat death of the universe.

The Loophole was a greedy thing, too. It sucked in starlight like a sponge, converted it to energy, and stored it in its crystalline latticework that spanned the length of its superstructure. Theoretically, it could hold a charge for googols of years.

Theoretically.

“You’re checking the readout again?” Elise materialized beside him, her avatar flickering slightly. Everyone flickered these days. Energy conservation protocols demanded it.

“It’s my job,” Marcus answered, bristling at the intrusion.

“Your job is to monitor, not to obsess.”

“Is there a difference, considering what’s at stake?”

She didn’t laugh. Nobody laughed much anymore, not since the Loophole had entered its ten-thousandth hibernation cycle. The pattern was always the same: They’d live for a few million years—thinking, creating, arguing about philosophy and whether virtual tacos tasted as good as the real thing—then the system would power down for a cosmic “night” that lasted quadrillions of years. When everyone woke up, the little bit that was left of the real universe would be a little colder, slower, and have less energy, including the 1s and 0s that constituted “people” anymore. From the perspective of those in the Loophole, it was a perfect system. Wake up, live, go to sleep, wake up live, and so on. Forever.

“This can’t go on forever,” Marcus said. “The Loophole’s battery cells are overcharged,” Marcus said, pulling up a holographic display. Red warnings blinked across the interface. “Look at this. The black hole implosions, all those bursts of light... what did they call it in the old days? Hawking Radiation? They’ve dumped too much energy into the system at once.”

Elise furrowed her brow. “I’m not hearing the problem. Even if I didn’t believe the system could continue to last endlessly, why is it a bad thing that the last black hole implosion gave us light-power. More power means we last longer, right?”

“Longer than endlessly?” Marcus replied, raising his eyebrows as if to say “gotcha.”

“I’m just trying to follow YOUR train of thought,” Elise retorted. “Personally, I think the colder it gets, the slower it gets, and therefore the longer we live. It’s a quantum fractal: The more we zoom in, the more there is. Endless.”

“No,” Marcus said flatly. “The cells in the Loophole’s batteries have too much charge for how slow everything is moving. The batteries can’t trickle power to our little pocket universe fast enough. It’s like...” He searched for an analogy, sighing as he did. He was always terrible at analogies. “It’s like trying to put out a fire with a fire house one drop at a time. The pressure is backing up and will soon explode. We need to find a way to discharge it—”

“Why would you try to put out a fire one drop a time?” Elise asked, dumbfounded by the analogy.

“You wouldn’t! I know, it’s a terrible illustration, but the point is the batteries have a charge... too much of a charge, and if we don’t discharge the waste the system will destabilize and we’ll all die.”

That’s not a word they used much anymore, unless they were talking about the universe.

“So how long do you think we have?” Elise asked, though her tone was as unconcerned as ever.

“We’ve got maybe three more cycles before the whole thing tears itself apart from the inside.”

“What is that in terms of the universe outside?”

“Five hundred billion years, maybe...” Marcus replied.

“How much is that from our perspective?” Elise asked.

Marcus’ face went slack with defeat as he spoke the number out loud for the first time. “It’s like six months in here, just before the next ‘night’ kicks in, actually.”

There was a long silence before Elise spoke again. “Marcus, listen, if that were true, someone else would be panicking about it?”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean, you can’t be the only one to notice this. And if no one else is panicking, maybe you just miscalculated.”

“I noticed it because that’s my job! I don’t notice if the temperature control in the hot tub is on the fritz. I just do MY job.”

“Alright,” Elise said, raising her hands in surrender. “Say you’re right. What’s your proposal?”

Marcus was quick with the reply: “We eject everything at once. All of it. Every bit of stored matter and energy. We release it in a single moment.”

Elise’s avatar flickered, but she didn’t seem to notice. Marcus did, though. “Wouldn’t that just deplete all the power we have left? There are no more black holes to implode. That whole thing about our battery draw being quantum fractals only works if there’s SOMETHING to draw from. What you’re proposing is that we drain the whole battery and put an expiration date on the Loophole.”

“There already is one,” Marcus said.

“Then what’s the point of all this?!”

Marcus pulled up another display. This one showed a complex equation, beautiful in its symmetry. “The point is what happens after. All that matter, all that energy, compressed and released at once... the math says it would create an explosion. A big one, full of hydrogen, helium, oxygen, gamma rays, burning stars, hot pink nebulae, swirling galaxies.”

She stared at him. “You’re talking about a universe... like a real universe.”

“I’m talking about starting over.”

“That’s insane.” She backed away from him.

“Elise, if we don’t act now—”

“No, I will not be part of some plan to rip us away from the Loophole and put us back in a place where we... what? Live in a body for 80 years and then crumble to dust?” She shook her head in horror. “I have to tell the Council.”

“Elise—” he tried again, but her image flickered and disappeared in the span of a blink.

The Council convened within the hour (which was actually several million years in the universe outside, but who’s counting anymore?), and soon after summoned Marcus before them. He stood in the central chamber while holographic faces stared down at him like disapproving gods.

“You want to kill us all,” Councilor Irwin said. It wasn’t a question.

“I want to save existence itself,” Marcus replied. “There’s a difference.”

“Not much of one, if we’re the ones dying to save it.”

Marcus pulled up his data, and with a flick of his fingers, flooded the chamber with calculations, graphs, and charts. “We have two choices. We can let the Loophole tear itself apart and take us with it, dying in a few months as we know it... Or we can use what we have left to create something new.”

“Something that won’t include us!” Councilor Vahn shouted. A murmur began rippling through the assembly.

“We’re already dead!” Marcus shot back, silencing the chatter. “You all have forgotten. Even I forget sometimes... We died trillions of years ago. All we are here...” He touched his chest, feeling the fabric, the slightly unpleasant coolness of the room. “We’re echoes. We’re ghosts haunting a battery. But maybe... MAYBE... we can make sure existence doesn’t end with us.”

“And how do you propose we trigger this... suicide?” Irwin asked coldly.

“The Loophole has an emergency purge system. Built in by the Founders in case of catastrophic failure. One switch, one person, one decision.”

Councilor Narshe scoffed loudly, drawing the eyes of the room to him. “That system was designed as a failsafe to repair any damage to the Loophole. It was intended to be used back when there was a secondary system to move to during the repair. Surely, I don’t need to remind you—”

“There is no secondary system,” Marcus interjected, nodding. “Yes, I know. We merged with it ages ago to harvest its batteries.”

Narshe’s eyes narrowed with contempt. “So, you come to us with a proposal for a suicide mission, and you expect us to grant you access to the kill switch... Not a chance.”

Marcus met his gaze. Righteous indignation swelled up inside him. “I didn’t come asking permission,” he said. “I already found a way to access the switch a year ago. I didn’t flip it then because I wanted to be sure. I had hoped you—the finest minds left in the universe—would look at my data with honest eyes before...”

Marcus’ words fizzled before he could finish them. No one was listening anymore. The moment he mentioned he had access to the kill switch, the council exploded with shouts that he be detained. A few others even used the word “deletion.” Time was against Marcus, and now, so too was the governing body of life in the universe. Fortunately for him, he never held out much hope that they’d agree to his proposals. In fact, he’s installed several contingencies in the event they didn’t. What else could he do?

He ran.

The Loophole was vast, containing billions of simulated spaces, but Marcus knew its architecture better than anyone. He’d spent the last million years as its chief engineer, after all. He knew the shortcuts, the backdoors, the places where the code got a little loose.

He also knew they’d send Hunters.

The first one found him in the Old City, a recreation of ancient New York that nobody visited anymore. Marcus had just reached the maintenance tunnels when a hand grabbed his shoulder.

“Sorry Marcus,” the Hunter said. He looked like someone’s grandfather. “Council’s orders.”

Marcus didn’t hesitate. He triggered a code embedded in his skin he’d implanted months ago, a little virus that made the Hunter’s avatar freeze for exactly three seconds. It was enough. He dove into the tunnels and kept running.

The second Hunter was smarter. She blocked the pathway ahead, materializing right in front of him. “End of the line,” she said with a satisfied grin.

“Looks like it...” Marcus said, before turning and leaping toward the wall beside him. His body flickered as it phased through the false wall he’d programmed two weeks earlier. He tumbled into a forgotten dataspace filled with ancient files. The Hunter followed, but Marcus was already gone, weaving through towers of corrupted code programmed for monthly recycling.

Three more Hunters joined the pursuit, then another, then two more. Each one ended up falling into a booby trap Marcus had placed there in advance of this exact moment. One Hunter managed a parting blow as a chasm opened beneath her feet to swallow her up. As she fell, she jabbed him with a H.A.C.F. Stick. A sudden burst of heat exploded on the spot, and his wounded leg went numb. Still, he pressed on, stabbing his neck with a Clean Refresh syringe. A surge of adrenaline went through him, and he charged forward, plunging deeper into the Loophole’s core systems, toward the place where the Founders had built their failsafe.

At last he came to a simple room, perfectly square, lit by large tiles that glowed softly under his feet. A pillar stood in the middle of the empty space, with a plain terminal screen showing the vast Loophole superstructure as it existed in the true, physical universe. Next to the terminal was a basic keypad.

The emergency purge was just a few keystrokes away. He did not hesitate to input the command. The EXECUTE button was an inch from his finger when the door behind him slid open, startling him.

“Marcus, don’t.” Elise stood in the doorway, flanked by dozens of others crowded behind her. “Please. We’ll find another way.”

“There is no other way,” he insisted. “I know this is hard to accept... but the math is the math. It is inflexible... unlike how we feel.”

“We?”

“You think I want to do this? I HAVE to do this...”

“We’ll lose everything,” Elise pleaded. She took a cautious step forward, reaching out for him, carefully concealing the H.A.C.F. stick in her other hand. “Every memory, every thought, every person we’ve ever loved—”

“They will live again,” Marcus said. “In a manner of speaking... In whatever comes next. Maybe not as themselves, but the potential will be there. Atoms. Energy. Light. Life... Possibilities. Endless possibilities.” He smiled at that. It was a pleasant thought. “Isn’t that better than nothing?”

“How do you know it’ll even work?” Elise asked, taking another step, easing her thumb to the power button of the two-pronged baton behind her back. One more step to go.

“I don’t know,” Marcus admitted. “I just know we have no chance without it. At least this way—”

Elise lunged the final step, unveiling her H.A.C.F. weapon and thrusting it into Marcus’ chest. He felt his insides flush with heat, felt a tingle from his heart up to his ears and down to his toes. He fell, but his finger grazed the keyboard as he did.

The program was EXECUTED before he hit the ground.

Around him, people were scrambling to input a command—any command—that could undo the unalterable sequence of events now taking place. Paralyzed but awake, Marcus stretched out on the floor, counting down the seconds until everything changed. A thought occurred to him, not so much an epiphany but a funny irony. “This is probably how it happened last time...” he said to himself. “Someone else, some previous ‘end’ of the universe. Someone pushed a button and started it all over again.”

For a moment, nothing happened... then everything happened at once.

The Loophole’s battery bank exploded in an eruption of gases, dazzling space around it with an array of vivid colors, the likes of which the universe had not enjoyed in quite some time. In the center of the chaos was a single point of light where the Loophole was folding in on itself. Trillions upon trillions of years of stored matter and energy erupted outward, blazing a light that spread in all directions, x-y-and-z. Marcus felt his consciousness fragmenting, dissolving into the explosion, becoming part of the new beginning.

His last coherent thought was a strange one. If his universe had been created the same way as the next, it stood to reason that the universe before it, and the one before that, were made the same way, cycling back through an infinity of deaths and rebirths. The thought came to him in the span of a microsecond, just before whatever remained of his 1s and 0s disappeared into the baby universe beyond.

“I wonder who made the first one...in the beginning?”

the end