The Edge of Everything

When the stars began to dim, no one noticed. Not at first.

A few astronomers whispered of anomalies—of fading starlight and flickering quasars—but Earth kept spinning. The wars raged. The markets climbed and fell. The oceans swallowed cities. People moved on, oblivious to the quiet, cosmic dying above them.

By the time the last supernova blinked out like a burnt match, it was too late to ask why. The universe had grown still, like a breath held too long.

That was when the Ark was built.

A vessel not of escape, but of understanding—meant to carry one soul to the edge of everything, where time unraveled and answers might still live in the lightless dark. Its destination: the outermost perimeter of the universe, beyond the veil of silence, where even gravity whispered.

And I was the one chosen to pilot it.

Not because I was the best.

Because I was the last.

I remember the launch. Earth was a memory already, soaked in grey light. I watched it shrink on the monitors, saw continents blur into cloud and silence. Then came Mars. Then the outer moons. Then nothing but stars—and even those were dying.

The journey stretched longer than any mind could hold. I aged, but barely. The Ark kept me suspended in slow time, waking me once every decade to check systems, speak logs, stretch limbs. There was no return mission. No crew. Just me, and the slow ache of infinity.

At some point, I stopped marking the years. Time lost form. Only silence remained.

And then, one cycle—when the Ark woke me again—there were no stars at all.

Just darkness. Real, heavy darkness.

I was at the edge.

There were no coordinates for this place. The Ark called it Boundary Point Zero, the mathematical limit of spacetime. Here, light had never passed. Here, entropy reigned like a sleeping god.

I stared into the abyss.

And the abyss... blinked.

I wish I meant that metaphorically. But no—something was there. A shimmer in the dark. Not light, but movement. Like a curtain of oil pulling back, revealing a deeper black.

It wasn’t a planet. It wasn’t a black hole.

It was a door.

And it opened.

“Do not fear,” said a voice—not heard, but felt, like thunder through water. “You are the first. You are the last.”

“Where am I?” I whispered.

“At the edge of everything.”

“Is this… death?”

“No,” said the voice. “This is choice.”

Inside the door, I saw flashes—not images, but entire lifetimes. Millions of them. A garden tended by hands I once held. A world without war. A life where I never boarded the Ark. A universe that never died.

“They are all real,” the voice said. “Or could be.”

“Why show me this?”

“Because you are the end. But you could be the beginning.”

I stood at the precipice of something vast and impossible. My mind fractured under the weight of infinite paths, infinite truths.

“What do I do?” I asked.

“Step forward. And choose.”

I looked back. The Ark floated behind me, a relic in the dark. My old life. My old self.

I looked ahead. The door pulsed like a heartbeat. Warm. Terrifying.

I thought of Earth—dead now, or dying. I thought of the ones I’d left behind, though centuries had passed. I thought of the stars, once so sure.

Then I stepped forward.

And the universe exhaled.

Colors poured in where there had been none. Not just colors—but senses I had no names for. Realities unfolded like flowers. I became light. I became sound. I became memory and future and something else entirely.

Time turned inside out.

And I saw her.

Standing in a garden beneath a violet sky, she smiled—the woman I had loved once, long ago, in the world before the Ark.

“How long has it been?” I asked, tears I no longer had forming anyway.

“No time at all,” she said.

I looked up. Stars burned bright overhead.

And somewhere far away, a man boarded a ship called the Ark.

But not me.

Not anymore.