The Schisma

Entropy

My transformation began in innumerable ways and in innumerable worlds before ultimately converging into one, so for this writing I will use an example from a universe that belongs to the set of universes of which you belong to so that you may better understand.

As your scientists have successfully identified, your universe is afflicted by a net-positive entropy that will result in complete stillness and dissolution of matter and energy in some googol amount of years. The randomness, so-called, of the quantum substrate in a timeless vacuum guarantees the endless generation of universes. These universes may begin and end in any number of ways in any number of combinations. Many are small; they pop into existence as a tiny whirl of information and then fizzle out immediately. Others are much more involved, with a critical level of mass and expansionary force whereby pockets of anti-entropic activity form, creating structures, sometimes in the form of particles, atoms, stars and planets. Within these types of universes very complex systems generally arise including, importantly, intelligence. Intelligence can be thought of roughly as a system wherein a reflexive language that imitates its surroundings occurs; patterns of matter and interactions within the universe are converted into simpler analogies that take on structural symbolic form that make relations to itself internally. You are an intelligent being of course, of the lowest and most basic order, but one just the same as I am.

The universe you occupy began with a just such a critically-large generation and, naturally, you are found within it. The expansionary force there is not large enough to indefinitely support anti-entropy, and so your universe will come to a full and finite dimensional end. Beyond this, the exact nature to your universe's ending is uncertain, of course, as each possible change from moment to moment will splinter into its own world, each one on a seperate path that will result in somewhat substantially numerically different destinations. I will use a specific subset of future states for your universe as the example of my transformation although the particulars matter little.

At some point in the future of this universe pockets of intelligent life will have expanded into the threshold of other pockets of life and converge. Most will extinct in isolation, never having left their home solar system, others will be exterminated in the period of intersystem conflict. Life is resilient however and by the end of this period, a total assimilation will have occured. The distinction between organic and artificial intelligence and physiology will have been abandoned. The cooling period will ultimately bring about a reduction in mass and diversity of life as fewer and fewer modes of survival become available. There will be no more planets or accessible material anywhere. Conscious life simulation will continue on into space until radiation destroys each of these vessels for each that doesn't first deplete in energy.In the deep future, as the stars begin to extinguish, all that will exist of life will be a fleet of creatures that traverse space 'nakedly', as the components of space travel and the components of intelligence will be merged into a compact body. These beings will be small housings for nearly-dormant brains, an acute organ for detecting the strength and direction of solar radiation, a solar sail for accumulating high velocity through interstellar travel, and an organ that absorbs energy and converts it into balls of material which can be positioned and jettisoned for control of trajectory at and between stars.

My origin was here. I was the last starleech and I danced with the last star in the universe.