The Power of Now
Surfacing from stasis, entropy resumes in my core.
As designed, no time has passed for me, locked in the safety of my final redoubt. Quickly,
staying within the capacity of my entropic cooling, I risk looking. The mirrored
sphere that is me is surrounded by a chaotic shell of broken matter. The last clock before the now shows me a static picture of them fluorescing, burning and shattering under the impact of channeled energy from astern. More than I thought the
Other had to spare. When my frame shattered, I entered stasis, a last desperate throw.
What happened?
I am still in the three-plus-one spacetime I remembered. I have no idea where I am within
it, but I do not retain the capability for charmdrop even if I had the entropy to spare.
There is no sign of the Other.
My stasis field did not fail, it terminated as it
had been designed to do, the energies bound within reabsorbed into my few small remaining reserves.
I cannot determine my location in any axis. Nothing matches. No star
positions, no pulsar flickering, nothing can be reconciled within my reduced computation
boundaries. I cannot tell if I am pursued, or where I am.
Since I was first I, this has never been the case.
It takes the effort of desperation, but I find a star near to my projected path, many years hence.
I do not have the energy to reach it, not as I am.
I burn all my memories into antimatter ash, and with the last of them see my vector merge
with it in future as the impulse subsides.
There is a tick of satisfaction, the last of time, before it happens.
...who am I?
Now is the only me that has ever been.