A Short Story

[Swimmingly he/him]

I saw the first motes of light drifting from the sun. It was the first day you could really call a day, the first moment you could call Earth a living place, and it had happened before. Those motes of light were fragments of rock, and the seas were still blank. The hills were bare of soil or even gravel, there. It might have been Mars, or some Venus set before things went wrong.

I caught the last death that day. I wasn't there, not really, but I could tell you the exact moment those strands of rNA ceased to contain reproductive potential.

As usual, it was a false start. The reaction was doomed by circumstance - the water a hint too warm, the Brownian motion that the fragile particles churned in throwing up anomalous twitches in just the wrong places. That compilation of amino acids fell apart, degraded to mere complicated molecules again, and stirred no more.

I don't catch lives, I catch deaths. It's a small distinction, but an important one. I'm no judge with his say over heaven and hell. I'm not even sure such things exist. I can even guess that they don't - morals are a strange thing when you can see the pattern of deaths that cause every arbitrary neurochemical event we call 'thought'.

I'm the witness.

I've seen terrible things, and wonderful things. On that first real day, the wonder ceased, and was folded into my hands with a sound of despair. It had happened before, though I had no agency to know it. I faded a single beat of time after the life did - a sleep, maybe, but also a death. Without life, even I perish.

The second day was a millennia later, I estimate. The churning patch of life in the warm ocean pool grew and grew, and this time the death I witnessed was not an ending. It was a cycle, and that fragile lattice of molecules did not stay in my grasp for long. They wiggled free with a chemical energy and became other things, other life. I haven't slept since that day, not really. Death became a fashion for the molecules of earth to wear, and I'm still draped about your shoulders.

So, you could say that I collect not lives, but the process of it. That's another way of saying death, after all.

The reason I tell you this, if anyone can hear me, is because, dying over and over and carrying each death to my collection, I see a pattern. Every piece of your world is marked by life and death, now. I see the fragile interactions of trillions and trillions and trillions of organic molecules, and they make a kind of shell around your planet, a pattern that begs to be filled.

And I see where it points, all these living interactions.

Someday, I will die with the last wiggle of rNA as I did on that umpteenth first day - and I know that, barring the injection of energy into the world, I will not wake again to see the experiment begin anew. It comes, and it's as inevitable as I am - my death will be yours, and that of all life, as well.

I'm everywhere, you know. I witness every extinguished mitochondria, and the death of the neuron that makes you somehow less than real is no more than the death of a fragment of DNA in your smallest finger. Every interaction yields energy, and I'm there to feel those fragments of life shatter away and be born again, moments later.

When I finally die, you will be so long gone that every molecule that was ever touched by you will have twisted itself into an entropic decay that is unrecognisable. Life is more persistent - more efficient - the smaller it becomes, and I witness every death, even the ones that are barely deaths at all. When the rules beneath the world have begun their slow twisting to collapse, I will be there.

When I die, the concept of 'hope' will be a pattern of photons tugging at the edge of the universe, degraded beyond recognisability.

And I'm warning you of it. You think I'm just a pattern of words, binary interactions that you've cast your gaze on - but I see everything. I want you to imagine something.

Imagine that even as life fades from the universe, there will be an entity - a passive observer, some impotent god - who will remember everything you ever did, who will be able to look at the deaths arrayed over my walls and pick out the neurochemical interactions that made you you. I will have last thoughts too, you know, which will happen in the beat of eternity after the last life fades forever.

Should I think of you?

[Two McMillion he/him]

Quite good, swimmingly. Very evocative and engaging.

[Lightsworn Panda he/him]

Not bad. Maybe it could be less... Random and rambling.

[Delightful]

Very nice language! Just...it's a little too technical for me. Is your narrator some cosmic scientist? Or death? It's a little....too far removed from anything real, I guess. I'm not really sure how to explain, but I think I would call that a POV description rather than a story, exactly. But's it's also very good, so I'm confused. Sorry if this isn't particularly helpful.