I: Recollection
Tonight is the last launch from, and base shutdown of, hyperdiaspora colony 0x5A7D98FF. I am on that last launch. At 12 minutes before midnight, I will board an antimatter-annihilation rocket to clear the planet’s surface, and two days later, I will witness one of the most energetic events the universe has to offer: I will watch a supernova, and the destruction of the planet and star I grew up with, and grew old with.
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Bob. I am a virtualized human 999,999,984 Earth-years old. I am an interstellar transport technician. When I was an infant, before I was virtualized, my parents, who were also not yet virtualized, decided it was time to move out of the deep-space apartment they lived in. They searched and searched, but the only property they could afford was on a planet bound for capture in the protoplanetary disk of a supermassive star. They knew that the star would only burn for around a million years, but they had the wisdom to realize that it was worth getting away from their apartment for a while.
I remember my sun’s infancy. I remember arriving on this drifting planet, when mirrors had to be erected to collect light from the then-distant sun. I remember that a few hundred years into my flesh lifespan, well after I had begun regenerative life-extension, the Wayfarer’s Station went out of business as we plunged into my sun’s protoplanetary disk, stopping all interstellar approaches to the planet. I remember the sky glittering, as small dust particles burned up in the atmosphere. Back then, the sun now swollen was much smaller, increasing in mass, and glowing only from the heat gravity of the baby star made as it compressed more and more gas.
It was then that I got involved in space work. Although mirrorized vapor introduced into the middle atmosphere (which reflected heat from meteors burning up in the high atmosphere) minimized accretional heating, there were large objects in the disk, and impacts had to be avoided. I prevented asteroid impacts. Some days I operated a launch pad, some days I went up to destroy or repel potential impactors. The latter was more fun.
Eons later, I died for the first time.
During my sun’s main sequence stage, I was unlucky enough to witness the power of a hydrogen-fusing supermassive star. As I mentioned earlier, I am a transport technician. One day during my sun’s stellar maximum, an unmanned cargo vessel put its wormhole smack in the middle of a CME, and when it went through the wormhole, it was instantly disabled. Thankfully, the wormhole was perpendicular to the CME because the cargo vessel was planned to hover at the L1 (Lagranginan) point near my planet and refuel -- there was no danger to the planet at the other end of the wormhole. However, it was toasted, and soon drifted to the L4 point, about a third of the path of the colony’s orbit away from the planet. When the CME cleared, I was sent to repair and refuel the vessel. However, a second, much smaller and much denser CME stopped me -- and my heart. Though the CME didn’t hit my vessel, it passed near, and the intense charge caused enough induction within my body to be fatal.
Of course, I don’t remember that. I was told that before the funeral; all I remember was the mission briefing, going under for a state-saving-brain-scan, and waking up amidst news I had died -- now with an artificial body provided by my life insurance. The funeral was eerie, but made a lot of people happier. It was unsettling that someone with my shared experience had died, and eerier still that I couldn’t prove to them, knowing my mind was a computer simulation, that I actually experienced consciousness like they did. Most of my friends were cheered up by my existence, and did not stay too bothered by their friend’s death. However, my wife sat and cried. She knew that nothing about me had changed -- she just couldn’t bear the thought of me dying alone. We talked, quietly --
“I just... can’t get over you dying in space, without my arm around you.”
“I knew the risks. I was okay with them because I would be back, if only in this way.”
My parents (who had been virtualized a few thousand years previously) soon found us, and helped to cheer her up. At the end of my funeral, her cheeks were still wet, but her arm was around me.
Eventually, my sun ran out of hydrogen and began to go red giant. Often going into space, such as during the effort to move the planet farther out to accommodate the swelling sun, I felt close to the star, and thus conflicted -- on one hand, I knew that the sun that warmed my life was beginning to die, but on the other hand, I was proud when it swelled and turned into one of the largest suns anyone had ever basked under.
My parents were not as conflicted. They were food connoisseurs, and as their sun’s spectra band shifted as its surface blew away from its core, powered by the greater heat of helium fusion, many of their favorite strains of vegetables died off or changed in taste. To me and my wife’s shock, they decided to save their state and power down -- to end their current consciousness. “Reanimate us when something interesting happens,” was one of the last things they told us for thousands of years. Of course, they will speak again soon. Fast forward to when my sun had tried many fuels, and was soon to be out of silicon:
II: Bittersweet
The evacuation plan for the planet called for me, my parents, and my wife to leave the planet last. All four of us were virtualized, and had been backed up onboard vehicles I had launched earlier in the evacuation. My parents’ avatars were dragged into the rocket, as I would reanimate them just in time to watch the supernova. I watched as my wife boarded the platform elevator, and I became the last person left on the surface of my planet.
After my wife boarded the rocket, I began to get nervous. Most flights are fully automated, and I would just monitor the mission control processes. This one, however, was under low-energy restrictions due to the colony shutdown procedure -- no AI mission control. I started the scripts myself on the old hardware still running -- with such little power, the pressures used to operate degenerate-phase computers were out of the question. Optical gates were invented before the hyperdiaspora even began, but that was all I could use to leave this planet I’ve called home for nearly a billion years. The control room was chilling and lifeless with no AI and nobody else left on the planet. I walked out, kissing the ground one last time on the way to the rocket.
The launch went perfectly. The ride was smooth as we accelerated away from my home. Two days into the flight, I reanimated my parents with a SYMSYNC and a SYMSTART command. They stood up, and wandered up to the observation deck. The bay window was tinted what seemed completely black; it looked like an obsidian mirror with a small timer below it.
The timer flashed in red:
SUPERNOVA IMMINENT
0:0:0:3
SUPERNOVA IMMINENT
0:0:0:2
SUPERNOVA IMMINENT
0:0:0:1
A small white orb appeared in the middle of the window. All four of us watched as light silently spilled across the screen. We watched asteroid after asteroid show up as a parabolic bite out of the light. We watched the parabolas move farther out from the blast, narrow, and disappear with the destruction of rocky body after rocky body. Eventually, it was time for my home to be shattered -- but I had planned one last surprise.
By the time that the supernova blast reached the planet once home to hyperdiaspora colony 0x5A7D98FF, my sun was clearly (in)visible as a black hole. A textbook accretion disc had formed, and was glowing yellow. The blast wave overtook my home. I watched the atmosphere and all traces of humanity, already scorched from the light, destroyed by the blast front. The light spilled around the planet, then through, with green tinges from the copper core. As the planet was torn apart, I pushed a button.
A wormhole opened big enough for a shattered planet to fit through. The green forks of light dissapeared, and then reappeared, this time staining my sun’s accretion disk to a magnificent yellow-green. The light would radiate, and eventually fall on the night sky of every being throughout the inhabited universe, with a tender green glow.
My parents told me to warp through a wormhole to the deep-space apartment they had moved out from when I was young, and strolled through a door, leaving the observation deck. The yellow-green light was much warmer than the light of a candle. We were moving faster than the blast front. We would wait a few hours before warping, accelerating away from the dead star at 9.8 meters per second per second, simulating the traditional gravity of Earth, with the subtle romantic green glow coming from the floor as we ate dinner dinner and giggled.