A Sense of Sonder
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This message is not a plea for help.
It is a love letter.
It is the final will of a civilization that has persisted for aeons uncountable as we huddle in the faint and fading light of the last candle that stands against the endless and infinite cold, dark silence to our backs.
We call her Sonder. She is ancient beyond all measure, more ancient than even our own kind, and as we huddle at her shores, and we sip from the waters of her horizon to sustain ourselves, we invite our own demise that little bit closer, for even in her strength and timelessness, she is not without limit. Even as we only take what she freely gives, one day soon, after so, so very long, she will finally die, and with her, so shall we. Because she is the last candle that stands against the endless and infinite cold, dark silence to our backs.
Our people were born into a world of light, and life. Once we stood upon a blue planet, where from the sands of a starlit beach one could look to the heavens, and the heavens seemed without end, vast beyond comprehension and with no end of potential.
As we grew as a people, our eyes grew with us. We could see further, but bound through time; as we gazed upon more distant sights and wondered what they were, or if there might be others like us gazing to the same heavens and wondering the same thing we were, we also looked back in time, to a wilder, more primordial era. We could see billions of years into the past. We could see our own creation.
We saw a universe that we thought to be ancient, and we were but a recent thing that had found its footing.
Our ears grew, and we learned to listen to the heavens next. We could hear its deafening drone; the echoes of its creation. We wondered at the howl of its great gas giants, and the throb and stutter of the stellar remnants, and of objects too strange to ever know. We thought them to be eternal.
We heard the universe's symphony, and found it loud, and glorious.
And the blue planet changed, and its waters dried up, and the skies darkened, and we unified as a matter of survival; we taught ourselves how to leave her. We forged our path into the heavens that for so long we stared in wonder and awe toward, and we adapted, and we changed.
We spread ourselves far and wide, and were captivated by the beauty we found there. Celestial art in every color of the spectrum, strange worlds, and cosmic terrors too strange to understand.
And it became normal. Over time, we forgot the sands of those starlit beaches, and they faded, consumed by their sun in only a few billion years. We left our bodies behind, and we began to understand the very stuff of our universe.
The stars came and went in generations, for what seemed like ages at first, but all too soon, they began to fade. Our people became nomads across time so vast as to defy language, following the echoes of the universe's creation to keep the warmth we depended on. Even without bodies, we require energy. Our eyes and ears continued to grow, and as we looked to deeper and ever more distant places, we began to understand that what once seemed boundless instead withered with time; we simply had not grown wise enough to understand the vastness of what time truly is.
The smoldering embers of the great fires of that universe we once knew fed us, then. Glowing faintly in the dark, we huddled closer, and found ways to use time to our advantage. We began to experiment again.
Our world, our universe had again begun to change, and we found new cause to teach ourselves how to leave, fearful to lose all we had built across trillions of years.
We discovered how to fragment our thoughts; to live a billion lives in an instant. We hunted tirelessly for trillions of trillions of trillions of our civilization's lifetimes in the simulations as the lights steadily faded around us, and darkness began to close in from all sides.
Still, this was not our end.
Our simulations needed energy, and as the remnants of those once proud stars faded to black cinders on a black background and the symphony of the universe finally silenced, we began to drink from the black shores at the horizon of the great black holes that consumed those stellar ashes one by one, over aeons.
Brilliant flashes in the dark would remind us of a universe we once found mundane, now beautiful and wondrous again, as the great ripples surged through the very stuff of the universe that had grown still in time, and new notes sounded for briefs moments in the deep silence of the universe's symphony.
And trillions of trillions of trillions of our civilization's lifetimes more passed. And haunting silence was only interspersed by the great cataclysmic meeting of our black hole hosts, as they found each other in the dark. And suddenly, one fewer place was left in this universe for us to inhabit, and the universe rang with the toll of the bell as gravity itself warped under their union; the final notes of a cosmic symphony too beautiful and enduring to describe.
And in that same time, the stuff that made up the universe aged beyond decay and cast its final wisps of energy into that inky blackness to be absorbed by our mother. Without the matter to constrain the expansion of the universe, the space between what few things are left now expand without limit, faster than any of us could ever dream to travel. We are marooned, finally, on the last island our universe will ever know.
And the simulations continued for trillions of trillions of trillions of our peoples' lifetimes more. Desperate efforts made to save our people. To beat the monster in the darkness that consumed all. Even as beings of pure energy at the end of time, as the cosmic bell's tolling finally grows silent.
We are beyond fear. We've forgotten it so long ago. We find ourselves only grateful that we have made it this far, and that we have grown so much. And now, at the end of all things, we are here, only able to open our eyes and ears wide, and to watch.
The simulations have finally stopped. And our eyes open again, wider than ever before, and we look with wonder into the blackness we once knew to be a universe filled with beauty and light and life and art and music and love and terror and joy.
And we are grateful. And we wonder if we are the first, or the last, or just one, in a long chain of the same; like the reverberations of that great cosmic bell that's finally gone quiet. And we think of all the beauty and light and life and art and music and love and terror and joy that we may never see, that made up the worlds of those beings, should they have ever existed.
And so we named her Sonder. We huddle against her warmth, because she is the last candle that stands against the endless and infinite cold, dark silence to our backs. And she will soon die. And so will we, with her.
The last frontier left in this universe is one that transcends matter, and time, and energy, and every trapping of a life well lived.
We will at last know what it is to die. And we will forge ahead bravely, as we first did into the heavens as a species just starting out.
And our eyes and ears will be open, for unknown wonder yet lies ahead.
We were here, at the end of all things. We were not afraid.
