I read this on another list and really liked it. So I poked around
"til I found the author and got permission to re-post it.
I hope you like it!!
xponent
And The Curtain Rises Maru
rob
THE MASQUE OF THE HEAT DEATH
by David Krieger
On the last night of the world, the gods decreed for themselves a
revel, a final masquerade in which they took on their long-discarded
human forms and spent themselves in orgiastic and drunken festivity.
It was a wake for spacetime itself.
The numbers of the gods had dwindled through the long middle age of
the
Universe. Each was a vast and unique information structure, grown from
a merely human seed. Augmented and elaborated first in magnitude and
then in kind, each became a god, a single mind as complex as a
civilization or an entire ecosystem, with instrumentality capable of
manipulating individual molecules or entire galaxies. A wave of
transformation had spread out from the birth-world of the gods, a
phase-change that swept through all space-time and transformed it to
the liking of the gods. Their capabilities were bounded only by the
limits of what was possible.
Yet those limits proved confining enough. The gods had known, while
still seeds in the womb of Earth, that the very matter they were
composed of was not immortal. They conjectured, and later
demonstrated,
that the protons constituting baryonic matter were unstable, and would
decay over the course of the protracted lifetimes of the gods. As time
progressed, the gods knew, their very substance would grow more and
more radioactive and less reliable. Information, the real essence of
the gods, would be lost. In the end, the gods themselves would die.
This, they could not bear.
They consumed whole galaxies seeking the underlying mechanisms of
their
doom, and finding them, found they could change nothing. Physics had
graven its laws in the substrate of spacetime itself. The instability
that accumulated in the proton came from a source the gods could
neither locate nor dam. Baryonic matter was provably doomed.
The gods contrived a reprieve. One who styled himself Perdurabo
discovered a way to spread the instability among all of the remaining
baryons as it accumulated. Linked by a hyperspatial network of
equipotential conduits, all of the baryons of existence would age
together, in lockstep... none could grow any more unstable than any
other. When they decayed, they would all decay at once...
spectacularly.
The gods had traded slow dissolution for a final cataclysm. Their
Universe would live fast and die young. The Stabilization cost the
gods
much -- enacting it consumed fully half of their remaining baryons --
but it bought them time to work on the problem of encoding
consciousness in non-baryonic matter. Leptons -- electrons and
mesons -- were immune to the accumulation of instability that doomed
the protons and neutrons. If the gods could find out how to build new
minds from these unwieldy members, they could perhaps survive the
final
blast.
The problem was the liquidity of leptonic matter. Even as the Universe
cooled to near absolute zero, the particles from which the gods hoped
to build their new selves remained intractably fluid and evanescent,
refusing to form well-behaved machinery of any kind. The gods worked
on
this problem for a period of time longer than their entire previous
existence. The gods had already long traced the perimeter of
possibility; all physical law was known to them. Within that perimeter
was the rich fractal space of all physically possible phenomena, so
vast and complex that it was impossible for them to know a priori
whether or not there was a solution to their problem within it. The
gods continued to experiment, and explore, and worry, while around
them
the stored energy of the stars and galaxies burned low and the hidden
pressure of apocalypse mounted higher inside every proton.
When only a sliver of the lifetime of the baryonic universe remained
to
it, the god known to his fellows as Excelsius published what he
claimed
was a proof that leptonic minds were impossible. There was
disagreement
from several quarters, but most of the gods were convinced. It came as
a relief to some; it triggered madness in others. Religion was
rediscovered, as the gods were faced for the first time in an eternity
with the prospect of death being imposed upon them, arbitrarily and
without exception, by the Universe.
The idea spread among the gods that the end of eternity called for a
fête, a spectacular wake to end all wakes, a funeral for existence
itself. As the true diehards continued to explore increasingly
desperate lines of research, the remaining gods -- only a few million
had survived the Stabilization -- gathered in a single galaxy, a
single
solar system, for their revel.
The nominal host of the extravaganza was Perdurabo, author of the
Stabilization. The solar system chosen was in fact the site of the
instrument of the Stabilization itself. Each of the gods created a
human for
