I watched the humans who had come with me from Earth evolve, as I did, or eventually fade away—die in the last way left to immortals, to forget one’s self and be forgotten by others. The rest of us lived, and merged.

The journey lasted, from our point of view, centuries. You know that time is a variable thing, far less important than our youth and weakness once made us think; flexible, but ever-present, warped and twisted into some barely recognizable form or another.

I lived many different times: the time of the city traveling down the Way at relativistic velocities, my time on the highspeed level of city memory, the time spent communicating directly with my fellow travelers, as I do now with you. Time bunched and coiled like a spring. If all my time were stretched out in a straight line, I might have lived ten thousand years, by your scale…

We had long since passed beyond the point in the Way where the last moments of this universe might have been accessed. Had we opened a gate there, something not possible to us, we might have witnessed the death of all we had ever known, all that was—however remotely—connected with us…And still we fled. I had defected from my own universe.

Strangely, that moment was not particularly momentous. We had already closed in upon ourselves in an extraordinary way, like a pupating insect. We had isolated ourselves from our surroundings, even as we continued to study them.

The Way opened into an immense, twisted tunnel. Our passage down this tunnel no longer followed any rational geodesic. There was no longer a flaw, a singularity, in the middle; the city could not draw its power from the flaw generators, so it sucked power from the very thin atmosphere of particles and stray atoms within the Way. And because of this, we slowed…rapidly. Within ten years of our own basic time, the city traveled at less than relativistic velocities.

The Way grew broader around us. We studied this increase, and foresaw what awaited us…A vast blister of space-time, capping but not ending the Way, finite but unbounded…

We had entered the egg of a new universe. We could not survive as material beings within this egg. We would have been dissolved by the nascent plasma of potential mass and energy as salt vanishes in water. But we learned how to cope with such an eventuality.

The entire city, all of its citizens, worked to transform itself. We expected at any moment to simply die, cease to exist, for we were children facing a raging furnace. But there was another possibility, very remote…

The possibility that we could adapt to the furnace-egg, live in it, and finally shape it to expand into a mature universe. It would sever its connection with the Way, drift free in superspace, and within the furnace-egg, our transformed selves would expand butterly wings, reborn.