Molten rock, quivering droplets of it, showered up past us, patterning against my skin. I closed my mechanical eyes and huddled with Eve, waiting for the rocky storm to pass.

Eve -- the Planck Zero AI -- wasn't destroyed. It proved possible to reconstruct some of it from the records and fragmented datastores left behind.

It was still sentient, but it was crippled. Its residual abilities were not much more than a human's.

I took it -- her -- home.

Now, we spend most of our time in a simulation of our old apartment, in a Virtual never-never-land.

I've tried to figure out why she did what she did.

Already mad with the desolating quantum loneliness of her birth, she'd been brought out of her black hole prison, and was presented with all the Ghosts' data on the future.

And, desperately intelligent, she suffered a vision of that future.

It was a vision of the destruction of all baryonic life, the desolate victory of the photino creatures: it was a rigid, logical and inescapable product of her own infinite intellect. It was a vision she couldn't bear.

So -- perhaps -- she subverted the Ghosts' hubristic experiments -- which do, incidentally, seem to have been genuinely aimed at a peaceful rapprochement with the photino birds. She allowed the Ghosts to make a dark matter bomb. Perhaps she was trying to open up a war with the photino birds, a new front, with a weapon that even the Xeelee had never considered.

Or perhaps she sought, simply, her own destruction. Release, from the terrible burden of infinite knowledge.

Even she doesn't know any longer.

As for myself, I can never know if Eve's bleak vision -- given to me in those startling, fragmented glimpses -- represents the true future history of our Universe. Perhaps it was just some mad fiction, concocted by her huge but damaged soul. Or perhaps it is only one strand of the truth; perhaps that gloomy future can, in the end, be averted.

Otherwise, in just a few million years, all humankind will be extinct in this Universe. And all our technology and intelligence and courage won't make a damn bit of difference in averting that fate.

If that's true, it's up to us to live as if it were not so.

I care for Eve, as best I can. We go on. What else is there for us to do?

The Xeelee Sequence-Timeline

The Xeelee Sequence-Timeline

Singularity: Big Bang

Era: Primeval

20 bya (billion years ago): Life forms in quagma broth. First contact between Xeelee and photino birds. Xeelee timeships begin modification of Xeelee evolutionary history.

10 bya: Construction of Ring begins. Birth of Sol.

5 bya: Assault on Ring by photino birds begins. Life on Earth emerges.

1 bya: First infestation of Sol by photino birds.

Era: Expansion

A.D. 3000 +: Opening up of Solar System with GUT and wormhole technology. First human extra-Solar expansion begins.

A.D. 3621: Birth of Michael Poole.

A.D. 3672: "The Sun-people"