And something else happened to the Hypothetical ecology as it sheltered in the galaxy’s still-beating heart: its information-processing mechanisms were co-opted and dominated by sentient species seeking to outlive their organic mortality. These rogue virtualities grew, encountered one another, and in some cases merged. (The human species was the source of one such sentient bloom, though its virtual descendents could hardly be called “human” in the classic sense.) Pools of post-mortal sentience began to cooperate in a collective decision-making process—a kind of cortical democracy, on a scale of light-years. The dying galaxy began to generate unitary thought.

None of these thoughts could be rendered in conventional language, though my larger self understood them, at least approximately.

I took a last walk in my robotic body through the ruins of Vox Core, its towers fractured and askew, its vast tiers dark or tremblingly half-lit. Vox had sailed the seas of several worlds, and was sailing now on the largest sea of all, but soon I would have to abandon it. I had already begun relocating my memories and identity to the cloud of Hypothetical nanodevices, which was linked in turn to the remaining Hypothetical networks, all powered by the dynamos of ancient singularities.

And even that last redoubt of order and meaning was doomed. Soon enough, the same phantom energy that had inflated the universe would unravel matter itself, leaving nothing but a dust of unbound subatomic particles. Then, I thought, the darkness would be absolute. And I could sleep.

But for now, Vox Core sailed on. Vacuum invaded its faltering defenses. Empty, it succumbed to emptiness. In the absence of induced gravity, its contents began to spill through breached walls into space.

Beyond it, outside of it, my somatic boundaries expanded disconcertingly.

*   *   *

The Hypothetical network grew denser and more complex as its virtual polities applied immense calculating power to the problem of survival. Gravitational anomalies suggested the existence of megastructures larger than the event horizon of the universe itself—shallow gradients of ghostly energy that might serve as a medium to carry organized intelligence out of the entropic desert. But how, and at what cost?

I didn’t participate in these debates. My own consciousness, though now totally incorporeal, was too limited to fully comprehend them. In any case the arguments could never have been rendered in words—the preamble to a single thought would have required thousands of volumes, a legion of interpreters, a vocabulary that had never existed.

The three-dimensional macrostructure of the universe began its ultimate collapse. Collapsing, it revealed new horizons. Hidden dimensions of space-time unfurled as new particles and forces crystallized from quantum foam. The ultimate darkness I had hoped for never arrived. The entity that had been the Hypothetical network—to which I was inextricably bound—expanded suddenly and exponentially.

But I can’t describe the realm we entered. We were forced to invent new senses to perceive it, new modes of thought to comprehend it.