Sometimes I think that all God did to create our universe was to burp it out, then let it inflate like a balloon.

In that first fraction of a second, the compressed matter of His Burp sprayed out its offspring in waves. First came a crowd of misbehaving neutrinos, followed by a flood of photons.

The universal balloon became transparent. As it swelled, the thick quark soup cooled enough to settle into atoms and stars.

But along with His Divine Burp, God ejected laws, which He stuck like price tags onto our slowly expanding cloud... laws which included a meddlesome pair of cousins, Enthalpy and Entropy.

The cousins’ fingerprints are on everything: on the atoms being forged in the hearts of stars, on black holes, on galaxies, on dust clouds, even on planets–including the planet that birthed, and bid farewell to, our species.

Cousin Enthalpy’s always on her best behavior, but bursting with energy. She gives what she gets. A joule for a joule. I imagine her as vast and golden, her face perfectly symmetrical.

Cousin Entropy is another story, though. She is a wastrel who skims a little off of every energy exchange, a bit like the percentage that banks once levied on every transaction. And what does she give in return? Nothing but chaos.

Cousin Entropy’s effect on the universe is like the effect of a little kid on a nice, tidy room: you come back to find all your stuff dumped on the floor.

But when I picture Cousin Entropy, I don’t see a little kid. I see a great, greedy mouth with blood-red lips–not that I’ve had lips, as such, for the past twenty billion years–sucking the energy out of the universe with a straw. Just a mouth: no teeth, no tongue, and especially no eyes.

Because, if she had eyes, Cousin Entropy would see the dead end that she’s dragging us all toward.

Oh, how I hate her.

Of course, Cousin Entropy isn’t inherently bad. She’s just a perfectionist. She wants everything to be perfectly equal, uniform, and desolate.

Desolate and cold.

I blame Cousin Entropy for the mess I’m in.

And she’s also to blame for the mess the over-inflated Universe is in.

Thanks to Cousin Enthalpy, the Universe’s been cooling as it expands. But, no thanks to Cousin Entropy, it’s also been falling into degeneracy, blurring the lines between types of particles. Greedy Cousin Entropy siphons heat from the nuclei of heavy atoms that don’t have enough energy left to get cracking (in any sense of the term).

She’s the one pushing the Universe’s temperature down, down, down toward the point of no return, where all that’s left will be nuclei drifting in disorganized isolation, sluggish electrons clinging to them like an icy mantle in the absolute-zero vacuum.

It’ll be a neat and tidy vacuum, utterly free of radiation. Not a single stray ray.

It’ll be lifeless.

There are no bright stars within sight, now. Oh, there are plenty of red dwarfs, those ubiquitous nobodies crowding our fading galaxy, but their glow’s as dim as a failing flashlight.

And even those dim lights are going out. The nearest ones are spinning into a final, fatal dance that will land them in the vast black hole beneath my feet.

Not that I have feet to speak of. But that doesn’t stop me from joining the dance.

Okay, so I’m staying a prudent distance from the supermassive black hole (don’t mess with power, as the historian said). Just shy of the event horizon.

Here’s the thing about dancing this close to the event horizon, though: like it or not, the rest of the universe speeds up around me. The closer I get, the faster the dying stars dance.

One of my buddies decided to take matters into his own hands, to end himself before Cousin Entropy ends us all for good.

He slipped over the event horizon and let himself fall into the black heart of the galaxy, gaze turned outward.

He had time to tell us how beautiful it was to see the remaining stars darting like moths, flitting and spinning faster and faster...

I don’t know if he’ll still be watching when the last stars go out.

But if I adjust my scopes and aim a precision laser just right, its light falls on his round body, which, for me, is endlessly falling.

And he isn’t alone.

There are so many celestial and post-human bodies piled up at the event horizon that they form a shining vortex of memories.

I said “he.” I could’ve said “she,” or “ze.” Gender doesn’t mean much to the UnAttached.

I’ve been around for about twenty billion years–an obsolete unit, given that the ancient Sun long ago met its dramatic end, taking several inner planets with it. Even what remained, an insignificant little dwarf, has long since cooled into a dark, mute ball.

Eternity has lost its meaning, now that the center of our once-vibrant Galaxy is nothing more than an ocean of dead dust, slowly swirling into an invisible singularity.

For now, the remaining friction between bits of dust still gives off a little light, a trickle of heat, which I soak in with all my pores.

My body’s well-constructed.

Too well.

As the eons passed, we UnAttached added everything to our bodies that we could possibly need, in order to survive anything.

Even the nothingness.

Few of us still remember the distant era when our species lived on the surface of a single rocky planet... except through HearSay.

After the first humans tamed fire, they sheltered in boxes made of wood and dirt.

When they tamed Cousin Enthalpy, they harnessed her and channeled some of her energy into lifting off into space, Detaching themselves from planet-bound life.

They sealed themselves in metal boxes at first, out of habit. Pressurized, shielded tin cans, to protect their bodies from the steady rain of live, energy-rich particles that danced through the universe at the time.

Gradually, medicine and micro-robotics came together to change those soft, weak Attached bodies into bodies that could live outside the boxes.

That first generation of UnAttached was glorious!

They still had arms, legs, even genitals, all proving their attachment to the primal human form.

They gave themselves radiation-shielded torsos and skulls. They spun their hair of magnetic wire that waved and curled in the vacuum, tracing out its own sign language.

They gave themselves eyes that could see the whole electromagnetic spectrum, which spawned a rash of exciting discoveries.

And they gave themselves wings, vast nets that unfolded from their backs to catch the same flux of energetic particles that had so threatened their soft, Attached bodies. Cosmic rays turned from threat–to dinner!

That first generation still needed boxes for in vitro gestation and birth, but they were nearly there.

Their first UnAttached newborns were turfed out of their boxes straight into orbit, like baby birds being pushed out of the nest. They stretched their rumpled little wings and flew straight into the waiting arms of their parents.

And their freshly-minted UnAttached minds came with added storage: memory banks filled with HearSay. Even back then, HearSay’s store of accumulated human knowledge was a deep well that we UnAttached could sip from at will.

These fresh UnAttached had also been grafted with new organs that let them communicate without vocal cords. And their advanced polymeric skin tingled with new sensations.

Meanwhile, the Attached stayed firmly planted on the ground, marveling at the dance of these cosmic butterflies that glowed bright as the aurora in the solar wind.

In all the excitement, everyone forgot about Cousin Entropy.

Humanity had discovered her, measured her, calculated her slow drain on the Universe’s energy. And we had decided her effect was negligible. We dismissed her thieving ways as a minor counterpoint to the glorious harmony of the Universe.

But Cousin Entropy never forgot about us.

Humans had been so accustomed to life with a horizon, that that horizontal bar had soaked into all our art–into our very souls. Many people just couldn’t handle life in three dimensions, with stars as the only scenery.

None of the colonists who’d settled off-Earth planets wanted to become UnAttached. They’d struggled too hard to keep their fleshly bodies alive to sacrifice them in exchange for life in the vacuum.

Thus began the First Division. We harassed each other, for a while: UnAttached VS. Attached.

Off-color jokes made the rounds. Did you hear the one about the UnAttached who fell for an Attached? He convinced her to climb to the top of the tallest tower for a single kiss...

But then the Second Division began. And it was even less amusing than the jokes.

To UnAttach, we had to learn to change our bodies and our brains to survive in the vacuum.  And we decided: why stop there? We had developed the power to become anything we could imagine.

Our clever UnAttached scientists lengthened our telomeres. They peppered our chromosomes with novel proteins. They multiplied our neurons, with compound interest. And finally, they tweaked the speed with which messages fly down our axons from neuron to neuron, until they could control the very passage of time–subjectively, at least.

That last came in handy for flitting between solar systems without suffering the twin depredations of old age and boredom.

To hell with the deterioration and decay Cousin Entropy had planned for us!

And the light-speed cosmic speed limit is no more than an inconvenience, when thousands of years pass in one long blink.

But our extended lifespan was the seed for the second great Division of humanity.

The second generation of UnAttached made themselves useful: they ferried box after box of hibernating Attached to their future colonies, like seeds waiting to root and cover the planetary surface with roiling masses.

The UnAttached sprouted reactors for the journey, and shields to let them shrug off cosmic rays and debris.

And after dropping off their cargo of Attached, they simply traveled on, drinking starlight and stowing away knowledge.

There was rarely any discord among the UnAttached, given our reduced needs and our diaspora’s dispersion across parsecs.

Several of us chose glorious solitude, drowsing alone in distant nebulas.

Little by little, we lost track of the Attached.

Their brief lives–longer than baseline, but only by two or three centuries–flickered by too quickly for us. We couldn’t really get attached to any individual Attached. It would’ve been like befriending an ant.

That’s not to say we forgot them. The deep pools of HearSay still held the memories of these grains of human dust.

The UnAttached shed crystal tears when the supernova formerly known as the Sun incinerated humanity’s cradle.

Alone, or with another UnAttached, I watched stars evolve before my eyes. Each nova was its star’s apotheosis, which we would’ve applauded if we’d had the appropriate appendages.

I also attended the birth and death of civilizations. Tens of thousands of human anthills rose up and crumbled. Sparring empires bloodied every arm of the galaxy.

A new wave of Attached, disgusted by the unending wars, rose up to join us in the peace of the void, their bodies barely recognizable as human.

We’ve fixed ourselves up pretty well since the butterfly generation.

Those long-ago cosmic butterflies wouldn’t have been able to hover, as I can, over the vast whirlpool at the center of the galaxy, slurping up the X-rays shooting from the poles of the supermassive black hole’s accretion disk, while contemplating the Hawking radiation that’s slowly evaporating that black hole into nothing.

A baseline Attached, if there were any of those left, would be like a speck of dust on my skin. And a first-generation UnAttached would be like a fly squashed on the windshield of my eyes.

These anachronistic comparisons bubble up to me from the vast depths of HearSay that are pooled within me.

An Attached’s puny three pounds of brainmeat wouldn’t be up to the task of constructing an inner life spanning eons. And its mere ninety billion neurons would be pathetically inadequate for storing all the memories of our extensive past.

Paradoxically, it was these recently-UnAttached, the ones fleeing the galactic wars, who’d really given us the drive to remember our species’ history.

I contemplate the cosmos–or what’s left of it–with the multiplicity of eyes dotting the oblate spheroid of my body.

About my eyes: forget the lashes, irises, and pupils of old-timey bodies. In their place I have dark wells, endlessly searching. And why would I make do with a mere two eyes? I have over eight million with which to sweep the depths of space, in every EM frequency, with complete efficiency.

Same goes for the angelically long hair of the first UnAttached. Forget hair. It’s gone. And my bald skin is wrinkled, to help me capture the kinetic energy of every speck of stardust that hits me.

An old UnAttached like myself is eons past aesthetics. I look more like a planet than anything else.

I cast nets of carbon atoms to tap into the immense source of radiation at the center of the galaxy.

And I use as little energy as possible. Ever conscious of the red ink on the universal balance sheet, I forbid myself from feeding too much to Cousin Entropy.

Every society is enriched by the arrival of new members. Despite the fears of a few of the first and second generation of UnAttached, most of us welcomed and helped the refugees of the galactic wars.

It was no small task. We had to re-accelerate our subjective time to be able to communicate with this third generation, until they adapted.

But it was worth it.

It was these refugees that, rich with the fruits of thousands of years of scientific progress, brought us new techniques for probing the innards of the universe.

These new techniques harnessed not Cousin Enthalpy, but a weighty aunt: Gravity herself.

But that’s not all. In negotiating the unending conflicts of their Attached era, the refugees had learned the wisdom of listening. Now they stretched their ears out again, taking advantage of their newly slowed subjective time to listen in a new way.

And they found that the galaxy was alive with conversation.

The play of dark spots and jets, of ion flux and gravity waves, the heart-song of supernovae: these made up the chatter of hundreds of billions of entities.

If our species’ limited brains had been able to self-assemble from chemical stews of carbon and hydrogen, with impulsively sparking neurons... then imagine the scope of a consciousness that assembled itself from an immense stew of molten metal!

The stars were talking to each other.

The galaxy was a great city, in which spun hot blue divas, yellow main-sequence conformists, diamond-bright little neutron stars, drab red dwarfs, and silent black holes.

There were lively stars, packed into the noisy downtown. And there were lonely stars, moping in the suburbs of the far-flung tips of the galactic arms. The latter got the occasional visit from itinerant comets, though these made feckless messengers, prone to letting themselves be captured by weightier celestial bodies.

Some stars were too generous. The massive Wolf-Rayet stars were burning their helium at both ends, creating a vast stellar wind that carried their outer layers away at 2000 km/s. Their neighbors waited patiently for them to come to a violent end.

At the other end of the social spectrum, a huge mass of brown and black dwarfs were chilling in obscurity.

Between these two extremes, the yellow stars wondered about the meaning of life, traded black-hole jokes, and bragged about the size of their planetary systems.

When we UnAttached managed, by dint of carefully-tuned emissions, to communicate with the stars, they were astonished to discover that one of their planets, although now vanished, had first borne this progeny. The news took a hundred million years to spread to every galactic neighborhood.

But the most emotional moments, for us, were when we overheard the stars measuring the widening distance to the galactic cities where their sisters spun, and mourning the ever-increasing delay in their responses.

Cousin Entropy was working in the shadows.

The universe couldn’t care less about Attached and UnAttached, blue giants, or red dwarfs. It just kept on plugging on its own deliberate project of expansion.

And the temperature of the vast, infinite void kept on dropping.

Cousin Entropy wants us all to be the same, everywhere.

Frozen.

Completely frozen.

The beautiful blue giants were the first to disappear.

One by one, their swan songs shone out across space. In death, these superstars spread the rosy veils of new stellar nurseries across parsecs.

The newborns that sprung from these nurseries were too lightweight to become anything more than yellow dwarfs.

The stars’ conversations took on a more anguished tone. Their sisters in other, receding cities were now too distant to respond to their final messages.

The black hole jokes died out.

The new yellow dwarfs were a pessimistic generation. Few of these young stars could bring themselves to put together a solar system worthy of the name.

Venomous disputes broke out between binaries. White dwarfs bled their companions dry to gain themselves a bit more time.

Worried stars passed around tips to prolong their lives, without pausing to think that a tip that worked well for a yellow dwarf could be a catastrophe for a Wolf-Rayet star. And the quasars didn’t listen to anyone. They were too busy channeling their existential anguish into the long, poignant poems they screamed out into the void.

The stars were no more resigned to their death than humans.

You’ve really got to hear the heartbeat of a red giant that’s trying to restart its hydrogen-to-helium fusion, but is running out of hydrogen.

Its heart keeps contracting.

At a hundred million degrees, the star suffers a heart attack: helium starts fusing into carbon and oxygen, triggering a meltdown. The whole core fuses at once in a helium flash. The star swells, then expels its outer layers in a great, final cry.

The marvelous consciousness built over billions of years is crushed, transformed into inert iron. The white dwarf that remains has no memory of its previous existence.

Four or five billion years later, the pessimistic generation of young yellow dwarfs had themselves gone out, leaving behind still-smaller dwarfs. Their robes of interstellar dust were too thin to form planetary entourages.

Meanwhile, the red dwarfs, the oldest of which had been born not long after the beginning of the expansion, carried on shining as dully as dark lanterns.

These dim, isolated stars didn’t have much to say.

Even with the patience of an UnAttached, one quickly tires of listening to “How’s it going?” and “What’s up with you?”

Cousin Entropy re-introduced herself to the last of the Attached.

As the red dwarves and the stars of the galactic suburbs went out, the cold forced the remaining Attached civilizations to migrate toward the galactic downtown’s island of warmth.

Ferocious wars burst out between the factions of Attached for control of the best neighborhoods. The wars lasted for hundreds of thousands of years–by UnAttached standards, the blink of an eye.

The Attached latched on to downtown’s flickering stars with the energy of despair (a concept Cousin Entropy could never understand).

We UnAttached also wanted to escape the death’s-waiting-room that the galactic arms had become.

Moving through a field of dead stars was risky. With no stars, we couldn’t pick out black holes by the way they curved starlight. Keeping ourselves out of these invisible, rogue death pits required energy-intensive gravitational sensing.

I had no choice but to say goodbye to all my suburban friends. Everybody’s leaving the neighborhood, they sighed as they cooled.

Wrapped in their stardust, I set myself up downtown, a mere eight-million-year commute from my former home.

So now, I dance above the heart of downtown: a supermassive black hole, surrounded by the spiral of luminous gases it’s drawn in. I sip energy from the powerful X-rays that periodically burst from its poles.

At this last act of our little corner of the universe, each of us has our own table manners.

A hundred parsecs from me hovers a giant, silver coin, one face turned toward the black hole, the better to capture its energies.

The coin’s diameter is greater than the ancient Earth’s orbit.

This UnAttached is so thin as to be translucent. As the galactic center’s light passes through it, variations in the thickness of its material outline a profile crowned by leaves. From my well of HearSay, I dredge the name of an ancient Roman emperor.

Could the original, Attached Augustus of antiquity have conceived of the stellar scope of this tribute?

I recognize it as a manifestation of our duty to remember, a duty dear to the third-generation UnAttached–the ones who built themselves from the ruins of worlds destroyed by war.

The downtown isn’t bustling anymore. Our proximity to the immense gravity well slows our senses.

The outward-facing residents discussed the flight of the other galaxies, their lacy loops of stars shining darker and darker red.

Finally, the last purple loops of lace disappeared from view. Even the giant coin’s ocular network, the best any of us had, couldn’t track them. A measly few photons still reach us, at the furthest end of the infrared: their wavelength is longer than the diameter of the ancient Milky Way.

My HearSay processors breathlessly evaluate the current size of our universe.

It’s over a trillion lightyears in circumference.

The sky is empty.

Our galaxy of dying stars is forevermore alone. The last red dwarfs are quietly going out.

The forecast is for a meager 0.05 degrees Kelvin.

When there was nothing left but a cluster of icy bodies, Attached and UnAttached found ourselves in the same boat (so to speak).

The spaceship holding the last twenty billion Attached is hard to distinguish from the giant coin.

Our psychological timescales are still far apart, but over the eons, the Attached had kept working at self-improvement. Their specialty was pocket environments.

To get an idea of what they look like now, imagine a large, transparent, flattened orb, filled with billions of little bubbles jostling each other in a thick amniotic fluid.

Each bubble is an Attached. Or rather, an ex-Attached, their translucent body swollen around their conscious biosphere, their eyes and senses turned toward the others.

After 887 billion years, new subjects of conversation are hard to come by.

“Hey, Augustus! You still kicking?”

“You old bastard, haven’t you frozen up yet?”

We keep ourselves occupied by studying history, by comparing our pools of HearSay. Every now and then, the Attached send out a lightning-brief burst of information, but their lifespans are too microbially fleeting to permit any real conversation.

The cold creeps into us, as our internal energy dwindles.

We warm ourselves back up as much as we can, by capturing the X-ray jets streaming from the black hole’s poles. But you can’t hold yourself too close to the axis: more than one UnAttached has gotten an overdose of X-rays right in the smacker.

We rub our toughened outer skins against each other to gain a tiny bit of energy. Obviously, we pay for these momentary lapses in lost matter.

This bodes poorly for the future.

When Cousin Entropy finishes evaporating the galactic black hole, the curtain will fall on the final act.

Actually, the curtain will freeze solid at absolute zero.

Just when I was starting to be tempted to let downtown’s central supermassive black hole compress me into a tiny speck, the colony of Attached made an unexpected discovery. Our distant cousins had managed to decode the black hole’s emissions. Their brief lives were the key to this achievement, given that we UnAttached could barely make out the black hole’s rapid blabber.

It turns out that the singularity is a first-class chatterbox, as if to make up for the silence of all the stars it had swallowed.

A keen intelligence bubbles under its secret horizon. Heat and light swirl there without too much distortion, as the black hole’s immense size mitigates the tidal effect.

That’s when we understood that Cousin Entropy had been keeping a card up her sleeve, all these eons.

An ace of spades.

An ace as black as the dark energy that so mystified ancient scientists!

Along with Cousin Enthalpy and Aunt Gravity, she’d been cooking us up a superb Napoleon pastry for dessert all this time.

Far from being selfish, Cousin Entropy had been filching excess disorder in order to pierce an inconspicuous little hole between two no-longer-theoretical membranes.

Where one universe ends, another begins.

None of the galactic spheres gave a damn about ever-widening distances or about light years. Their singular hearts were busy weaving webs of interdimensional string.

When we’re ready to take the plunge, all we have to do is politely let our galactic center know.

And restrain ourselves from telling any more black hole jokes.

All of us, UnAttached and Attached alike are preparing for the big move. Augustus has wrapped the Attached orb in his immense body. All we UnAttached gather tightly around them, as though the cluster of Attached were a small, fragile bird.

Humanity, reunited, will let itself fall into the star near the pole, just outside the emissions cone. And then we’ll take advantage of a lull in the X-rays to slip across the secret horizon.

The black hole advises us not to wait too long, given that the manoeuver to relocate us into a baby universe requires as much mass as possible.

I don’t know what the other side will look like. I imagine those Cousins, Entropy and Enthalpy, swimming in an immense white fountain.

Our march toward the event horizon will take up a brief millennium or two.

As humanity sets off on its journey, I have one little twinge of regret:

Leaving downtown is never easy.