A Man Out of Time

He lay on the frozen ground, staring at the dark sky. A single star twinkled amidst the infinite shadow of the abyss. No clouds impeded the view, it was merely the only star that remained. He let loose a long sigh as he watch the last remaining shred of light. He was unwavering, unblinking, waiting for the end.

Long, long ago, he came into existence. It was so long ago that it was barely a moment in the entirety of his existence, and he had long since forgotten nearly all of those experiences. He remembered feelings and concepts from his early existence, about the accident that brought him here.

He had barely been a man when it happened. Had he been about thirty years old, or thirty thousand years old? Thirty million years old? After all this time numbers had lost most of their meaning. Regardless, there had been an antimatter explosion in space while trying to escape the event horizon of a black hole. That explosion turned into an implosion, which again turned into an explosion, and onward it went on the cusp of reality where physics broke down. He blacked out, and in a one in an infinite chance, something happened that he had no understanding of.

When he came to, he was on an unfamiliar world with bits of his ship scattered about the area. He did not know how, but he seemed to be unscathed. As he took inventory of his body and of what was around him, he began to wonder what had happened and how he survived. He took what he could find, which was enough to put together a medium range transmitter. The signal would be able to reach anyone who came within about half a light year of him, and it would be able to transmit constantly for at least a year… or was it one hundred years?

Time passed, and he explored the world he found himself on. At night some of the stars seemed familiar, but off. They were not quite in the correct place, and that made calculating his exact location more difficult than he had hoped. There were various creatures in this world. Some meek and docile, others were predatory and aggressive. It was not until his first fatal encounter that he began to comprehend the possibility of what happened to him.

He remembered that he had felt intense pain, but when he looked he was astonished to see that he bore no injuries. The first time it happened, he was afraid, curious, and thought that he had just gotten lucky. It has just been an accidental fall down a cliff, and it was something he thought luck could explain away. It wasn’t until the third time he should have died that he realized something was fundamentally different about how he existed in reality. He had been attacked by one of the predatory animals of this world, but no matter how much it bit or clawed at him, it could not render flesh from him to eat… it could not kill him. Eventually the predator left, and he remained. Terrified, and in mental agony, but he remained.

The transmitter he cobbled together eventually died before anyone could come across its signal, and he spent the next many uncounted years living on that world. Eventually he explored that world. It was difficult at first, failure during such explorations often meant pain. But the more he explored the more he grew accustom to the pain, and the less he started to notice it until pain was little more than a tiny itch at the back of his mind.

He climbed the tallest peaks, where the air was too thin to breathe and the cold would freeze anyone else within moments. He swam to the deepest chasms of the ocean floors where the pressure could crush a diamond into powder. He traversed the entire planet as time marched on without him, and eventually he experienced every place that there was on the apparently small world. After seeing everything that there was, he decided to make a more active mark on his environment.

He began with a species that, if he guessed correctly, were similar to apes where he had come from. If felt like it took forever for them to become accustomed to him, yet in retrospect it wasn’t even the blink of an eye. Once they no longer feared him he began training them, teaching them, and through careful, and manipulative practices over countless generations, he began to shape their evolutionary path. Their general shape never changed too much, but subtle differences did occur over the years and built up over the eons. He was beyond excited when the first one developed the ability to speak, even if it was the most basic of words.

From there everything became even more of a blur.

The beings that he had helped evolve saw multiplied and spread across the world. Many saw him as a god. This had not been something he had wanted, and it bore both wonderful but mostly horrible fruits. Wars were raged in his name as the millennia passed by. Eventually he stopped trying to prevent them as warring sides would not listen to him, convinced that what he truly wanted was to test their loyalty and faith and destroy those who misunderstood his will.

Eventually the violent believers began attacking those who, as he desired, did not see him as a god. When this happened he did his best to help hide those who did not believe he was a god, then isolated himself from the creatures he had helped come into being to try to do something about the more violent and fanatical of his followers. When he returned to them many generations had come and gone, and most of those that did not believe him a god had been found and slaughtered. He took the fruits of his work in isolation into a one of the biggest cities, a powerful bomb. He spoke to the leader, and tried to convince the leader that he was no god, just a very old man outside of time who implored that they stop killing everyone who did not believe as they believed. But the leader would have none of it. He declared it merely another test of their faith, and that to show their undying faith they would continue to spread and slaughter the unbelievers until only the believers remained.

So he detonated the bomb.

It had been incredibly difficult and slow to create a fission bomb with the technology that was present on the world, but he had managed to do it. The city was decimated in light and fire, and he walked from it unscathed as always.

After word of his wrath spread, and none of the creatures dared to contradict him again, though now nearly all of them did honestly believe him to be a god.

It took him a while before he decided to interact with them again, and when he did he began to help them develop their society. The creatures quickly developed to and through industry, and within a short time they had begun to ponder the possibility of exploring their three moons. Time blurred past, and before he knew it they were exploring their solar system and developing methods of intergalactic travel. When they had advanced far enough, he took a ship and left behind the world that he had known for the almost all of his existence.

For nearly all of the rest of time, he drifted amongst the stars, searching and hoping to find his home. Eventually the search itself evolved, and he began to search for an end to his existence. He attempted any and every way he could imagine to reach the end of the road he was on, but none of them yielded any results. His travels between the stars eventually became travels between galaxies, and yet he still found nothing that could end his being.

His last hope was that he would end when existence itself came to an end, and so he found himself a lone planet at what he thought was the edge of the universe, and waited as time, the life blood of reality, bled away. The more time passed the faster it seemed to go by, and yet it seemed it still went on at an imperceivable crawl. One by one, stars would flicker out, and new ones would be born… until the birth of new stars was no longer enough to replace those that faded from life, and the sky slowly became a barren blanket of darkness. Save for one, tiny, speck.

The last star that remained in the sky. The last star in what had been a universe of an infinite sea of stars. The end of the road.

He watched that star, tirelessly, and yet so tired of what existence had become for him. He almost missed it. The flicker of the star grew noticeably brighter for a brief moment, and with it a hope grew in his chest that he had not experienced in as long as he could remember. And as quickly as it had flared, it vanished. The last star, gone, and with it the end. The heat death of the universe.

There he waited. He waited for time to end. He waited for his experience to conclude. The passage of time had long since lost meaning to him, but in that void, he eventually came to a realization that brought tears to his eyes. His time was never ending, and even though everything else had come to its natural end, the road before him never would, and he would be forced to walk it, now bleak… cold… dark... and alone, beyond any eternity.