Excerpt of Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas
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I put on my anorak and my red wool scarf and left without
saying anything else; I didn’t even turn back when I heard
Christopher’s box of nails fall on the floor, although I knew I
should have done.
How do you survive the end of time? It’s quite simple. By the
time the universe is old enough and frail enough to collapse,
humans will be able to do whatever they like with it. They’ll
have had billions of years to learn, and there’ll be no matron to
stop them, and no liberal broadsheets and no doomy hymns.
By then it’ll just be a case of wheeling one decrepit planet to
one side of the universe while another one pisses itself sadly in
another galaxy. And all this while waiting for the final crunch,
as everything becomes everything else as the universe begins
its beautiful collapse, panting and sweating until all life arcs
out of it and all matter in existence is crushed into a single
point and then disappears. In the barely audible last gasp of
the collapsing universe, its last orgasmic sigh, all its mucus
and pus and rancid jus will become pure energy, capable of
everything imaginable, just for a moment. I didn’t know why
I’d contemplated trying to explain this to Christopher. He’d
once made me cry because he refused to accept spatial dimensions,
and we’d had a massive row because he wouldn’t look at
my diagram that proved Pythagoras’s theorem. According to
Christopher the books I reviewed were ‘too cerebral, babe’. I
didn’t know what he’d make of this one, which was a complete
head-fuck.
According to Kelsey Newman, the universe, which always
was a computer, will, for one moment — not even that — be so
dense and have so much energy that it will be able to compute
anything at all. So why not simply program it to simulate
another universe, a new one that will never end, and in
which everyone can live happily ever after? This moment will
be called the Omega Point, and, because it has the power to
contain everything, will be indistinguishable from God. It will
be different from God, though, because it will run on a processing
power called Energia. As the universe gets ready to collapse,
no one will be writing poetry about it or making love
for the last time or just bobbing around, stoned and listless,
waiting for annihilation, imagining something beautiful and
unfathomable on the other side. All hands will be on deck for
the ultimate goal: survival. Using only physics and their bare
hands, humans will construct the Omega Point, which, with
its infinite power, can and for various reasons definitely will,
bring everyone back to life — yes, even you — billions of years
after you have died, and it will love everyone and create a perfect
heaven. At the end of the universe anything could happen,
except for one thing.
You can’t die, ever again.
Excerpted from Our Tragic Universe
by Scarlett Thomas. Copyright © 2010 by Scarlett Thomas.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.
