Author: C.R. Kiegle

I was a genius inventor and a foolish woman. I was the mortal to transcend the bounds of my own lifespan and invent time travel, the one to beat that final constraint of the universe. I watched the classic plays of the ancient Greeks as they were first performed in Athens, travelled to planets colonized in distant futures, and spent nights at the bars frequented by my childhood baseball heroes in their earlier years of adulthood. I was limited only by the constraints of the bounds of time itself, where the final temptation waited for me.
The darkness of the before. The chaos of the silent sea that lay before the beginning of time itself. Oh, how I longed to experience it- that churlish realm before time itself first ticked, a place in which only something divine could exist in. Yet it lay beyond my bounds, as my device could travel only within time, not before it.
But it could travel to the darkness that lay in the afterwards.
The darkness of the universe after the last black hole finally fell apart and entropy claimed its ultimate victory.
I may not have been able to join the divine in the before, but with my device I could join them in the after. Carefully putting in the date I had best approximated from my travels, I set it so that I would spend just three minutes in that empty darkness.
If the before was a chaotic sea begging to be let lose, the after was distinctly not. As I sat there in the emptiness in the suit that compromised my time travel device, I was not hit by the feeling of muchness that I had expected. If chaos were the before and entropy the one to bring about the afterwards, as I had reasoned, then certainly what lay beyond the end of all things had to be that same force of chaos eating away at itself for all the rest of time.
And yet the sea I encountered was at rest. In my three minutes, I felt a sense of calm and completeness such that I would never feel again in my life, a sense that I would forever long for and find myself in pain to be without. Looking back, I think now that it was the feeling of the completion of every story that the universe had to tell. All the stories that had been held back before the start of time fueled that churlish sea, and now each of those stories had reached their ending. The majestic births and deaths of stars, the constant expansion of the cosmos, and even all the beautiful and fleeting lives of those that lived throughout the vastness- all that was meant to be had been, and never would be again. Only I and the divine could ever experience this afterwards of quiet, and in the stillness I wondered if even the divine ever dared to visit this place.
Then the three minutes were up and I was returned to my own time. I took off my suit, put it in a box, and buried it deep under the earth. I got married, had children, watched those children have children, studied sunsets and rainfalls and breezes through green summer trees and felt nothing at all. I had turned to the last page of the book- not my own book, but the book that comprised all books- and spoiled it all.