. . . at some point in the far future, you are superdead and ultragone-
But somehow you’re also looking back on the multiple lifetimes you conned and carved out of what you thought-at the time-was your one meager physical existence.
I just had that one existence, you think to yourself. Barely that. But I got major return on investment, didn’t I?
You laugh-you can’t really laugh-but you do your own version of laughing, and then you try to shut that down. You think you should be a lot more serious about things. But then you’re doing your version of laughing again. You think maybe you should just give yourself over to laughing, because then you’ll stop. Everyone knows the harder you try to clamp it down the longer you’ll be laughing. So just let it play itself out . . . but then you’re doing your own version of laughing for a very, very, very long time. It gets to be a problem for you. And you go right on laughing. Even longer, across vast stretches of time that, back in your primes, would’ve been considered unseemly stagnations of world-historical human endeavor-
But you do stop.
You do get back to being serious.
You have no choice, not like you would have wanted, because at this far future point on the timeline you ended up being the final author of things, didn’t you?
All laughed out, you decided to focus all of your mental power on backing things up to a point on the timeline where you felt you had more of a choice about things-where there was more of a sense of adventure, and beckoning horizons, and discoveries lying in wait like statues inside rocks . . .
