The first thought that skittered through his recovering consciousness was: Holy shit, the embryos! The spaceship was aflame and from the corner of his swollen, bleeding eyes, he could see his first mate, Private Jess, unconscious, strapped to her chair, and burning gleefully like a flag at a mob riot.

Somewhere behind him, through the haze of pain, he could hear the pop-pop-pop of the embryos as they combusted in their little egg like pods.  The fire flared across the dash and raked up his arm—animated by the high Gs, it looked like a fiery, guzzling sonic hedgehog or a swarm of bright red piranhas. This is it, this is the end. Command pilot Olusola cracked open his helmet, twisted it clockwise and pulled it off his head. At least, they had been right about the oxygen levels, he thought, taking in lungfuls of air that streamed in through the broken viewport. The fire crept greedily up his face with a cackle, and that was when he heard the axe clear away what was left of the viewport’s polycarbonate screen and felt an arm reach in, grab him. Wide-eyed and in shock, he fought back. What was better: to burn to death or be saved by a life form on a planet that was presumed lifeless?

To his pain-addled mind, the arm looked like a human arm— eerie, since all mankind was dead. He and his first mate had been the ‘Last Hope’: A small ship with a thousand embryos heading to a possible habitable planet at the center of the Milky Way.

No one had ever been—

“Duro, duro, farabale!” A voice. And then in English, “Stop fighting and let me help you.” Fingers popped his safety latch and dragged him out summarily through the open viewport.

#

“I thought I was the last man alive,” Olusola said getting up on one elbow and looking around the low room he was lying in. It looked like a cave of some sort, and the man who had saved him was bent over what looked like paper, his back to him, scribbling furiously. Olusola examined his bandages.  An IV cannula jutted out of his arm, connected to a bag of dextrose saline. What in the hell?

“Who are you?”

The man continued to work. There was something quite familiar about the curve of his back and the shape of his head but nothing could prepare Olusola for what was to come. The man turned around and Olusola gasped, then screamed, bile rushing up his throat and out of his mouth in utter repulsion.

 

The man had his face.

There is something thoroughly repulsive about seeing oneself in three dimensions. It was like looking into a grotesque mirror he’d once seen as a child at a circus. It was the sort of disgust he felt towards tryphophobic imagery and Olusola could barely suppress the waves of nausea that rippled through him.

“It will pass soon,” the man said in his voice, reaching forward with callused, dirty fingers to remove the IV cannula.

“What are you, why have you stolen my face?!” Olusola recoiled from his touch. What sort of alien life form was this? Perhaps a chameleon-like sentience that could imitate —

“I am not a chameleon like sentience,” the man said smugly

Oh shit, it can read minds!

“And no, I cannot read minds.”

“Are you God?!” Olusola cried, exasperated.

“Ah, finally we’re getting somewhere!” The man said, smiling that grotesque smile that was as bad as pockmarked fruit. Olusola noticed suddenly that there were mounds on the floor, rows of them extending deeper into the cave.

They looked like… graves.

#

The planet was a particularly unique one. One-third of the sky was a velvety black—the stuff of nightmares—with a beam of light shooting across the other two-thirds: cosmic microwave background repurposed into a pseudo-sun by the extreme gravity of the super massive black hole it circled.

In the days he spent recuperating, Olusola would hobble out of the cave and stare, captivated by this unique and beautiful sky. The darkness on the dark side was absolute—no light escaped from it. And it seemed to also reach into his mind and pull all his warring thoughts into its spinning maw, grinding them up like the debris billowing in the fiery accretion disc that became the bright side of the sky. The man answered no questions on those early days. He seemed extremely busy, writing multiple equations across vast sheets of papers, typing furiously on an old Dell laptop and disappearing deeper into the cave for long hours at a time. The man would bring pain medicine and when Olusola turned the side of the bottle, he saw it came from a pharmacy: Medplus pharmacy and stores. With an Earth 6.0 address! Other times the man returned with junk food from KFC.

He also had books, millions of them filling adjacent rooms to the brim and on some nights, Olusola would find him asleep in a heap, the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or the Quran, or Anna Karenina open across his chest. Olusola would help him up, and into his sleeping quarters. He would babble incoherently in his sleep.

On some nights, the man cried: huge deep sobs that filled the cave and were reminiscent of a grief Olusola knew only too intimately.

#

When his wounds had healed fully, the man took him into the belly of the cave.

“Ever heard of a photon sphere?” He asked as they crossed a bridge leading to a rusty metallic door. Under the bridge, a river of molten aluminum flowed.

“You know I have” Olusola replied.

He knew now that the man was indeed himself, a future version of himself. The burn on his arms had healed into a distinct corrugated scar and this man had that scar already. It was matured, and a darker shade, but it was the same damn scar.

“Have we had this conversation before?” Olusola asked as they went through the metal door and onto a ledge that extended into nothingness, into a vast unquantifiable space that was bottomless and endless.

“No we haven’t,” the man said, pulling out a device from his pocket. It looked like a rosary or tesbih and he scrolled through its beads.

“This entire planet is situated in a stable orbit around a Kerr black hole sun.”

“I know, that’s why we chose it as a likely last home for mankind, to survive in the trough of a time dilation so deep therefore extending our existence by a few hundred years while the rest of the universe ended in ‘earth time’. “

“It was a great idea.” The man said with a ghost of a smile. Olusola smiled too. Pride welled up in his heart for he had come up with the idea and the calculations to make it possible. It had come to him in a dream, almost fully formed on one of those frantic nights of panic on Earth 6.0 and he had written the equations down when he woke that morning at 3.33am.

“It was not your idea.” The man said, snapping Olusola out of his reverie.

“What?”

The man clicked one of the beads of his rosary and they were suddenly transported to his room back home. “What?” A wave of nostalgia washed through him. It was all too real, vivid. He reached for and could feel the fabric of his shirt hanging over the shoulder of the bedside chair. He could smell his deodorant, and he reeled, steadying against the wall.

There was a version of Olusola lying in bed, asleep. And the man knelt by his ear and whispered the equations to him. Olusola looked at the bedside clock it was 3:32am.

“I’m—He’s going to wake up any moment.”  Olusola whispered. The clock however remained 3:32am.

“Time dilation,” the man said, looking at his watch. “It’ll be sixteen years for us before that clock becomes 3:33.” He clicked on his rosary device and they were back on the ledge jutting into the darkness.

“Was that real?” Olusola gasped.

The man stared.

“Why? Why did you want us to come here?”

There was a deep sadness in his voice when he replied: “It’s the only way for mankind to exist.”

His thumb ran across the device again, this time backwards, images flashing across the vast emptiness. Olusola watched the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs retreat from Earth 1.0, watched the planets melt into elements in the early universe; he watched it all go back, way back, the entire universe coalescing into a vibrating particle, a size, one-billionth of a pin head.

“Everyone wonders what happened before the Big Bang,” the man’s voice boomed God-like in this vacuum of nothing, virtual particle pairs popping into existence and eliminating one other in a broil that was buzzing with white noise. He zoomed into one of those virtual particles and grabbed one before it disappeared into its twin … and swallowed it! Setting in motion all that was to follow.

“Let there be light,” He said.

#

Olusola paced the cave, his mind a-flurry with excitement. The man sat in the corner eating from an open box of Dominoes pizza.

“Are you saying that space-time itself is curved around our black hole and we are back where we started? The end is indeed the beginning? Is that why the cosmic background radiation is so bright? It’s supposed to be non-existent at this time.”

The man dabbed his lips, nodding.

“How did you get the rosary, the time device?”

“The one before me gave it to me.”

Olusola paced again:

“You know all of earth’s history, all of the six earths. That makes you omniscient for all intents and purposes. You have access to all of the earths via your metallic door and” —he shook the pizza piece—“you can make changes. That means you’re omnipotent. And because of the time dilation,” his eyes widened, “you can be everywhere at every time!”

“Omnipresent” the man said.

Olusola stood up and gasped: “You are God.”

“So are you.”

And then it came out in a whisper that was barely audible: “So you could save her?” It wasn’t a question but a plea.

The man stared, tears in his eyes.

“Why won’t you?” Olusola’s lip trembled. The man stood up suddenly and pulled him into an embrace, the tightest, and they both cried—ugly sobs really, for the grief they carried that was never resolved.

#

“We can change the history of the worlds,” Olusola argued. “We can smother Hitler in his sleep, get Bin-laden away from those influences, prevent every single war before it ever started and more.”

“Don’t you think I would have tried?”

“And?”

“First you cease to exist. Somehow, our existence has melded with the existence of the universe. One cannot exist without the other. If I took a day off from rewriting the history of the universe it all breaks apart and we all cease to exist. Every extant butterfly must emerge from its pupa and every bird that starved the first time must starve again.”

“That’s what you do? Everyday? Rewriting the history of the universe?”

“Everything has to happen as it happened the very first time…whenever that was. Because of entropy, the sheer randomness of the universe, it could not happen again a second time or in perpetuity. I have to ride that asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and help the first mud-skipper that starts breathing on land. One day of rest and it all goes to hell as entropy takes over.”

He continued, wiping his hands with a towel: “In one of those, for instance, mankind never evolves and you know what happens?  First you vanish and then I have to fix it before I vanish as well.”

“You can’t do this forever.” Olusola said. The man, God, was visibly coming apart at the seams, time dilation or not. “You can’t survive on Dominoes pizza and soda.”

“That is why I need you. To continue this work and do it again, when I can no longer do it. And you will need the one who comes after you.”

Olusola looked at the mounds scattered around the cave, the graves, and could not imagine how long this had been going. It was madness!

“Why do you do it at all? Why don’t you let go and watch it all go to nothing. Must we exist?”

“No we mustn’t but if we are gone and there’s no one to remember it, then the universe is as good as having never existed. If a tree falls in a forest and no one heard it fall, then did it make a sound? Was it ever there?” His lower lip trembled, “Don’t you get it? We are the eternal witness.”

Olusola threw up his hands. “Must it exist again and again, in perpetuity? Isn’t it enough that it existed once?”

“There’s only one existence.”

“Must this fucking universe so full of pain and horror exist at all then???”

“That is the ultimate question.”

Olusola continued: “If it all has to happen exactly the way it did. If Hitler has to kill all those Jews—“

—and then it hit him with the force of a hundred gigaton explosion: “No!” Olusola whispered stepping away.

“Yes.” The man replied, gritting his teeth.

#

“One day, this”—he raised the rosary—“will be yours and you can decide then if you want to let it all go to nothing. If the pain of your grief is too severe, if the price to pay too expensive, if all the love and the beauty of the universe was nothing when side by side with all its horror and pain. If you would rather not have ever known her, known her love, her voice, her touch and magnificent personality than knowing her and losing her the way you did—“ he lowered the rosary. “One day you will decide. For now you will work with me, for I have decided and I will show you what must be done.

“First the sunset—“

The sunset brought tears to Olusola’s eyes. It was the most magnificent sight off the coast of one of the Samoan islands, a beautiful red ball sinking into the sea while locals played the ukulele and danced the taualuga. A three-hundred-year old turtle had laid its eggs on the beach and Olusola stared at a little hatchling that struggled out of its shell and onto the sand, jerking like a little mechanical toy, harkening to a call that was buried deep in its genetic code as it navigated an obstacle course of footprints, crabs and driftwood on its desperate route to the sea.

 On the beach, a small blonde boy with a deep beautiful laugh played. And the man called to him and spoke to him: “Si o ta alofa atu.”

“Talofa lava!” The boy cried and ran off chortling.

“—then the pain.”

They stood beside the bed of a child suffering from the most acute form of glioblastoma multiforme. The child was bald from multiple chemotherapy treatments and was chained to the bed because he was mad with pain that was uncontrollable with morphine. On the side of the room, his mother clutched the arm of a praying priest, too catatonic to mutter another prayer for her dying son, who howled and screeched in undeserved agony as unfettered cells proliferated in his brain.

“Why don’t you help him,” Olusola begged, grabbing his double by the throat. “You can reach into his genetic code and turn off that errant gene. What purpose is his pain to the existence of the universe!?” He pushed the man away and pointed at the priest. “Can’t you see they’re praying to you?”

Then the boy cackled with deranged laughter and Olusola knew it was the same boy on the beach, the boy who had been so full of health and life only a moment ago.

“You did this, didn’t you? You are the devil.” Olusola realized.

“You are me. We are the same.”

“I will never do what you did to this child!” Olusola spat. “I will never be you!”

“This is a new beginning. I know you don’t have the stomach for all the evil that is part of the bargain of existence, so I’ll make you a deal, like the one before made with me. We will be partners, you and I, and you will do only the good—you will ensure the sun rises and sets beautifully; you will inspire them to create art and music and you will whisper to Newton and Einstein and Beethoven in their sleep; you will read all of Shakespeare’s works back to him.”

“And what will you do?”

“All the other things you wouldn’t: I will give them the Bible and the Quran and the Torah and set them against one another. I will eat with Abraham and tell him I’ll make him a father of many nations; I’ll give them Leviticus and tell them to stone all those who commit adultery, and Jesus, I’ll put the spear in his side. I’ll whisper into the hearts of all the suicide bombers and harden the hearts of all men against the other. I’ll dine with Hitler and fill him with delusions of his Aryan race. I’ll orchestrate the nuclear winter that destroyed the first earth and —“

“Enough.”

“You will play God. And I will play the devil. For now.”

#

When it was all done and dusted, the two men sat in their cave. One was broken by all the evil he had done in the universe and there was nothing left of his spirit. He was gaunt and bereft of any joy or energy. The other was full with all of the good he had done.

They stared at each other, quiet; there were no words left unsaid between them. Olusola noticed a dried red splotch on the wall behind the man’s head. It had always been there and he always wondered, in their comings and goings, what it meant.

The man pulled out a gun and placed it on his lap. Olusola watched him and made no attempt to stop him. With a limp hand, he carried the gun and buried it deep into his mouth.

Eyes burning with pain, he pulled the trigger, his brain and blood splattering on the wall behind him, on the red stain that would never fade.

Olusola buried him in a heap along with the others. He picked up the rosary device and pocketed it. He walked outside the cave. He remembered all the good he had done in the universe. All the love between men and women and children. All the laughter, oh all the glorious laughter. All the sunsets and sunrises.  All the ‘eureka’ moments in music, art, technology. Every single smile on every single face of every single race. And it filled him with a feeling of light that was indescribable.

Now he had the rosary: Would he let it all cease to exist? He knew what the man had done last, what had finally broken him, he knew it because he could still feel the pain of losing her burning within his heart.  He had seen it in the man’s eyes in that last second before he pulled the trigger. For a man such as this, suicide is the only mercy.

Outside, Olusola looked up at the piebald skies. If they had done their job well, it would happen as it always would. He watched the spacecraft, Last Hope, burn through the atmosphere and hurtle across the firmament. He picked up his axe.

It was time to save a certain black astronaut whose name was Olusola. It was time for another cycle of the eternal witness.