The Last Astronaut
He was traveling on a light thunder since the beginning of the times. He crossed-over the miles one after another during billions of years without noticing time because time didn’t exist for him.
He saw when uncountable stars were born and died without alleyming older; without one unique electron, among the ones which maintained his body, could move his orbit; and, after all, without noticing his innert situation.
He could only notice some very light colors nuances which floated around him during his eternal fall, standing in between a millisecond and another, and, surely, these differences had nothing to do with that thing that was surrounding him.
His transparent coffin with three meters long couldn’t be seen by any external viewer for it could travel on the exact speed of light in vacuum, not even one part of second above or below, so it would look like a thunder only.
No solid body has ever traveled this fast in space. Time expansion had disappeared, there was only the eternal immobility that left.
His cryogenic pot, which had never been opened, was then converted into a real coffin, though its occupant wasn’t dead or even alive, as they wanted.
The quartz which it was made of wasn’t affected by its atypical situation. It was as lifeless as its content.
***
The last astronaut didn’t want to say good-bye to his fellows, last alive beings on the Universe who would die. They had been on many things together, but now, not even their very sofisticated technology could avoid what was about to happen.
The Universe had finally alleyme shorter again, compressing even more the space-time and, in consequence, the body in it.
Only one space station, with hundreds of kilometers long and millions of inhabitants, had survived to the natural disaster, and this was only due to the N-M fantastic camp which could equilibrar the fantastic energies of them, creating, with this, a large inert energy space which includes all the structure of the station. This action took more than five hundred million years, allowing more and more generations of alive beings keep alive besides of the space-time colapse of the Universe.
Nevertheless, scientists knew a long time ago that one day the equilibrium would be shattered and, at last, everything would be smashed and joined the group that could no more be called Universe.
The last astronaut would be the only one who would try escape the holocaust on a despairingly technical handle and could, who knew one day, see the new Universe coming from the old one.
He went towards the cryogenical pot in the reception room and stood there looking at it during a long time. His mind went through all his life in that time lapse, concluding its uselessness just like all the efforts’s uselessness realized until then to save something from this moribund universe. He felt he was too old in spite of his thirty-two normal years. But, besides it all, he walked towards the place by which the pot could be opened.
He could list all recommendations from the scientists, so he did everything automatically. The cryogenic system would be activated by a mental order when it was time to do so (if there existed any mind to do it).
Scientists from that race had created an unfailurable plan to send the astronaut safe and sound to the future with millions of trillions of information bytes about the most diverse kinds of science, history, arts besides DNA banks from uncountable organisms, compiled by them.
At zero time, when the protection camp around the spacial station had ruined on itself due to the space-time collapse, the station, with its millions of beings started spliting while strong generators from N-M camp catapulted the quartz esquife on speed of light – it means, in a non-detectable by the mensuration systems, the skiff passed from the complete rest to the speed of light, freezing, this way, any kind of reaction that could go over it.
One second after the big-crunch, the new big-bang occurred and the Universe started expanding itself again with the astronaut’s esquife, safe from the destruction of its original universe.
***
But something hadn’t been calculated by the scientists...
After collapsing, one exact nano-second before the big-bang, the astronaut lost any possibility of having his velocity stopped and go back to the normal Universe. He stood going and returning eternally, going through many universes from the beginning until their ends, without leaving his imobilidade.
He was still going through his four-thousandth universe without having his velocity changed. And this universe was still expanding itself...