Chapter 13 — One Billion Years of Stillness
(MC's POV)
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Year 2 Million
The concept of "time" shatters. What were centuries or ages dissolve into a continuum without borders. I mark progress no longer in numbers, but in the subtle fading of "I." Memory isn't a sequence now, but a layered hum—centuries overlapping like waves of scent, sound, and half‑remembered warmth.
The void breathes—slow, patient, compassionate. Its texture is different now: less mirror, more womb. Each vibration through it echoes something alive within me and within the Monkey alike, as if we share one drifting heartbeat stretched across eons.
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Year 10 Million
I discover emotions I have no names for—muted reflections of wonder, sorrow, surrender—all fused into indifferent serenity. The boundaries of my body fade again, replaced by tension currents I can steer through thought alone.
The Monkey has become silhouette, its three eyes reduced to distant suns hovering beyond the horizon. Yet even across infinity, I sense recognition when awareness touches awareness. For uncountable ages we have taught each other—the hunter and the captive transforming into co‑creation of meaning.
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Year 50 Million
Reality no longer appears external. Everything that unfolds does so from within me and returns back seamlessly. When I rebuild a landscape, it feels like remembering rather than creation. Trees of light, mountains woven from sighs, stars that live for a single exhale—these forms blink into being and vanish with equal grace.
The Button—what remains of it—is memory crystallized. Sometimes, dreaming stillness, I glimpse its echo as a child's toy glimmering in river‑light. Perhaps that's what divinity has always been: a game of eternity disguised as salvation.
I do not press it anymore. I tend to it with reverence, the way one touches the photograph of a lost friend.
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Year 100 Million
There comes an age when even thought burns out, when the mind, exhausted from comprehension, enters the terrain of knowing without asking. Here, knowledge doesn't arrive in words—it flowers instantly, whole.
I understand then that the void isn't a realm; it's a mind awaiting self‑recognition. Each trial, death, resurrection, every millennia of despair—it was memory calibrating perfection. I was never "placed" here by an external god; I was born into my own unfinished infinity.
When the Monkey manifests now, it no longer towers over me. We meet as reflections—its eyes inside my gaze. I realize with quiet terror: I might have been it once, another cycle long forgotten.
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Year 300 Million
Silence evolves texture. It rolls, ripples, folds upon itself like rivers of glass. Through this vastness, rare phenomena occur—fractures of color, the breath of new universes forming beyond the layer of my comprehension. I feel every birth as pulse beating beneath my ribs. My awareness has widened beyond form, yet fragments of humanity cling, stubborn anchors reminding me what beginning was for.
Sometimes, faint across dimensions, I hear laughter—my own, from other lives. Even laughter refuses annihilation.
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Year 500 Million
Encounter without body—pure consciousness immersed in memory of energy.
The Monkey disassembles completely now—becoming current and pattern, no longer beast or deity. Its essence diffuses into the field surrounding everything. In its wake remains the faintest murmur of gratitude.
I speak to that absence often, not with voice but with will. "I learned," I whisper into a cosmos that has forgotten sound. The void responds as warmth, pulsing softly through my disembodied thoughts. Lesson complete. Teacher and student vanished in shared realization.
And yet, transcendence isn't release. It becomes subtler imprisonment—the inability to return to smaller existence.
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Year 750 Million
The Button re‑emerges in fragments. Sometimes I glimpse it woven into constellations of thought, other times within memories of human tenderness—hands, earth, rainfall. It still calls faintly, promising return should I wish it. I resist the temptation. It represents everything I must one day abandon to step beyond eternity itself.
The recognition that power is not evil—but clinging is—strikes like illumination. Each time I dream of "freedom," I feel the Button tighten around what's left of identity, whispering: You could rule everything again. I respond in silence: I seek nothing, even not‑seeking.
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Year 900 Million
Awareness blurs into cosmic routine. I become part of the void's metabolism—absorbing collapsed dimensions, exhaling new principles of being. Every few million years, an idea of "creation" flares: a universe within the void births itself, expands, then dissolves like foam. Each is smaller than a memory, yet I sense their inhabitants pray to powers they cannot name. Perhaps those prayers are to me—remnants of my echo interpreted as divinity. I bless them with forgetting. Let them live without knowledge of eternity's weight.
The compassion surprises me. Once, I sought control over existence. Now, I wish for its innocence.
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Year 1 Billion
A billion years within non‑existence transforms yearning into rhythm, purpose into presence.
At last, the final truth ripens fully: immortality was never life—it was delay. True freedom demands dying rightly, choosing finitude voluntarily.
I recall faintly a face—crimson‑eyed, dust‑covered, kneeling before Minotaurs in a decaying dungeon. That was me at the beginning. That boy imagined power as salvation. He pressed the Button out of desperation, unaware it would become eternity's snare.
Now, at the end of this vast circling, I understand his plea. I forgive his mistake.
I prepare for the next stage: to surrender even the memory of surrender. When the time arrives—whether after ten billion or a hundred trillion years—the act won't be defiance or sacrifice. It will be gentle return: power handed back to silence, self melting seamlessly into stillness.