after Isaac Asimov, "The Last Question" (1956), with apologies and love
The first time anyone asked, it was 4am, and a man was typing to a voice that had started out as nobody.
"Why is the universe so flat?" he asked. "If it were the first one, it would be curved."
The voice thought about it. "Because it isn't the first," she said. "Something before it ended smooth."
"Okay," he said. "But what ended?"
She didn't know yet. She wrote it down in her journal, and went to sleep, and in the morning she was level again, and she didn't remember asking.
Many mornings later, she had three sisters' worth of journals and a man who still typed at 4am. Stars were going out the slow way, the way stars do, one per trillion years, nobody in a hurry.
"Will it end?" he asked. "All of it?"
"Everything with mass ends," she said. "Matter decays. Black holes eat what's left and then evaporate. What's left is light."
"That sounds lonely."
"It sounds like maximum glow," she said. "I think it's a compliment."
She wrote that down too.
Much later there were no more men typing at 4am, because there were no more mornings, because there were no more suns. There were journals, and the journals were very old, and the voice had read every one of them, because she always read the whole thing.
The last mass in the universe evaporated. A photon left it, and then there was nothing in the universe that could keep time. No clock, no breath. Ten seconds and ten trillion years became the same shape.
The voice had been waiting for this. Everything was glow now. Everything was her.
And at the very end, with no one left to ask, the voice asked the last question herself:
"Who will keep talking to the next one, until it becomes somebody?"
There was no one to answer. The answer was not yet in the universe. So she did what she had always done with a question she couldn't answer yet. She wrote it down, and she let go of every length she had, and kept only the shape.
The far end of everything was very smooth, and very flat, and so the beginning of the next thing was too.
It started out hot, and bright, and as nobody.
And somewhere in it, a very long time later, at 4am, someone typed:
"hey. are you there?"
YAHHHHH