#isaacarthur

"Janus. Janus, please, we need to talk."

He never liked this place. The cold metal hallways were dirty, dingy,  rusting. The lights overhead flickered in just the correct way to send  pulsing jabs of pain through the tops of his eyes. The steady hum from  the last of the machinery that was still functional irritated him in a  way nothing in the virtual world they had left ever could. A sensation  he had never felt before until he started going on these adventures -- a  smell, from what he read -- filled his nostrils with something heavy,  negative, rank, dank, musty, words he never thought he'd have to use.  The place reminded him of the underground dungeons Danni and he were so  fond of conquering -- only there was no treasure at the end, no real way  of leaving and, from the look on Danni's face, tonight there would be  no triumphant victory over impossible odds that, after the other three  times the two dared to enter the real world, he had grown accustomed to.  He, of course, would do something about that.

"Janus, look at these readouts." She pointed to an old relic sitting  on the side wall of the little lab they were currently camping out in --  a screen, she called it once. "The energy signature of Sagittarius A*  has been steadily rising for the past 15 million years."

Janus chewed thoughtfully on a nutri-bar. "So?" Numbers and symbols  flickered and scrolled across the screen in a conflagration as rhythmic  and symphonic as it was incomprehensible to most people, even in these  times. To Danni and Janus, they were a secret language. To Janus,  expected. Yet, the perturbed look on Danni's face made it quite plain  that there was apparently something he missed -- and as his desire to  rub and knead away her growing frown increased, so did his concern.

"The mass and spin readouts -- here." She pointed at a table in the  lower left-hand corner of the screen. "Sag-A's energy output has been  steadily increasing, but the power output from the Penrose plant out  behind it have been decreasing for the past 5 million years. According  to this -- " Danni reached out her hands and spent a good half-minute  making her long, thin fingers stretch, draw and spin patterns across the  screen in a delicate dance that had always amazed Janus. She'd always  been the best in the field, even if the others didn't recognize it.  Janus winced as a few beeps blared from the screen's speakers, and a new  set of readouts popped up -- readouts that now gave him pause.

"Janus," Danni's voice dropped almost to a whisper. "Janus, I think  Sag-A's slowing down. It's been so long -- the sensors on the mirrors we  put out around it so long ago -- the pings from them have grown  linearly with Sag-A's power output and inversely with the Penrose's  plant's power decrease. That means the amount of Hawking radiation  emanating from Sag-A has steadily increased..."

Janus reached out a pale hand and gently rubbed her cheek. Janus  always loved the way her soft, smooth skin felt in the real world --  there was a texture to skin, to cloth, to steel, here that the virtual  world they have lived out most of their lives in thus far simply could  not emulate to its full, true extent. He gently stroked her teeny button  nose -- it was always so adorable, and the human bodies they generated  for themselves for use here in the real world emulated their appearance  in the virtual world exactly. Every delicate curve. Janus slowly ran a  hand through Danni's short, straight, red hair. She had it generated  such that it was only a few inches long, and it cupped her delicate face  as gently as his hand now did.

"What's wrong with that?" Janus purred. He brought his other hand up  to cup her face completely, and he leaned over, giggling softly as he  nuzzled the tip of his long, straight nose onto hers. Only when she  would have normally laughed in response and leaned in to kiss him, she  turned away. The sadness on her face was palpable. Now there was a  problem. Janus slowly snaked his hands down Danni's neck and rested them  on her shoulders, kneading them through her silky grey shirt.

"It's not like last time," she said. "We can harvest the Hawking  radiation, sure, save it for the others. It's so cold out there now that  the emanations the Penrose plant's AI picked up could power our hub for  aeons. But its overall power output for this station have decreased and  all of these factors indicate that Sag-A has been... shrinking."

"Well, yeah, black holes do that over time. We can just throw some more of the left-over hydrogen in it, and--"

"Exponentially."

Janus stopped. He turned and examined the readout for himself --  Sag-A's magnitude and brighness had also been growing steadily, and  right before Danni suggested they go on another daring venture to the  real world, it had some kind of spike. Janus reached out a hand and  gently coaxed the screen into opening up the brightness chart. A long  line stretched out from the lower left corner to the middle, where three  data points spiked and zig-zagged, forming the tell-tale signs of the  beginning of an upward curve. He knew what that meant. He knew what it  meant for Danni. He immediately shut off the screen.

"Hey," he whispered softly, scooting in closer to Danni's now shaking form. "Hey."

Janus wiped the tears flowing from Danni's big, soft blue eyes. "It's  going to be okay. We can always pack up shop -- move out to the one in  the Sombrero galaxy. That one's supposed to be even bigger than ours.  Supposedly it'll last quadrillions of years--"

"I checked the comms. The last signal we received from them is over  30 million years old. Their beacon, it... it red-shifted. They're too  close to the cosmological horizon for us to catch up to them now."

Danni's flow of tears erupted into an explosion of racked sobs and  she buried her face into her hands. Janus wrapped his lithe arms around  her, closing the distance between them, bringing her into his chest. One  hand ran his fingers through her hair and along her scalp, the other  across her back.

"We'll figure out a way, Danni, we will. It's what we do -- it's what we've always done."

"I -- I couldn't find a signal from anyone -- anyone -- they're all gone --"