When Sergei woke up, the Earth had vanished. He'd expected it - they'd all expected it - but to open his eyes and actually see nothing beneath them... That tore through his guts like a swallowed shot of liquid nitrogen. Jonathan and Eloise floated at the Space Station porthole, mute, haggard, as he pulled free of the cocoon.

"Five hours twenty-two minutes, Greenwich," she said, "April 2nd, 2019. Requiescat in pace."

"We turned off the radio a few hours before. It's stored in the computer," Jonathan said, facing the window.

Sergei floated to the wall, still numb from his drugged sleep. He had been awake for nearly two days before mission control medics insisted he get some rest. He hung upside down above the other astronauts.

The three looked out in silence as the stars spun past outside, a panoramic, pinwheeling show of the universe rotating around a pinpricked centre.

#

Brian Wilcox sat behind a keyboard in the main observation bay at the LHC-ALICE, ten stories beneath the Franco-Swiss border.

Thought about the upcoming weekend, planned to spend it with a brace of pellet guns and a few six-packs of Budweiser - real Budweiser - out by the substation, keeping watch for the birds of the 19th Baguette Bomber Wing.

Three uncomprehending seconds after the warning lights screamed into his eyes, harsh red amping up the aggression to let him know the alarm meant catastrophe, he leapt to scram the beam.

Automated safety systems shunted magnets and triggered plasma-window force fields around the explosions, but he had the job of putting fist to red plastic button. Not an April Fool's Day joke, surely, nobody would be so terminally stupid.

It sounded like a freight train running into a church bell.

Rainbow-coloured detector traces and warning messages crashed across computer monitors beneath CERN. The clanging roar switched off, replaced by the ululating wail of fire alarms.

Three of the other experiment monitors stood up shouting behind him as news of the malfunction spread around the globe to tied-in universities and he puzzled over error messages.

"What happened?"

"Kill the magnet power!"

"Get atmosphere numbers on the tunnels!" Gretzky shouted. Brian blinked - perceptive. If the magnets had gone normal, the thermal energy dumped into the liquid helium coolant would have vaporised it.

The inert gas would have displaced the oxygen around the beam line. Two steps and a breath and you'd fall over unconscious and choking.

"What is it saying?" The Canadian pulled a chair up close to the main terminal.

"Okay." Brian scrolled the screen back. "T-minus sixty-five nanoseconds, ITS and TPC shows a near-total drop off in energy output from the focus. Time of flight, though, means we've kept sending packets in. So the beam alignment interprets this to mean the streams weren't crossing."

"Were they?" Each beam had several kilotons of energy stored in the swirling nucleons - the slightest misalignment could lead to a critical failure.

"Can't tell. I wasn't getting any residual beam activity, but everything shot to hell and back down there. Breaches registered, fields triggered, magnets dump critical."

The other scientists shouted into the phones, calling in facility engineers, disaster-management teams, and fire-fighters. One of them leaned over the two physicists and handed them a walkie-talkie.

"Come on. There are masks at the entrance to the detector hall. Johansson will meet us there."

#

April 8th, 2019:

My name is Sergei Illyich Toundykov. I was born in 1973, July 11 in the Gregorian Calendar, to Maya and Daneel. I grew up in Leningrad, Russia, studied physics and geology in Moscow, and moved to Star City at thirty.

If I have time I will expand on this more. We have a Soyuz capsule, but Jonathan has done... did, the numbers - the best we can hope for is three-thousandths more of a gamma. I ran my own numbers on the well, and there's no way about it.

Maybe if we were a million times smaller, or if the Earth had been a million times bigger...

It just occurred to me - if there were bacteria in the upper atmosphere - Eloise would have known - they might make it. I don't think I'll run those numbers, but off the top of my head I think that they will probably keep on keeping on, forever. Longer than anything human, at least, which was to be expected.

Not like this, though.

#

The first explosion blew as they stepped into the experimental hall, the massive detector towering above them like a doughnut of the gods. A solid wave of heat and vaporised metal slammed out of the tunnel, vanishing the silhouetted figures who stood in its way.

Brian ducked behind a stanchion and felt the hair on his body burn off in an instant, leaving just a layer of parboiled ash and that stench.

Voices screamed, yelling and calling for fire extinguishers as the glowing flames of burning metal flickered out from the tunnel.

He stood up and took one step to run for the red telephone on the wall and got far enough to see the plastic sublimate into a pink cloud before his blood boiled in his brain as the second explosion poured out of the tunnel.

Sergei heard Eloise and Jonathan having sex in the Japanese science module. It wasn't hard - the walls were thin, and the station hadn't been designed with such activities foremost in mind. Still, he didn't say a word, just went about organising the station.

All of the science experiments could go - the crystals, the atomic traps, the precision clocks. He kept the algae and the seedlings, wrenching his mouth into a grin as he thought about it, and put the telescopes and cameras onto standby.

The computer disks he arranged and labelled before his three hours on the exercise bike, sweat wicking and oxygen burning as Tchaikovsky roared in his ears, songs of a dead earth.

In his bunk, scrounged from one of the modules in storage that would now never be launched, was a Hermes microsatellite. He'd removed the payload and made space for his journal and a few optical disks.

A redundant backup. He knew he couldn't get it to escape velocity - that hadn't changed - but he could still kick it out to another orbit, just in case.

Muscles burned with lactic acid, and he fought down a wave of space-sickness for the first time in months, spurred by the bottomless, infinite void beneath his feet.

#

Elizabeth killed CNN. The news stations could only report what they read off the Twitter feeds and forwarded e-mails, and she had a second monitor for that. Mission control had emptied just before the first reports filtered in, during the night-cycle above.

Then she killed the feeds. She'd seen enough. The words "chain reaction" and the conclusion that, inversion layer or not, it would happen soon. Like an internal combustion engine, sooner - not later - the heat and the vacuum would blend the conversions into one continual roar that would reach her, all the way on the other side of the globe.

A Google Wave window stopped in hysterical garble, "inter val starngelt blowws ff5.0", and she figured it would be soon. The ground rumbled and the lights went out. Each layer collapse now generated a world-wide seismic event, travelling at twice the speed of sound through stone.

She picked up the microphone and pressed to talk to the space station orbiting above the doomed Earth.

#

"Our prayers are with you. I will continue transmitting for as long as I can, until backup power — "Static." - in remembrance of us, of all of us. May God have mercy on our souls, and vouchsafe you until... as you go onward." Silence, for an aching time. "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light... Sic transit gloria mun--"

Dead air.

April 10th, 2019:

I realise now that a lot of what I wrote may not make much sense, if you can manage to translate it. In our calendar, one year is the length of time it takes for the Earth to orbit the sun once. Calibrate to the star at G4.5+6.8, which went nova in 1604.

It's divided further into twelve months, each with about thirty days. A day was one rotation of the Earth on its axis.

Russia was a country on one of the largest landmasses of the Earth. Groups of individuals join together to form organisations based around a certain extent of territory. Smaller groups are cities, which in turn make up the nations like atoms cleave together into molecules. Moscow and Star City were two such places.

There are many gigabytes of data stored here - I took the time to catalogue them myself, as Jonathan and Eloise completed their last spacewalk. The poetry of Keats, the science of Einstein and Ramanujan's maths.

Solzenhitsyn, Carroll, Locke and Jefferson. Text is easy to transmit - the soul of civilisation. We became, at a swoop, the biggest library in history and then, save for those within our electronic pages, the only, the last.

I've put most of the disks into the safety boxes already, to shield them from the cosmic rays - close your eyes and... I can see the sparkles in the dark as they tear through my vitreous humour. Lined in lead, in inert gases, we intend to use one of the spare rocket boosters to try and send it to the moon.

Jonathan says he knows how to edit the guidance system. We can spare it - it's not as if we're in any danger of falling into the atmosphere now. The danger of falling has passed us by forever, as odd as that may seem.

Earth may not be totally gone, but it is forever out of our reach nonetheless.

There, it will still be in vacuum, still in space orbiting, but it will at least have the moon between it and half of the rest of the universe. And even if it does get fried, and boiled, roasted in the cosmic fires or smashed by micrometeorites, well, at least it will still be there. That is more than I can say for the rest of it all.

#

Jonathan stayed awake, switching his tranquiliser for a tab of synthetic adrenaline. He felt that he had to hold vigil for the dying Earth. He had the best, the only vantage point on the end of the world.

The middle of Europe erupted into a cloud, the explosions following one another too fast for the mushroom cap to form in the upper atmosphere. Each pulse sent a shockwave through the cloudy sky below him, looking like the bellows of a jellyfish.

Matter collapsed onto the strangelet core where France and Switzerland once sat, positively charged nuclei falling against the newly bound states and shifting, changing. Transmuting into lower-energy configurations and blowing the difference back out, hitting against other infalling particles.

In a microsecond the first kinetic gas molecules formed an outrushing wave. In a millisecond, a solid front of exotic matter. The heat and pure energy released scoured space clear as the pressure wave erupted out and swept a clean vacuum around the compressing mass of strangelets.

Then the vacuum collapsed and the atmosphere, the oceans, the boiling rock of the core burst back up and made contact again.

For one moment, close to the end, it seemed the Earth might be saved, at least in part. The strangelet mass touched the core, stayed trapped as molten rock surrounded it at supersonic speeds, and detonated. The shrinking clump of invisible matter blew into the sky, seeming for a moment that it might escape.

Just for a moment.

It fell back, not quite reaching the Station on orbit, and the collapse of the Earth completed itself a few seconds later.

The three of them, the last three, orbited above last resting place of Earth, their planet's grave a hole dug in the fabric of spacetime as it shrank towards mathematical nothingness. Only its gravitation remained, stressing spacetime, holding the Station in its embrace.

Jonathan pulled the sun-shutter.

#

The night after Sergei heard them together (not that there was a day-night division anymore; he went by old Greenwich time) he found the note taped to the closed hatch to the CERES radio telescope experiment. Both of them had signed it. It was short. It didn't need to be long.

Through the frosted glass he could see the two frozen bodies, still desiccating slowly into the vacuum of space. The maintenance hatch to the outside had been wrenched open after they had tied themselves to support beams and embraced. A fine pink snow of boiled, crystallised blood swam in the dim red lights.

#

"April 12th. Twenty... nineteen.

"It occurs to me now how laughable my earlier thoughts were. How foolishly proud of this library I was, how foolishly vain to think that any of it would even be read. I gave names of my parents, but that word is meaningless without knowledge of human sexual reproduction, behaviour, sociology, psychology, everything.

I'd have to mention all of that, and somehow explain individuality too. And love, affection, all of human history and geography.

"And it still wouldn't be enough. No-one will ever read these words, no-one will ever understand these recordings. Every verb, every noun, every adjective and adverb is now abstracted to infinity and beyond.

I can't say that I saw the green tree because there are no trees, there is nothing green, and soon enough there will not even be a me to see.

"I suppose mathematics remains, but mathematics always was, has been, and forever will be. How stupid I was to ever think that my words could exist after the world ended. To think that they, that I, could long endure when all else is obliterated.

"I'll shrug to futility then, and consider this both an acknowledgment of all our specie's striving futility and an upraised middle finger to fate, entropy, and the nature of the universe.

"Goodbye."

Sergei finished speaking the last sentence, his pen scratching on for a few more seconds. He slipped the paper in a small hermetically sealed steel sphere atop a stack of optical disks.

He would launch the satellite towards the place the moon would be when it arrived, away from all of this, and then don one of the EVA suits.

He calculated that if he pulled the auxiliary fuel tanks from the other suit, and ran a modified de-orbit burn on the station beforehand, he could make it down into the photon sphere, where his six and a half billion fellow men, women and children now resided, a global hell that had devoured them all in a single day.

#

In Russia in winter 2018, ten days before Christmas - countries, seasons, years and holidays that within a year would mean nothing, which would be gone forever and always within a year, Sergei Toundykov climbed into the cramped Soyuz orbiter and gave the thumbs up to his ground crew. Over his radio, one of the ground control scientists crackled.

"One small step for a man, one giant leap for a hopeless romantic who can't hold his liquor."

Sergei grinned. Two nights ago he had gone out with the rest of the team and ended up waxing rhapsodic about the night sky above before showing up the next morning nursing a headache and a self-induced black eye.

"Or maybe, to go boldly where no man has gone before?

"But I prefer this one," he said. Unseen, he smiled, then grew serious. He murmured words remembered from his engineering literature course, the words an American Englishman named Thomas Stearns Eliot uttered a lifetime earlier as his great adopted city of London burned.

"We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time."

---