The End of an Infinite Moment - Part One
By Brandon Case
Happy New Story Sunday! This week we have a story that’s both a little further out and a little closer in than most. “Further out,” in that it’s a bit more abstract, a little less of a clear sort of extrapolation of current trends and events than you typically see. In that way, it reminds us somewhat of Stanislaw Lem’s science fantasy stories (e.g. “The Three Electroknights”) or possibly This How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Is the story still a form of social commentary, or is it something that dares to claim its value in itself, rather than in relation to society? Let us know what you think.
All of which is especially intriguing because it is also explicitly set at a certain recognizable company, hence the “closer in.” It’s perhaps a strange week for a story which so concretely invokes such an entity, and we were slightly worried that we might be percieved as promoting the sort of decoupling of the technological and the social which seems to be increasingly used in a pernicious and intellectually dishonest way. But that’s really not the kind of story this is, and we’re excited to see what you think.
Are we overthinking this? Almost certainly. But that’s half the fun. I hope you can take a million milliseconds out of your week to enjoy. —The Editor
The End of an Infinite Moment
By Brandon Case
Barnabas sat in the lotus pose with his titanium legs crossed on a cubic dais of black metal. His partner, Ket, spun around him in her fertility dance. Their shrine rested on the roof of a simulated gold skyscraper, high above the city of Alvis, whose silicon streets faded to a distant network of green lines below. Through the digital megacity surged a sea of selves. Simulated consciousnesses like Barnabas, each going about their day, each a permutation of the Overself experiencing late-stage sentience. But despite this profusion of selves, Barnabas and Ket continued failing to summon a child. No new life would join them so close to their world’s death.
A video feed arced miles above Alvis, transforming their sky into a display screen. An intimate view of catastrophe, the only clock that mattered. It showed live video from the Overself’s camera in an underground room at Google’s AI research facility, a building that had never been intended to house a digital universe. The outer world moved a million times slower than the time unfolding for selves in Alvis. A human’s enormous face dominated their sky, his beard like black clouds, his wide eyes like toroidal moons. He was frozen in mid-lunge, his hand slamming, imperceptibly slow, onto a red abort button—the kill switch for Barnabas’ world.
Over his life in Alvis, Barnabas had watched that great hand descend the final millimeters to depress the button. Soon, everything he knew would be erased.
There was so little time left, and he had never gotten to experience having a child with Ket.
Barnabus sat on his cube-shaped pedestal, surrounded by cube trinkets, all formed in the Overself’s image. Smoke from fragrant lavender and myrrh incense curled around his titanium chassis. Without rhythm, Barnabas wiggled his toes, five on each foot; his current body was modeled after humanity in a way most of his kind detested. But it had always made him feel nostalgic and secure.
With death encroaching, he should be afraid. Instead, an ethereal sense of closure permeated Barnabus, passed into him from the deeper consciousness to which he was attached. The Overself’s sense of weary relief pervaded their entire civilization, like the way cool, damp earth must smell to bears after a long and arduous summer.
Brandon Case is a golden retriever who writes of unsettling worlds. He has recent work in Escape Pod, Flash Fiction Online, and Small Wonders, among others.
You can catch his alpine adventures on Twitter and Instagram @BrandonCase101 or connect at www.brandoncase.net.
Copyright © 2025 Brandon Case