Arthur Blackwood knew, the moment the arksip crossed Pluto's orbit, that he was the last man in the universe.

From this vantage point, the sun was a dim star, no different from how it had appeared thirty years of ship-time ago when he first left the solar system. But the arksip's computer had just completed a parallax measurement, and the results told him something his heart refused to accept: Pluto's orbit had shifted outward considerably. From this, he could calculate that the sun had lost 4.74 percent of its mass. And from that, another conclusion, one that made his hands tremble and then go cold as ice.

It had already happened.

The thing had happened.

Arthur pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the observation window and watched the sun shrink to a pinprick of light behind him. He had known, of course. Humanity had known. They had launched thousands of probes through the sun and determined that it would undergo a brief energy flash, losing approximately five percent of its mass. They had told him this before he left. They had told him everything.

But knowing and seeing are different things. Knowing is a philosophical concept, a thing to be discussed over tea in well-lit rooms. Seeing is a fact that sits in your chest like a stone.

The arksip had traveled for twenty-three years of ship-time. But this was arksip time. Because the vessel moved at near-light speed, twenty-five thousand five hundred years had passed on Earth.

Originally, the arksip could have returned on schedule. But near-light speed made communication impossible. The vessel had to decelerate to below half light-speed to receive signals from Earth. This required enormous energy and time. The arksip decelerated once each month, receiving whatever signals Earth had managed to send. Each time it decelerated again, the messages it received were over a century older.

The last message from Earth had arrived at ship-year thirteen, Earth-year seventeen thousand. One month later, when the arksip decelerated again, the direction of Earth was silent. Dead silent. The calculations made seventeen thousand years ago might have been slightly wrong. In that single month, over those one hundred plus years of Earth-time, it had happened.

The arksip had become a true ark. But it contained only one Noah.

Seven pioneers had left Earth. Four died from the radiation of a nova that erupted four light-years from their course. Two died of disease. One—a man—had shot himself during the last deceleration communication, listening to the silence from Earth.

Arthur was the last.

He had kept the arksip at communicable speed for a long time after that, accelerating to light-speed, then decelerating again and again, driven by the faint ember of hope. The return journey was lengthened considerably by these frequent decelerations.

Twenty-five thousand five hundred years of Earth-time later, the arksip returned to the solar system. Nine thousand years late.

Now Arthur was descending to Earth in the landing pod, following a signal that had been emitted from the planet's surface. A video signal. A welcome signal. A signal that contained a girl.

The girl on the screen was perhaps sixteen years old, with a face that fused Eastern and Western features into something uncanny and beautiful. She waved at him from a platform in what appeared to be a vast plaza filled with people.

"Hey, we see you!" she called, her voice sweet as honey. "You look like a star flying fast! Are you Ark Number One?!"

Arthur watched her with the weary eyes of a man who had spent twenty-five thousand five hundred years in the void. He had built countless虚假 worlds in the arksip's virtual reality game during the lonely years. He could see immediately that the girl was a construct—a computer-generated image, poorly made. The errors were too many: people jumping from hundreds of meters up and landing unharmed; others leaping up building walls as if they possessed supernatural grace; crystal spheres floating in the air, into which people reached and pulled out small portions that became tiny spheres in their hands, which they then ate.

It was a crude fabrication. The mind that created it had been twisted by the approach of apocalypse.

"Is there anyone else alive?" Arthur asked.

"Someone like you?" the girl asked, her wide eyes filled with天真.

"Real people like me. Not computer-generated虚拟人 like you."

"The previous arkship returned seven hundred and thirty years ago. You are the last arkship to return. Tell me—do you have women on your ship?"

"Only me."

"No women?!" The girl's eyes widened. Then she covered her face with both hands and began to cry. Behind her, the entire plaza erupted in synchronized weeping.

Arthur's heart sank. The extinction of humanity was confirmed.

Then the girl looked up, her sadness vanished as if it had never existed. "You don't ask who I am?"

"I have no interest."

"I am the Earth Leader!" she called to the plaza.

"yes, she is the highest执政官 of the Earth United Government!" the people behind her chorused, their sadness instantly transforming into兴奋.

Arthur turned away. He was done with this.

"前辈，您马上就要到达地球首都了——" The girl's voice continued through the video glasses he wore. He switched to a downward view and saw black wasteland stretching to the horizon.

He landed. He stepped out. The air was thin but breathable. The temperature was minus forty degrees. The sky was a deep blue, the sun bright but cold. He removed his glove and held it beneath the sunlight. Felt nothing.

The black ground was rippled, like frozen waves. This was rock that had melted and re-solidified two thousand years ago. Somewhere in the distance, a frozen ocean gleamed white on the horizon.

Arthur found the source of the signal: a transparent hemispherical dome embedded in the rock, about one meter in diameter. Below it, something complex and intricate. He leaned over it and peered inside. He could not make out the tiny structures, but he saw in his left lens the girl's face, magnified a hundred million times, filling the entire sky of the虚拟 world.

"We see you! Can you see us?!" she cried. "Get a magnifying glass!"

Arthur understood everything.

He remembered the people jumping from buildings. In a micro-environment, gravity causes no harm. At that scale, a person could leap hundreds of meters. The crystal spheres were water—tiny water droplets held together by surface tension. The floating objects in the city's space, including the large branch that had carried the girl through the air, were simply dust particles.

The city was not虚拟. It was as real as all cities had been twenty-five thousand five hundred years ago. It was exactly one meter in diameter. Inside the transparent glass dome.

Humanity was still here. Civilization was still here.

The Earth Leader, a girl of perhaps sixteen years, extended her hand toward Arthur through the glass, her expression confident in a way that was both touching and heartbreaking.

"前辈，微纪元欢迎您."

Arthur stood over the dome for a long time. Inside, he could now distinguish the skyscrapers—they looked like dense clusters of matchsticks standing upright. The arksip's video feed showed him the micro-city's traffic: hundreds of feather-like vehicles, each carrying dozens of micro-people, flying through the spaces between buildings. Occasionally two "feathers" collided. Occasionally a micro-person leaped from a window and missed a feather, beginning a dizzying fall. But they were unharmed. At that scale, collision was harmless. A grain of dust colliding with another grain of dust sustained no damage.

The girl's voice came through his video眼镜: "Your eyes are like a black sea, so deep, so full of sorrow. Your sorrow has covered our city. You've turned it into a museum!"

She began to cry again. Behind her, everyone cried with her. The feathers crashed between buildings as if in a daze.

"Why a museum?" Arthur asked.

"Because only museums have sorrow! The Micro Era is an era without sorrow!"

"We are the era without sorrow!" others cheered, their tears already gone.

Arthur felt something shift inside him. The micro-people's emotional changes were a hundred times faster than macro-people's. They could leap from sadness to joy in an instant. And this joy itself was strange: negative emotions like sorrow and melancholy were so rare in their world that the micro-people treated them as curiosities, eager to experience them whenever possible.

"You shouldn't be melancholy like a child," the Earth Leader said. "You'll find there's nothing to be sorrowful about in the Micro Era."

"But sorrow is beautiful," she added, tears already forming again. "Like moonlight on water. It represents the pastoral love of the Macro Era—"

"You don't know what sorrow is, little one. True sorrow cannot be cried."

"You'll show us!" she said, already cheerful again.

Arthur sighed. "I hope not."

He led them to the arksip. The micro-people flew on their feather-vehicles and landed on Arthur's finger. He estimated ten thousand of them. They looked like a small patch of white powder drifting onto the translucent mountain ranges of his fingerprint.

The Earth Leader jumped first and fell flat on her back. "Your finger is too slippery! You have oily skin!"

She took off her shoe and threw it far away, then ran barefoot across the fingerprint mountains, curious and laughing.

Inside the arksip, someone shouted: "Look at the metal sky! The artificial sun!"

"Don't be a fool," the Earth Leader scolded, but she was also looking around in wonder. Then she and the others began to sing:

Glorious Macro Era, Great Macro Era, Sorrowful Macro Era, You are a dream lost in fire...

As the landing pod ascended back to the arksip, the Earth Leader continued telling the story of the Micro Era.

"In the twenty or so generations before the Micro Era fully took over, micro-society and macro-society coexisted. The micro-humans mastered all macro-knowledge and inherited their culture. But then—"

She told Arthur about the war between macro-humans and micro-humans. The macro-humans refused to surrender power. How could a handful of bacteria lead humanity? The war was brief. Macro-weapons could not target invisible enemies. Their only weapon was disinfectant, and they had never defeated bacteria in their entire civilization.

"The war criminals received their due punishment," the girl said fiercely. "Thousands of micro-special forces dropped lasers onto their retinas."

After the war, the micro-humans took control. The Macro Era ended. The Micro Era began.

"Now think about it," Arthur said.

"Those war criminals received their due punishment—"

Arthur showed them the arksip. The micro-people were stunned by its size.

"Now we understand," the Earth Leader said. "Even without the sun's energy flash, the Macro Era would have died. Your resource consumption was hundreds of millions of times ours."

"But this ship can travel at near-light speed," Arthur said. "It can reach stars hundreds of light-years away. Only the great Macro Era could do this."

"We cannot do that yet. Our fastest ship reaches one-tenth light-speed."

"How big is your ship?"

"The largest is the size of your football, carrying over a hundred thousand people. The smallest is the size of your golf ball."

Arthur's last sense of superiority vanished.

Then the Earth Leader asked him for food. Arthur opened a can of luncheon meat and placed a small piece on the console. Behind the girl's screen, people rushed toward a pink mountain of meat, grabbing pieces and eating. The piece on the console did not diminish.

"Not good," she said, shaking her head at a bite she had taken.

They asked for alcohol. Arthur produced a bottle of Maotai he had kept since launch. He poured some into the cap. The micro-people climbed the cap like a cliff and drank from the liquid lake within.

The Earth Leader dipped her foot into the liquor, scooped a droplet, and tasted it. "The Macro Era's wine is better than the Micro Era's."

"I didn't think we had even survived in alcohol!" Arthur said.

"We inherited all beautiful things from humanity. But those macro-people thought we had no right to represent civilization—"

The girl was drunk now, swaying on the console. She recited philosophy: "No man can step in the same river twice; the Dao produced One, One produced Two, Two produced Three, Three produced all things!"

"We appreciate Van Gogh's paintings! We listen to Beethoven! We perform Shakespeare!"

"But in our era, a girl like you would never become a world leader in the Macro Era."

"The Macro Era was an era of sorrowful politics," the Earth Leader said, more lucid now. "The Micro Era is an era without sorrow. It needs joyful leaders."

Arthur listened to them speak of their history, their wars, their preparation for the coming disaster. They had built thousands of super-cities deep underground, each city a stainless steel sphere two meters in diameter, housing millions. When the solar flash came, the entire micro-population migrated underground.

Four hundred years after the disaster, the first micro-people emerged from underground tunnels, drilling through solidified magma with lasers. Five more centuries passed before they rebuilt civilization on the surface. Ten thousand cities. Eighteen billion people.

"The micro-humans' optimism about humanity's future is enormous, far beyond anything the Macro Era could imagine," Arthur said. "This optimism is based on the micro-society's small scale. This smallness makes humanity millions of times more resilient in the universe."

As a man of the Macro Era, Arthur understood the micro-civilization's enormous advantage. It was myth. It was epic.

"Life's evolutionary trend is toward smallness. Large does not equal great. The dinosaurs went extinct. The contemporaneous ants survived."

For a long time, Arthur was silent. Then he spoke to the sea of micro-people on his coin-sized area of the console:

"When I first saw Earth again, when I thought I was the last man in the universe, I was the most sorrowful of all humanity. The greatest sorrow is a dead heart. No one has faced that heart-deadening境况. But now, I am the happiest of all humanity, or at least the happiest of the macro-people. I have seen the continuation of human civilization. Actually, 'continuation' is not enough to describe the Micro Era. This is the sublimation of human civilization. We are of one lineage. Now I request that the Micro Era accept me as an ordinary citizen of your society."

"We already accepted you when we detected the arksip. You can live on Earth. The Micro Era can sustain a macro-life for you."

"I will live on Earth, but I need everything from the arksip. The ship's ecological system can maintain my remaining life. Macro-people must no longer consume Earth's resources."

Arthur looked at the micro-people, these tiny, joyful, unsorrowful beings who had inherited all of human philosophy and art and managed to build something new from the ashes of the old.

Then he went to the冷藏舱.

Inside, rows of shelves held hundreds of thousands of sealed tubes—seeds, the arksip's seed vault. And beside them, more shelves: the embryo vault, containing embryo cells of over ten thousand animal species from Earth.

Arthur walked to the section marked HOMO SAPIENS MACRO.

He took out one hundred sealed tubes.

These were embryo cells of his contemporaries. Macro-human embryos.

He carried them to the laser waste incinerator. He looked back at the冷藏舱 one more time, making sure he had not missed any tubes. He returned to the incinerator.

He pressed the button.

At hundreds of thousands of degrees, the sealed tubes vaporized instantly. The embryos inside them—thousands of years of accumulated genetic information, the last biological legacy of the Macro Era—became nothing. No ash. No trace. Just heat dissipating into the arksip's ventilation system.

Arthur stood there and watched the incinerator's light fade.

He thought of the micro-people on the console, drunk on Maotai, reciting Heraclitus and Laozi, laughing with a joy that was both genuine and manufactured. He thought of the Earth Leader, Eleanor, who could cry and laugh in the same breath, who had never known true sorrow but had been taught to value it as a rare aesthetic experience.

He thought of the cultivation pods he had not found, because in this version of events, there were no cultivation pods. There was no conspiracy. There was only the simple, terrible fact that the Macro Era was over and the Micro Era had begun.

The micro-humans were not his children. They were not his heirs. They were something new. Something that had grown from human DNA and microbial life after the solar flash had melted the Earth's surface to four thousand degrees.

They were humanity's successor. And they were happy.

Arthur Blackwood, the last macro-human pioneer, sat in the arksip's observation deck and watched the micro-city through the glass dome. He watched the feather-vehicles fly between the matchstick buildings. He watched the micro-people live their tiny, joyous, unsorrowful lives.

And he understood, with a clarity that was both comfort and devastation, that the Micro Era did not need him. It did not need the Macro Era. It only needed what it already had: itself.

He closed his eyes. The sun shone through the viewport, a dim star behind him. The universe was vast and indifferent. And somewhere below, in a one-meter glass dome, tiny humans were laughing.