The nightmare woke me with a start, the clock showed the time: 00:00, the countdown was already begun. It was difficult to rise out of the bed due to my intoxicated state, the room was still blurring around me but eventually I could stand up and the solidity of things returned.

For a brief moment, I looked outside and saw a rapid cycling of the sky from dark to light that inspired a great panic, but the cycle rapidly returned things to the correct state again, the clock jumping to 12:00 and back to 00:01.

The cycles were always haunting, but this one - the penultimate cycle - was the worst of them all, because I watched myself lieing dead and covered in blood, an image which sent shivers down my spine but which quickly faded.

In order to save myself, I would have to be quick, the intoxication was wearing off and I had a firm grasp on reality. Sometimes, I wondered if I could perhaps have too firm a grasp on reality, because for many years I have been haunted by nightmares wherein the stars go blank and the earth fades away, but while in this world I was able to escape that very real and deadly fate.

The intoxication had fully worn off by 1:30am, dawn was due at 6am - the image of my dead self flashed through my head, lieing alone and dead for 6 hours. My assassin I am sure would arrive at dawn. To escape, I needed to flee, I did not know who was responsible for my future death, but I knew I had seen it occur many times during the cycles, always in this house and in my bed.

By 2am, I had dressed, and grabbed what I could - a mobile phone, a wristwratch, and a pistol. Although I had never had firearms training, something told me it would be wise to pack one.

Walking outside onto the street, the sky went light again, and watching my wristwatch I feared I would not cycle back to the right moment quickly enough to avoid being caught by my assassin, thankfully this time the cycle went only to 5am - 3 hours from now. The sky did not light up as brightly as before, only the preludes to dawn appeared momentarily, but it concerned me that this event was getting closer and closer.

One thing that is odd about my home, is that it's within a ghost town - for an event a few years back caused the vast majority of mankind to simply "go away". Of the few that stayed here, a few million or so on the whole planet the average incidences of depression and various other mental illnesses has shot up by nearly 5000%, I have never actually met anyone that stayed behind who hasn't at one time or another considered suicide. Some looked into the great darkness beyond this world and became so terrified by the weight of it that they could no longer tolerate any form of existence.

I have known their nihilism, and I have known some joy - but nothing can ever undo what is happening already. We can not cheat the laws of nature like this forever, eventually I too will have to face that great and dark void of the beyond. Perhaps I will be able to overcome it and thus survive, perhaps not. Many have tried and stepped back from the brink - surviving, but within this world. Some don't even survive within this world, once the veil is pulled back they can no longer live with the truth.

This all started with the tiniest little chip. Sometime in the late 21st century, mankind finally perfected the quantum computer - a "quantum leap" in processing power that rivalled everything seen throughout human history. Scientists quickly got to work, building numerous simulations with the technology, perfect 100% accurate models of the known laws of physics capable of emulating any physical system you care to think of.

An old friend of mine, much wiser than me, was at the time employed as a technician for one of these huge projects. His job consisted of the mundane tasks of checking system log files, updating the software on the more traditional digital computers and so on, which while not deeply exciting gave him enough of an income to pursue other passions.

One day, he came back from work and for no reason that anyone could fathom he swallowed his own pistol. His last will and testament left this very same pistol to me and a cryptic warning:

I always knew it was turing complete, I always knew about the probabilities involved, but I never accepted it until I saw it

A few months after his suicide, people started to simply vanish - a few random cases here and there at first, until the populations of whole cities were simply gone. Witnesses described only that those who vanished smiled, sometimes saying goodbye to family or friends and then just disappeared without a fuss.

Not everyone simply vanished though, in some cases people would break down emotionally in public, gripped by a sudden crippling primitive fear they would scream and rant at all present, often violently lashing out and then taking their own lives in despair. The news reports on TV were chilling, and not all that different from Nietzsche's parable of the madman. Since my nightmares, one section of that parable is always playing on my mind:

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?
Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving?
Away from all suns?
Are we not plunging continually?
Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions?
Is there still any up or down?
Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing?
Do we not feel the breath of empty space?
Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?

At night, when I should be at rest, I experience nightmares. Inside those nightmares, I am standing in a vast and empty field, grasshoppers are hopping everywhere and overhead one by one the stars just go out. Each star going out sends the grasshoppers into a frenzy, and they almost appear to spawn more of themselves. All the while, the horizon becomes more blurry and I feel a sense of time running out. Often, I am awoken from these nightmares by a sudden image of nothingness - a great and dark void.

Now in my waking reality, I felt that cold and dreadful ticking of time running out, my assassin would surely already be on his way to my location. I fired up my motorcycle and began to ride out of town, feeling the wind across my body and hoping that I would get away in time. The roaring of the wind and the enginge could not silence one little sound:

tick tock... tick tock.....

While driving, thoughts of when the cycles started flowed into my mind. From what i'd saw, everyone experienced them differently - I was gifted in that they were infrequent and did not last long. Some poor souls apparently walked the eras in their own private hell before returning to now. One unfortunate gentleman claimed to have seen the end of the solar system as the sun went supernova, watched the ground beneath his feet blast away while an enormous ball of fire filled the sky, arriving back in the present just in time not to be burnt to death.

At first, the reports of the cycles, like the disappearances, were dismissed as mass hysteria. But as both events increased in frequency, the authorities were forced to respond. Religious groups also jumped on the bandwagon, many declaring that judgement day would soon be upon us. Proclomations by government and church conspired to worsen affairs and the suicide rates shot up even further, some even organised group suicide cults.

My wise and deceased friend who seemed to have suffered from some maddness at the time of his death very quickly appeared to me to have some hidden insight, and that is why on that dark morning I was riding towards his home - his wife had stayed there, and even through her grief had not surrendered to death. I hoped she could have some insight into what my friend had known, and I hoped this insight could potentially save my own life.

I arrived at his house at 3am, fearful that I only had 2 hours to resolve this mystery - for surely my assassin would try to follow my trail once he found me gone. Knocking on the door, an attractive brunette woman answered and rushed me inside, grabbing me before I could talk. The room got blurry, and I realised she was pushing me down and trying to seduce me. When solidity returned, she pulled back screaming.

"YOU ARE NOT MY HUSBAND"

She burst into tears, and although she at first seemed angry, she fell forward again into my arms, explaining she briefly saw her husband. I understood her, nobody's mind has been fully intact since these strange events started. I asked her if I could take a look at her late husband's computer, a request she simply nodded her consent to before she went to lie down. With her pretty face still reddened by tears, she was a poster child for grief.

I logged into my late friend's computer, and looked through his harddrive. Alongside a collection of various personal photo albums, some music and a few assorted games there was also a video link to the output from his employer's simulator.

Opening it, I saw a man sitting at a computer, puzzled by this I thought that perhaps it was an old colleague of his, but then realised that the desk was all too familiar. So was the man.

What I was looking at, was me - I looked behind me, but could not see any kind of camera. Digging further, I looked into the research notes and source code for the simulator, looking for anything related to surveillance.

I found nothing about surveillance, but what I did find was deeply disturbing.

A bug report had been filed by one of the scientists working on the project. Apparently the simulation had an inconsistent framerate due to some kind of weird interfacing issue between the digital computers and the quantum computers. Every now and then, parts of the simulation would rapidly speed up, ruining the last few minutes or even hours of research and then return to normal. The proposed work-around was to reset to known good checkpoints, turning back the clock.

The problem was that the first time the bug workaround was tried, it didn't just turn back the clock inside the simulation - it turned it back in reality too. While a technician sat at a terminal, he would be dragged backwards in time. Writing this up, some of the scientists got excited and proposed multiple theories for this effect, considering it an easy means of achieving actual time travel.

For a few months, they experimented, until they discovered that something else weird was occurring. Within the simulation, when they created a large simulation the time distortion effects would rapidly increase. The date of the report on this incident was the date of my friend's death.

Looking further into what he did that day, I found source control logs indicating he had made changes to the sourcecode of the simulation output viewer, but in a private branch. That meant the software running on his computer had been changed just for him.

I could not fathom the changes he had made, he seemed to have written 1000s of lines of code in the hours just before his own suicide. The code looked messy in parts, not elegant but very rushed, not his usual style. He was known for preferring elegance and beauty in software, but this looked rushed and was full of messy hacks.

The end result from what I can tell is that he was hijacking one of the quantum chips and without uploading any simulation into it was still getting back video footage.

One does not need to be a genius to figure out where that footage was coming from, but to test my theory I grabbed some pen and paper from his desk, wrote a few random numbers on it and held it up, the man on the screen copied me - with the same numbers. I moved the virtual camera around, and I could observe everything. I did not dare to mess with the time, even if I may have gotten some useful information on my assassin.

However, that didn't matter - a new cycle started, my small amount of interaction seemed to kick off some hidden process and I began to jump from moment to moment, but more and more that great and terrible dark void cut into my perception.

For the first time, I saw what else was in that darkness, only briefly I witnessed an object floating in empty space - a round and smooth black sphere, only visible if you are able to look closely. While looking upon it, I felt as though as I was both falling and staying completely stationary, a sensation which inspired utter terror in me but left me intact.

I cycled back, and noticed with terror that the time was 5:45am.

Grabbing my pistol, I ran outside, and covered the area with it, looking for my assassin. Some terror, greater than the fear of my impending death, was rising within me. I kept on seeing that blackness in my mind's eye, scared that I would actually cut over into that dark place for real. My wristwatch was ticking loudly.

Screaming, I felt myself switchover into that dark place again, I gripped my pistol hard as if it was an anchor that could keep me together in the void. Nietzsche was talking metaphorically, but I was sure I could literally feel the breath of empty space. This was not however merely the death of god, something much greater was happening - it felt like we were all on our deathbeds.

I cycled back at 6am, totally exhausted - and in the worst possible place. I was in my bedroom, at 6am. As the assassin walked through the door, I did not get a chance to look at his face before I cycled again, back to that great void.

When I next cycled, I felt myself floating, until the sphere before me opened - something pulled me inside, and like a mythical near death experience I saw a great white light.

Inside the sphere was a collection of equipment that looked utterly alien, but with some familiar aspects - various computer terminals were around the polished white walls, some with people sitting at them. In other parts of the sphere lay tables of equipment, some with laserbeams bouncing between mirrors and metal piping.

The people working at the terminals did not appear to notice me. I felt myself floating and could not walk, and floated around the sphere observing some of the terminals. The language of the text upon the screens was foreign to me, as was the words being exchanged between these people. Although they were certainly human, they appeared completely alien to me.

One of them without warning jumped out of their chair, pointing at the terminal and screaming in that foreign language. As they did so, the sphere went blurry and faded out, total darkness replaced it.

I felt a great wave pass through me, like the void was a black liquid. A bright light shone in the distance, followed by an explosion and then my life flashed before my eyes.

Not only did my whole life flash before my eyes, but after seeing my own life I began to see every single moment of everyone's life - every single person who has ever lived. I witnessed all of history in an instant, and then I understood.

It has long been theorised that at the end of time an event will occur that will release unimaginable amounts of energy, enough that if a civilisation advanced enough was to collect it, the energy could be used to power a long-running computational process that would last an infinite amount of time relative to the execution of the process itself, even if time itself runs for a finite period.

With enough energy, you can keep a computer running forever, even at the end of time. I understood now what was happening.

The laws of physics are commonly believed to be a subset turing complete, if you have enough information about them and you have enough processing power you can build a virtual universe. Within that virtual universe, you could outlive the end of the real universe.

A problem however is that certain events are influenced by the lower levels of quantum mechanics, classical mechanics is turing complete, but it is unknown how low level quantum mechanics functions. Throw the same configuration of particles together in 2 places and apply the same forces and different things can easily happen. To manage this, one shortcut you might use would be random number generators in your simulation.

In order to get good random entropy, the best method to use is more quantum-level events. The real universe thus always leaks into the virtual. I do not know if I was born inside of the simulation or if at some point mankind was en masse uploaded into it after being saved from some destruction.

All I know is that this sudden realisation filled me with despair, because it meant the end was already here. Because of bugs in the simulation these leaks were getting more and more intense, but outside the end of time could easily be less than a millisecond away.

Some realised this, perhaps the leaks occurred directly into their mind. Some were able to accept the truth and move into a different simulation, filled with joy. Others were not able to accept the truth, and their resulting psychosis grief them - they gazed into the darkness and saw the end.

I felt myself cycle back to 5:59am, my pistol in hand. Around me, the world was fading in and out, pieces of that sphere were fading into my view overlayed onto the ordinary world I was accustomed to.

One thing that I knew was that I could not withstand the pain of this crippling truth. My pistol was in hand.

My pistol was in hand, and I was standing outside my bedroom.

My wristwatch was ticking.

Time itself was ending.

I opened the bedroom door, I saw myself there, and that other me pulled out the very same pistol I was holding.

I knew what I would think in that situation.

I was on my bed, my assassin stood before me. The clock was ticking, I raised my pistol.

I was standing up, seeing myself.

Could I save myself if I were to use self-defence?

I do not know.

The clock was at 5:59am and 59 seconds.

I pointed the gun at my bed and pulled the trigger.

You do realise it's a work of fiction, yes?

The protagonist is a fictional character, not me.

I should also note that if you read the ending carefully, it never actually says he commits suicide.
Yes, he shoots his past self - but that need not automatically imply suicide.