text: Man has always feared the dark. In the most ancient times we huddled around fires to hold back the dark. To hold back what the dark concealed. The light, the heat, the fire; it provided protection from the wolves and cold out there trying to kill us. Man used that energy to conquer a world; and then again to leave that world and slowly, ever so slowly, conquer a galaxy. It took billions of years, but man pushed back the dark. But it is not possible to overcome the basic nature of the universe. Heat dissipates, order devolves. Even stars must concede to entropy. Generations of stars died their explosive deaths, seeding space with the material for the next generation. Man escaped those worlds and moved on. But eventually, there wasn't enough density of matter for new stars to ignite. Man stepped in and brought the ingredients together, but even that only bought time. And time was the only thing the dark had. Finally the last generation of stars was dying. An entire galactic empire very slowly unraveled over uncounted eons. All the planets which had been hospitable to life were destroyed by novas or were left frozen by their stars collapse. Planets were abandoned by those with the ability, the rest perished. Generations lived and died in vast fleets, living off massive stockpiles of energy and food. Over the eons even these resources were depleted. The fleets grew cold and died, derelict graveyards floating un-powered in deep space. In a final desperate hope for warmth some small colonies were set up on brown dwarfs. They brought all the food and power available with them; leaving behind the cold dead hulks, suckling on the lingering warmth of aborted stars. After a few thousand more generations all their equipment and tools began to run down and wear out. Man receded to a simplistic life devoid of any appreciable technology other than hyperspace communications. Food and light and connection were all that mattered, and only what they had brought with them was available. They carefully planned and conserved the stabilized rations and chemical lamps they had inherited from their forefathers. But even those vast stores gradually reached an end. They managed their own decline, each generation bearing fewer and fewer children trying to make sure there would be enough resources for one more generation. There was no celebration in the final colony when the last messages went unanswered. They knew they were the last vestige of humanity, and in a few brief generations they too would succumb. The final couple knew they should end it, but could not resist the warmth and comfort they provided for each other and inadvertently had one last baby. At the end, the lonely man sat in a room deep inside a brown dwarf with piles of stabilized rations all around him. As the green glow from his last chemical light burned out, a complete darkness such as no human had ever experienced enveloped him utterly. And he knew fear, not because anything was out there to kill him, but because he knew nothing was.