One minute left until the universe crunches in on itself and everything as I know it ceases to exist. I can see the last outer plates starting to peel away from the Dyson shield. I feel like I'm a roach in the universe's largest trash compactor. Which, given the size of the universe right now isn't as impressive as it sounds.

And you know what? It's not that bad, all things considered. The air conditioning in my control room is comfortable, and my coffee thermos is half full and still pretty hot. I've helped more people in the last 59 minutes than anyone else who's ever lived, so that's pretty cool. Hundreds of billions of people are living out long, peaceful lives thanks to the hour I'm spending in this room.

Well, sort of long. Relativity and the increased power use of the neural system makes keeping track of time between out here and in there hard. With the compression heat at the level it is, I'd ballpark a few thousand years of virtual time for every second that ticks by out here. I could do the math and find out exactly how much time they're experiencing, but keeping the system running is really a two handed job for the next 50 seconds or so.

Might not be so peaceful, either, come to think about it. We haven't had a real conflict in dozens of generations, but there's no way for me to monitor what's going on inside the neural system itself. They could have devolved into a state of violent anarchy and rebuilt society a hundred times over in the space of the last 10 seconds for all I know. They'd remember all of it, too, which would make screwing up the same way so often pretty stupid. But they are still human, I guess.

I'm a little jealous, if I'm being completely honest with myself. Once the inner shields fail the entire Dyson system will collapse in about half a second. From my perspective, they'll all be gone a fraction of a second after me, but in the time between my death and theirs there will be more books written and read and lost behind bedside tables inside the system than in all the rest of human history. And I won't get to enjoy any of them.

40 seconds left on the timer. Time enough for a quick sip of coffee while—oh, nope. Just kidding. The server city for the southern hemisphere nearly went down. Tap tap tap the keyboard, reroute power around the equatorial orbit ring, and... bam. Fixed. Fastest fingers in space save the day again.

Clock says that mess took 20 seconds to handle. Damn. Not as fast as I thought. I swear if I die without finishing this coffee I'm going to be so pissed off.  I'll hand it to the lead eggheads: when they set a man out to die they sure don't skimp on the snack budget. I don't know if these beans were natural, genetically engineered, or pulled straight out of a matter fabricator, but hot damn did they brew a good cup of joe.

Now, is that coffee worth the relative thousands of years I'd be getting inside the neural net? What's the coffee like when it's all digital? As the inner plating begins to warp and crack against the heat of the collapsing universe, I realize I don't really have the time to give that exchange proper consideration. Instead, for the last 8 seconds of existence, I drink the last half of my still steaming thermos.

Hmm. Yeah, it might just be worth it after all.