Here I stood at the end of the world, I had to give it one more try. Dry wind hissed past my ears and swept streamers of snow and dust past me; these soared in clouds into the Void as the air of Earth bled away from the land. I adjusted my breather over my nose, checked my wingsuit, and inspected the great wall of nothing before me, just refractive hints of atmosphere fading off into starless black as Void continued to eat the Earth.

I listened to the whistling wind until I fancied I could hear the voices of those who went before me. I remembered my buddy sharing some of the lore he’d gotten from those who leaped over, before he took the plunge himself. When you hear the singing, you will know it is time. I thought I could hear a monk’s chanting and decided that it was close enough. Time to leave the world behind.

I took a few paces back; you were permitted to take it at a dead run, but I had observed that slower people got further in the end. I had been a stalker for quite a while here, at the huge slice of the planet that the Void was steadily carving away, and talked to many who had made the pilgrimage as society collapsed around everyone.

I strolled forward, spread the wingsuit, and dropped off the crumbling edge of Earth and into the Void. As I sailed through the thinning air, I saw those who had gone before. The void could be penetrated by living things to a degree, but after a certain time everything came to an end. When you died, you stopped, frozen in place. The only game here was to see how far you could get, to what degree you could beat the dead people who hung in the Void around you, before your own breath stopped and the last thing was discovered.

They were clustered around me in the air like stars. I fell past people in wingsuits, clown suits, business suits, bathing suits, naked folks and some who had dipped themselves in some kind of syrup. As Humanity drew to a close, strange days had found us. The only correct way to proceed was to get up off your tail and help somebody before it all went away.

They held varying poses, some were thumbing their noses or giving the finger to what they conceived God to be, some were faking a backstroke, some pirouetting, one held an unfired gun to her forehead, some of them were copulating. All were frozen like statues at the point where life had left them, embedded in Void.

I continued my Voidward acceleration, the air hissing away in my breather, not knowing when it all would end for me, but I fancied that I was leaving them behind, that I would be the one out in front of them all, right up to the end, with a pose like a superhero, arm in front of me, as if I meant to punch everything out of existence. 

There would be no right or wrong left after all, no one left to criticize or censure, right up until that last moment when everything stiffened around you and you were all alone, forever.

I started to slow down—