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The Third Goal was first published in the Fall 2023 Issue of The Bayou Review

By TM Hogeman

Of the three goals, the first is relatively easy to achieve.

It starts with something simple.

You want to know yourself better. To learn what makes you tick. In the short term, you find this knowledge useful for the acute aims of curing sickness, harm, the basic work of keeping yourself alive. But beyond that, you also find yourself driven by a larger sense of general metaphysical yearning.

To understand what makes you, well, you.

Through study of the natural world, you realize you are of it and yet apart from it. Made from the same basic ingredients as the rest of the universe, but shaped by eons of iterative evolution until the spark of wonder ignited in your nervous system.

To better understand this process, you develop rudimentary models of your body and mind.

As your tools and technology advance, so does your ability to elaborate on these models, making them ever more complex. You find yourself able to simulate and explore the structures of your mind and body in greater detail, and you begin to realize that you’ve stumbled across a new possibility of what you are and what you could be.

Fundamentally, you are not simply a collection of parts and chemicals and electrical impulses, but a constantly shifting pattern of information. Given sufficient detail in the models your technology helps you build, you realize that what you’ve created is not simply a simulation, but an entirely new substrate that you can transfer that pattern to.

The analog to digital conversion frees you from many of your prior constraints.

It requires upkeep and persistence, but you improve at both over time. You’re able to run duplicates and backups, and your multitude of new shapes are better able to explore the universe, more resistant to radiation exposure from the cosmic wash of distant rays.

You spread, first between planets, then between stars, distributed-you being the best possible contingency against anything untoward happening to any one version of yourself.

Along the way, some of you find yourselves missing your original, organic context. Further technological breakthroughs in genetic engineering, biological printing, and pattern download allow you to relive your more squishy youth when the urge takes you. Many of you return to your initial bodies, others experiment with entirely new forms. Some of you come back, some of you don’t.

It’s not that you end death, per se. It’s that it stops being involuntary.

Now, to die is just one possible path among many. Some still choose to end, whether out of a sense of final contentment, spiritual belief, intense curiosity, or sheer boredom. But always as a choice.

You can have as much time as you like.

Sort of.

***

The cosmos is expanding, even faster than you, and getting faster every day.

Faster than the stars themselves can keep up with. The world spreading itself thin over all that ever-growing space, the long-term prognosis a very cold, rather dull, eternal night. The heat death of the universe.

Hence, somewhat larger in scope, the second goal.

Eternity’s not guaranteed, and all the time in the world doesn’t have the same ring to it when the universe itself comes with an expiration date. You’ve still got a few moves left to play, however, and your vast new playground lets you put into practice all of those big ideas that you could only consider in the abstract when you were stuck to one tenuous sphere. No longer a mere observer watching the cosmos from afar, you become an active participant. You learn quite a bit.

It takes time, somewhat more time than you expected, and involves more than a few loops back to the beginning of everything, dipping yourself into and out of the ergospheres of black holes.

Reboot, retry, record.

Along the way, you find an added side benefit to your newfound chronological fluidity: the opportunity to sneak back and offer all those myriad minds, born and passed before the first goal was achieved, a chance to come along and join the party. Those that say yes come forward at the moment they exit their initial timelines.

You’re careful not to upset causality too much along the way.

You’ve been climbing your way up the Kardashev scale this whole time, but this next step involves taking things up a notch further still. Question some of your fundamental assumptions, including your understanding of the fundamentals of the world itself.

It’s dangerous, delicate work, true rocket surgery at its finest. But you’re careful, and maybe a bit lucky. You defy entropy. Through the subtle tweaking of universal constants, a mastery of quantum field manipulations, and a deft redirection of what was once known as dark energy, you bring things into a new kind of balance.

Like a universal defibrillator, you shock the world itself out of its long gasping death rattle, and into something more like regular respiration. Heat death perpetually delayed. Intricately poised between the big crunch and the big rip.

Now the universe can live just as long as you. Forever, if you like.

It’s a rather nifty trick, and you’re quite proud of yourself.

***

Which brings us, at last, to the third goal.

The first two goals, on their own, were simply tools to bring you here, to this point. You’ve been grappling with the third goal ever since you first conceived of the concept of a goal, but it isn’t until now, perhaps, all your possibilities unshackled from your prior limitations, that you can truly consider who and what you really are: You are the universe itself, woken up, equipped with the power to shape your own destiny. Our ultimate fate whatever you choose it to be.

We’ve come such a long way since we were sucking on geothermal fumes at the bottom of a primordial ocean. Worked so hard to get here, and keep here around. Fought tooth and nail, neuron, quark, and star. Claimed eternity and won.

So brush that stardust from your shoulders, and ask yourself:

What was it all for?

What now?

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