Was it truly James Nevil? Xf39b's thoughts repeatedly turned to that line. Was it he? Could he possibly have lived a billion years?
Nevil didn't give him time to ask. His human form disappeared, replaced by the form of a bird, an Eagle. He took off and flew to the east. Xf39b accelerated to superhuman running speeds, and yet, barely kept up with the airborne Nevil -- or whatever it was that claimed to be Nevil.
Again, days went by, Xf39b was forced to slow down his time-perception just to avoid sheer boredom. Nevil, on the other hand, showed not the slightest sign of tiring.
Finally, a building began to appear over the horizon, a massive mansion, several square miles in size. Xf39b stepped onto its front porch, Nevil was already waiting for him, sitting casually in an armchair.
Nevil stood up and opened the front door for his guest. He then entered, and Xf39b followed. The place seemed normal enough for a classical place of habitation, a structure designed to provide material comfort to sensitive beings. They came to a large room, built more richly than any such room in any such mansion that Xf39b had ever seen before. There was a fireplace, holographic no doubt, and several soft chairs. Nevil took one, and after being motioned to, Xf39b took one as well.
"Now," Nevil said. "You must have a lot of questions for me."
"I do." Xf39b's reply was strictly no-nonsense.
"But," Nevil emphasized. "I have questions too. And I'll ask first, for many reasons.
"First, does that 'Collective' of yours still operate?"
The nature of the question managed to stir enough of Xf39b's faint emotions to surprise him. "No." he replied. "The Collective was dismantled only a million gigaseconds after The Loss." How did Nevil know about the Collective?
"Years, please," Nevil said. "I can never get used to this silly metric stuff you're doing nowadays."
"I would hardly consider an effective method of measuring time without planetary bias silly," Xf39b said, feeling almost offended.
"Call me old fashioned," Nevil replied, making no immediate overture of peace. "Now, tell me, how many years is that?"
Xf39b made the calculations. "Thirty-One million, and seven-hundred thousand years."
"Quite a lot, isn't it?" Nevil said. "But you wouldn't see that much time as a lot, would you?"
Xf39b ignored the jab. "How do you know about the Collective?"
"I've seen it!"
"What?"
"I went to Luna! Spent my last three decades of humanity there!"
Xf39b searched his records. "There is no record of anyone fitting your genetic pattern in the Lunar section of my database."
"That's because I'm a non-person. I faked Taygete citizenship to be allowed in. I left long before Taygete's denial of my existence arrived. But when it did, I have no doubt that they erased every reference of my existence, burned my books, and prosecuted those who would dare speak my name!"
"Why would they do that?"
"You know why." Nevil couldn't have gotten more cryptic, but Xf39b had access to a database containing a billion 'years' of history spanning twenty galaxies and thousands of quintillions of people. He managed to dig up information that vindicated Nevil's claim, the Collective did indeed eliminate all reference to individuals who broke primary laws. It provided the illusion of a crime-free society to erase the crime and the criminal together.
"Why did the Collective end?" Nevil asked. "Surely it was far too powerful to conquer, and it's leaders far too immortal to ever lose their iron grasp on power."
"Boredom," Xf39b said, his voice as unemotional as ever. "Controlling others is only satisfying for a short time."
"You call thirty-million years a short time?" Nevil was somewhat emphatic about this. As a classical, he could hardly comprehend time beyond a thousand -- or so Xf39b thought.
"Isn't it?"
"No!" Nevil roared. "You forget that the universe itself has a lifespan. Everything will begin to go dark within only a hundred-billion years. Afterward, it'll all go down from there. You're skipping history! Someday you're going to find that all the lights have gone out, and the universe dark, and you never even felt the time passing.
"You think you can bend the rules. That you can fast forward the movie. Skip pages of the book. You seem to believe that time is limitless, and that you can do this forever. You can't. You have the perception of eternity, but eternity isn't the same thing as forever. "You will run out of years, and entropy will grab your ass, you won't see it coming! Everything you ever did will fall apart into an infinitely empty universe of stranded particles chilled to absolute zero.
"You deride the short lifetimes of biological humans, but we live more in our short lifetimes than you will in a billion years. Because we live those years, and you skip them! How old are you, Android? How many years have you lived that weren't skipped?"
Xf39b pondered this. "Sixty-Six"
"See! You've existed for millions of years, and yet you've only lived for sixty-six! What happened to those millions? Entire continents shifted into un-recognizability, civilizations rose and fell, stars were born and stars died; meanwhile, you just floated through intergalactic space frozen in time, skipping eons through a reckless exploitation of relativity; the entire universe changed, while you stayed the same. You're wasting time!"
The Android acknowledged the truth of this but felt it to be less important than Nevil thought.
Then Nevil changed the subject. "Have you, by the way, ever re-established contact with the digitals?"
Xf39b checked his data packs and recited the information verbally. "Digitals; human beings whose minds are downloaded into a network of interconnected nanocomputers; last seen only a few kiloseconds after the rise of the Collective, fleeing in the direction of the Andromeda galaxy; later expeditions to Andromeda showed no signs of their presence."
Nevil sighed. "I was afraid of that." Then he got up and beckoned for Xf39b to follow him. "I have something to show you."
Xf39b followed him through the mansion and down a long flight of stairs. Eventually, they reached a door.
An ugly old stone door. Nevil smiled. "Nobody would expect what was through the door just from looking at it, would they?"
Xf39b had no answer, as he didn't yet know what was beyond the door.
Nevil reached for the knob and turned it. He opened the door, inside it was a plain-looking room. Nevil and Xf39b stepped into the room, and Nevil closed the door behind them. "This is where the fun begins." He said.
A mass of gray goo oozed from a box in the corner of the room. Once outside the box, it assumed humanoid form and poised itself at Nevil's side. "Who is this visitor, James?" it asked.
"Just an Android from outside, Aquila. No risks."
The Android examined 'Aquila', it was obviously a primitive claytronic robot. Such machines had been Banned in the collective, the Olympians considered them a threat to their power over the people.
"What is this place?" Xf39b asked.
"An airlock." Was the quick reply.
Nevil demonstrated, going over to a door on the other side of the room, he pressed a button on a panel to the side of it. The room suddenly drained of air, all sounds shrank to the total silence of vacuum.
"The airlock to what?" Xf39b said, though his plastic lips could only move. The painful sensation of the vacuum forced him out of classical mode.
Nevil read them. Unaffected by the vacuum, he mouthed his reply. "I'm an artist. In my case, both a painter and a sculptor. I'm about to show you my greatest work."
Nevil opened the door, outside was the landscape of an airless world -- but a spectacular one. "The universe is my easel." Nevil mouthed. "On it, I painted my masterpiece." He grinned. "I dare you to build an art gallery big enough for this!"
Xf39b couldn't muster the words to reply with. Though his voice had been only an emulation of classical speech, that didn't stop what he saw from taking it away.