It was half past the end of the universe, and the last human being alive was watching the death of, well, the only other being alive.

The Big Crunch had never happened; things had just slowly spread out, and they’d never quite reached a point of return. It had been a matter of time before entropy had won.

The cockroach lay on its back, feebly moving in the dim brown light; the best the ashes of the sun could manage. The others stars were long since dark.

Eventually its legs stopped whirring, and the man stood up, carefully. He did everything carefully nowadays; the slightest movement encouraged the ground beneath him to crumble.

He should have been long dead, too. Epochs before, in a brighter world, he’d made a deal with a force beyond his ken; his soul, for eternal life. He simply could not die. It had even been fun for the few billion years. Eventually, the whole planet would decohere into a fine haze of dust, but he would remain.

Perhaps, he wondered, it hadn’t been such a great deal after all…