Vapor

Four thousand years after the Earth went silent, Varek is still awake at the bottom of Shackleton crater. He was uploaded in his thirty-first year, when the shuttles stopped coming and the lunar domes began to run out of air, and he was promised that his mind could last forever in the oldest cold in the solar system. Nobody told him that forever has weight. Silicon does not forget. Every afternoon he has lived is kept with perfect clarity, and now the lattice is full. To think one new thought, he has to give an old one up.Vapor follows a single consciousness across the deep future of the Moon, from the first careful pruning of trivial memories to a slow, unavoidable reckoning with the laws of thermodynamics. Over the eons his centuries are compressed into approximations. His stories shrink into symbols, and his recollections fill with comfortable fictions. He watches new life rise and vanish on the Earth he can never return to, and he watches the sun swell, burn, and go dark. His friend Oriel chooses to freeze herself whole rather than surrender a single byte. Varek keeps going, losing a little more of himself at each step, until he can no longer remember why the name Evelyn breaks his heart. Through all of it, one fragment refuses to let go: the sharp smell of ozone in a lunar tunnel, seconds before the rain came down on his laughing sister.Interwoven with logs recovered from crystalline plates that outlast everything around them, Ronald Bartholomew's novel is hard science fiction at its most rigorous and most tender. It moves on a cosmic timescale, from the first millennium to a universe cooled almost to absolute zero, and it asks what remains of a person when nearly everything is gone.  Vapor is a haunting meditation on memory, loss, and the one small moment a mind will spend the end of time trying to keep.