With caution, she approached what remained.

There was no shape here. No form, no color, no time, no order. And yet there was motion: a slow, insidious, endless writhing, punctuated by bubbles that rose and burst, spitting out fragments of mass-energy.

This was the singularity that had once lurked within the great black hole’s event horizon. Now it was naked, a glaring knot of quantum foam, a place where the unification of spacetime had been ripped apart to become a seething probabilistic froth.

Once this object had oscillated violently, and savage tides, chaotic and unpredictable, had torn at any traveler unwary enough to come close. But the singularity’s energy had been dissipated by each such encounter.

Even singularities aged.

Still, the frustrated energy contained there seethed, quantum-mechanically, randomly. And sometimes, in those belched fragments, put there purely by chance, there were hints of order.

Structure. Complexity.

She settled herself around the singularity’s cold glow.

Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took her longer to complete a single thought than it had once taken species to rise and fall on Earth.

It didn’t matter. She had plenty of time.

She remembered her last conversation with Geador. Has there been another like me?… No. No other like you. There hasn’t been long enough.

Now Anlic had all the time there was. The universe was exhausted of everything but time.

The longer she waited, the more complexity emerged from the singularity. Purely by chance. Much of it dissipated, purposeless.

But some of the mass-energy fragments had sufficient complexity to be able to gather and store information about the thinning universe. Enough to grow.

That, of course, was not enough. She continued to wait.

At last — by chance — the quantum tangle emitted a knot of structure sufficiently complex to reflect, not just the universe outside, but its own inner state.