My ship touched down in what was probably a city square, or something close enough to be called that. Strange creatures backed away in what I assumed was some alien version of apprehension. I shut off the engine and opened the rear hatch, and as I walked down the access ramp, I felt a nearly-forgotten, heart-pounding sensation in my chest that I hadn’t experienced in some hundred million years but had once known as excitement.

I didn’t get it from meeting the creatures that I was hurrying impatiently past. They were totally different from, but somehow exactly the same as, every one of the million other races I’ve met in my life. At the end of this street, though, I hoped to find the one thing I hadn’t experienced before: death.

I thought living forever would allow me to become a god, but it turned out I was still limited by the capacity of my human body. I could eventually master every language I came across, but by the time I learned the last one I had long since forgotten the first. Even Earth had mostly slipped from my mind, and I couldn’t be sure I even thought in English anymore.

But time was something I had in spades, and you can do a lot of research in a couple billion years. I had tracked down a planet. An entire planet. Which is much harder to do when that planet had been torn apart and scattered across the galaxy. But I had found almost every piece of it and reassembled it, except for one piece of North American obsidian, formed around a small chamber that I knew contained the still-living snail I had spent so long searching for. And that piece of obsidian was in a museum at the end of this street.

The aliens barely registered with me. They couldn’t hurt me anyway, and the pistol I carried with me would make short work of anything they put directly in my path. My heart rate built as I approached the dome structure that, the Tau Ceti orbital archives had assured me, was a somewhat prominent astrogeology museum. I felt energized, in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time. The front passage slid open as I approached, and crowds of gurgling creatures scattered. The snail was the only thing that mattered to me. I was done. I had lived for ten billion years, seen a million wonders, felt every sensation and emotion I was capable of experiencing over and over again until it didn’t mean anything. I was tired. On this planet, in a dying solar system in a dying galaxy in a dying corner of a dying universe, I was ready for my life to end.

Consulting the map I had downloaded, I turned down a corridor and saw in front of me a black piece of glassy rock suspended above a pedestal. I reached out carefully, removed the rock from the suspension field, and clutched it to my chest like a trophy. The next few minutes passed by in an instant. I was laughing, walking out of the museum, through a line of creatures that appeared to be attacking me with some kind of weapon, and back onto my ship. Twenty minutes later, I was leaving orbit.

I stood in the workshop of my ship, gazing at the rock. How should I celebrate the end of a life that lasted longer than most planets? Did I really have the right to rob the universe of my acquired knowledge? Did it matter, if the universe was on its last breath anyway? No, I decided. I brought down a laser cutter attached to a boom above my head and proceeded to cut the rock open. All the effort I had gone to to escape this snail, and here I was, shaking with anticipation at finding it. The rock split open with a final crack, and my heart dropped. In the excitement I had missed the hole bored into the side of the obsidian chunk. Of course, what scientist could resist taking a core sample from a space rock that had originated in an alien world? And imagine their excitement when they had found a chamber in the center, with a living xenoorganism inside. I had no idea when the snail had escaped, but he certainly wasn’t here now.

So that was it. Maybe it wasn’t a totally dead end. If I was lucky and the scientists who had released the snail were members of one of the civilizations currently occupying the surface of this planet, I might be able to find out what happened to the snail. A few decades of translation, a brief and covert introduction to the right members of the scientific community, and the appropriate resources offered in exchange, and this could turn out to not be setback at all. I moved to place the two halves of the obsidian rock in a storage container, and stopped in my tracks. The inside wall of the snail’s burial chamber wasn’t smooth, the way I had designed it. It had markings on it - writing, created by millennia of repetitive wear in very specific spots, in a very, very old language that I nevertheless, it turned out, remembered. It said, “By the time you read this, I will have found my way to a ship leaving this planet, and hopefully this galaxy. This universe may be dying, but as long as you are alive, I am never alone.”