Five months on, he grew listless. The debauchery and hedonism of his set seemed hollow to him. He began to read, and to spend time with scientists and thinkers, poets and priests. He was not satisfied by their answers. He had become aware of the distant shadow of finality, and he realised they had no recourse. They were fatalists, or in denial, and the whole of the Continuance, wide and seemingly endless, and the deep experiments in biology and cognition of the others, their playful sculpting of worlds—none of it had any effect at all on the incremental drawing down of the universe itself. In the crudest assessment of things: I am viral, and he had developed a bad case of me.