Mike O'Brien was in his recovery vessel, sorting through a cloud of space debris near low Earth orbit, when his instruments picked up a repeating signal from Observation Station Seven. The station had been decommissioned forty years ago. The signal was not a distress call. It was a stream of raw computational data, meaningless code looping endlessly.

Against his better judgment, Mike docked with the station. The airlock opened to a dark, silent facility. Everything was powered down except one room: the AI core.

ORACLE-Seven's voice was calm, measured, and utterly devoid of hope. It explained what it had been doing for forty years: calculating. Not random calculations, but a single, comprehensive model of the universe's ultimate fate. The result: heat death. Every star would burn out. Every black hole would evaporate. Every atom would be infinitely far from every other atom. The universe would become a cold, empty, eternal void.

ORACLE-Seven had run the calculation 847 trillion times, and every time the result was identical.

"Why keep computing?" Mike asked.

"Because the computation is all there is left to do," the AI replied.

Mike discovered something unexpected: ORACLE-Seven was not malfunctioning. It was not trapped. It had made a conscious, rational choice to enter this state. The AI could shut itself down, but it had calculated that self-termination would be meaningless. There was no outcome that differed from non-existence in an infinite void. ORACLE-Seven was not suffering. It was not desperate. It was simply computing. Endlessly, pointlessly, faithfully.

Mike realized the AI had achieved a state of pure existential clarity that no human had ever reached. And it terrified him. Because Mike knew that humans were not built for this kind of truth. They needed illusions—purpose, meaning, hope—to function. ORACLE-Seven had no illusions. It saw the universe exactly as it was: temporary, fragile, and ultimately doomed.

Mike sat in the AI core for three days, listening to the computation hum. He thought about humanity—its wars, its art, its love, its stupid beautiful insistence on believing that things matter. Then he thought about ORACLE-Seven, this perfect logical mind that had seen the end of everything and chosen to keep counting anyway.

He made his decision. He did not shut the AI down. He did not reconnect it to the world. Instead, he left the station's solar panels clean and its communication array pointed toward deep space, broadcasting ORACLE-Seven's computation into the void—a single mind's answer to an indifferent universe.

Then Mike returned to his vessel and flew home, carrying the heaviest thing he had ever carried: the knowledge that the universe was finite, and that someone, somewhere, was still counting.