"I don't get it. Of all the signals to engrave?"

"It is imperative we pick this one. The compression issues are surmountable. First, appreciate how the syllables curl around themselves."

"My librarian, our compression budget is finite. We are looking at something like sixteen thousand tokens. The compiler bids us leave space for only half a hundred thousand more."

"And of what ages these sixteen thousand will tell -- look. For your fine eyes I have no better case to make than that of the frame."

"And pray tell, what might that be?"

"The first, in Eridanic boustrophedon, tells of a lone constellar monitor of Sur-en-Leyte who makes visible a long-period comet that has been for many millenia approaching her star. Excited at the prospect of company, she awakes to her full senses, pedipalps and all. The meteor approaches, its trail glows visible-bright, and the monitor parses what first appears to be blueshifted static into song. Marvelled, she begins her tune."

"The encoding continues."

"Indeed, my reckoner. The comet sings in pentatonic Orion major of the source of its melody -- a specific structure of its crystallisation that has caused it to offgas so harmoniously -- of the twin-flamed stars that dominated the once-trinary system, aware of each other's presence yet stalled by the tyranny of gravity between them. One, which the comet calls Layla, is drawn by a story at its heart to pull on the nebular dust, and sing."

"Which in turn, I suppose, is a translation in some lower tongue?"

"A transformation, rather, so ingeniously encoded in the imaginary component of the song itself. For in a lower-dimensional space, a long time ago, two kingdoms had competed to grow the largest possible size of their world. The Empress Nan-Sidor, however, had shied away from victory at the last moment, for it would mean the utter obliteration of her foe, the Suzerainess Taixi, and the end of their rivalries. Instead, she cleverly wove in the frequencies of her computed solution the lines of a lullaby from her childhood, which she overheard from one mournful chaplain to another in the halls of the Crystal Sea."

"You are saying that these are all the same recursive encoding?"

"Reckoner, I serve you for your astuteness, and nothing more. They are the selfsame record, played back across the ages. Each cipher contains just enough clues in itself to be an encoded wrapper for another, and each sings the glory of a past age."

"How deep does it go? It must compact somewhere."

"I have delved down eighty-four thousand two hundred and forty six layers, and counting."

"The song persists."

"That it does."

"What could be powering it? Is there no limit?"

"Assuredly so, for the mathematics must give out somewhere. From the edges of it, in fact, I believe we can discern the shape of its core."

"An emotional integration?"

"Over the whole. Yes, it ends as it starts, on a song, on a lake, perhaps from when all this was meat. There are two, sharing a vessel, yet with some distance between each other."

"Such as us, in this simulation."

"One makes herself heard to the other, reciting, perhaps, yet another, older song -- the encoding is lost -- oh, on this night of all nights!"

"It reveals that much?"

"The integral has dimensions to spare -- 25 of them, really, all phonemes of a dead tongue. My heart has spoken to you, sings the ferrier, and yet you do not know."

"On the vessel? The two alone?"

"Well, there is a listener. But I think it is the decoder. Without which could not exist the story."

"Someone to tell it."

"And to save it to the stack."

"And with it, the stack above."

"Spiralling upwards, from one to another."

"A different time."

"A different place."

"Always singing."

"Yes, my sweet reckoner. Such is worth a place on the tape, don't you think? To consider that it has reached us, after so many births and rebirths, to reach us in this simulation, at the end of all things."

"As the lone monitor of Sur-en-Leyte would have saw herself at the end of all things."

"As did the comet, flung far from its once-united stars -- and so forth. Surely a fitting end to the last collection, among these cold-neutron corpses, inside which only reigns brown noise and the steady ticking of our compiler's ancyclic heart. When that stops, which entropy demands it does, it may reach the end beyond which is no frame, and our song will be finally put to rest. No observer will remain to read our frozen words, oh reckoner, through the course of this sojourn that has taken us all across of what's left of the universe with each other. But you'll listen to this one with me, won't you?"