Cosmic Charlie pulled Lilla by the hand down the steps through flying rice and confetti toward his car–but his car wasn’t there. Instead, a red Tesla Model 3 sat at the curb next to the church. It was covered in paper flowers.

     Charlie stared at the car and then Lilla’s father was standing there grinning and pressing car keys into Charlie’s  hand. “This is our surprise wedding present for you. Congratulations, kids.”

     “Oh daddy thank you,” Lilla said and she kissed Charlie and they climbed into the car.

     The reception was at a picnic grove in the mountains behind Santa Barbara. Charlie marveled at how well the car handled as he drove up San Marcos Pass. He was amazed that he was married. He was 20, and he and Lilla were both still virgins. He was proud of that. He stepped on the accelerator a little bit more and the Tesla surged ahead even faster, pressing them back in their seats. “This is so cool!” he said.

     “Charlie, slow down,” said Lilla.

     Then they were at the turnoff and he misjudged the curve and misjudged his speed and the car went skidding off the edge into a long endless plunge with Lilla’s scream surrounding him as he uselessly stomped the brake. Then a stupendous impact and a bounce and then Charlie was upside down with blood dripping across his eyes and he couldn’t move to wipe it aside and the only thing he could see was Lilla staring blankly, her white dress spattered with red, and a broken piece of the window frame sticking through her head from ear to ear.

     Lilla’s white dress was all he could see. The dress became brighter and brighter and he was roaring through a tunnel of darkness toward a bright light. And then he passed through. He floated dreamily out of consciousness into a shouting cascade of dream imagery. His heart stopped.

     His complicated biomechanical sensory systems failed, and the whole organic machine of Charlie’s body came to a halt.    

     Still, each individual cell hoped to survive. A good competent muscle cell is still alive hours and hours after the coroner signs the death certificate. Cut an arm off and wait a couple hours and put it back on–it can live. It’s been done.

     The cells are tough–the delicate part is the control system. When that fails, everything goes to hell in a hurry and each muscle cell sits there dimly in the dark muttering “C’mon, gimme a pulse of blood and I’ll run like hell, we can still get out of this mess.”

     But the pulse of blood never came.

     At the funeral Charlie’s father found himself talking to Lilla’s parents. “Charlie had such big plans. His pals always called him “Cosmic” Charlie, his plans were so big….now he’s gone. Poof.”

     “Unless he’s reincarnated,” said Lilla’s mother.

     “Reincarnation is a silly notion,” said Lilla’s father. He was a mathematician. “There’s not a chance in a quintillion that a person could be reincarnated.”

     Charlie  was unable to see the tears at the funeral, nor the mourning that preoccupied the families for weeks. The unique biochemical sensory device his DNA had built was no longer reporting to his consciousness. The complex organs and interconnective systems were dead.

     But his DNA was still sort of alive.

     DNA is not a static thing. It’s a complex assemblage of hundreds of billions of atoms writhing and vibrating.

     Trillions of Charlie’s cells were still faintly alive, still waiting for that pulse of oxygenated blood, still conducting a purposeful internal activity. His stubborn DNA still maintained a kind of consciousness. Charlie dreamed he was still alive.

     But time passed and the planet continued to spin around the sun. Charlie’s last surviving internal cells began to shut down their processes.

     Six months after the funeral, a dozen of Charlie’s school pals met at his gravesite overlooking the Pacific ocean. They drank too much and didn’t mention Charlie.

     Charlie’s DNA still vibrated and communicated to the other strands of DNA inside each demised cell. DNA is like a virus and can survive even if crystallized. And so part of Charlie’s consciousness dreamed on, unaware of the passing time.

     On the first anniversary of the crash, Charlie & Lilla’s parents met at the gravesite on the cliffs above the Pacific ocean. Once again they remembered Charlie. It was the last time anyone visited Cosmic Charlie’s grave.  

     Charlie’s school pals graduated and scattered; Lilla’s pals were all on the East coast.

     Lilla’s mother and father died together in a plane crash nine years later. Twenty years after that, Charlie’s mother died of cancer, and then within days his father shot himself.

     Both of Charlie’s brothers died in the Pacific Attack by the Asian Hegemony. After 60 years Charlie’s sister was dead, too. Soon after that everyone in the world he had known was dead.

     The Earth continued to spin, and the offshore winds ruffled the grasses growing on his grave. Some of Charlie’s DNA still twirled and vibrated down below.

     A century after Cosmic Charlie died, a severe earthquake split off a sliver of the cliffside cemetery. Charlie’s gravesite slipped toward the sea. 

     After a thousand years a new ice age began. Humanity retreated toward the tropics as glaciers covered North America with mile-thick ice. The coastline receded. Charlie’s gravesite was now a dozen miles inland from the shore.

     A hundred thousand years passed. A comet smashed into the Pacific ocean. 2000 cubic miles of water flashed into steam. The resulting storms and climactic disruptions killed 90% of all humans on Earth. Charlie’s grave sank into the newly risen ocean and began to be subducted by plate tectonic activity.

     Millions of years passed and the continents shifted and drifted. Los Angeles scraped north past San Francisco and piled into Alaska. Charlie was now part of a geological stratum far below the surface, but a few strands of his DNA still vibrated with a sense of self-identity.

     The Sun drifted into a cloud of hydrogen gas and flamed brighter. Huge solar flares boiled dry every ocean on Earth. No humans survived. Charlie’s molecules were now thoroughly reduced to traces of carbon and organic matter in a vein of rock.

     After a few billion years the sun went supernova. Earth was vaporized. The remnant of the sun was a white dwarf star that dimmed gradually over billions of years into a dark, barely warm lump of dense matter.

     By this time the universe had expanded to its limits and began to shrink. All matter compressed toward the center and after a hundred billion years the universe was once more a zone of furiously compacted energy smaller than the diameter of an atom. It reached the limits of smallness and exploded outward again.

     The new universe was a quark-gluon plasma. It hyperexpanded faster than the speed of light into a hundred trillion quadrillion universes, each as big as Charlie’s original universe.

     Each universe cooled as it expanded and the plasma underwent a transition allowing quarks to lock together and form everyday matter. In a few hundred million years there were trillions of new galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, and the stars raced through evolution to explode into supernovas to form new elements. Hydrogen and helium were joined by concentrations of carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and silicon and sulfur.

     If you rub these elements around with running water for a few billion years they will organize themselves into DNA. They can’t help it, any more than a hydrogen atom can help it when it mixes with oxygen to make water.

     Although a given DNA structure is unique in its own universe, it is bound to occur in another universe sooner or later if you have enough universes. Since there are infinite number of universes, there are an infinite number of universes with identical DNA structures.  In each universe, after ten billion years there were 10 trillion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars and 100 billion water planets.

     The universes had at least 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets just about like Earth. Somewhere in the high quintillions.     And as luck would have it, as life evolved on one of those worlds, one of them developed exactly as had Earth. And Cosmic Charlie was born again.

     His life proceeded exactly as before and then there was a red  Tesla at the foot of the stairs and Lilla’s dad was there holding out the car keys to Charlie.

     Charlie was filled with a sense of deja vu. He started the car and drove up San Marcos Pass, and once again skidded off the edge as Lilla screamed for him to slow down.

     A billion quadrillion years went by and another universe evolved a copy of Charlie’s DNA and it produced another copy of him and the universe propelled him through exactly the same red Tesla crash. Endlessly

     There were endless identical universes in which his every alternative choice was lived.   His DNA structure could be developed during a 100,000 year window: from the start of the Cro-Magnon era until humans learn how to program the DNA themselves, after which the baton of consciousness is carried forward by silicon and teflon creatures and mankind joins the dinosaurs.

     True human consciousness doesn’t emerge until the connection between the right brain and the left brain, the corpus callosum, knits together around age 10; Charlie’s DNA was rarely able to get a complete, fully developed brain into existence, let alone a sexually mature body.

     Charlie’s DNA was a less-than-perfect plan, susceptible to early disease and death. The likely universes for Cosmic Charlie’s DNA to re-occur and survive turned out to be societies that had equaled the medical advances of the early 21st century. That was the only place where Charlie’s DNA came to full adolescent bloom. And each time he drove the new red Tesla off the cliff.

     When Charlie was born into a Stone Age environment, he rarely lived longer than a few days, due to a low Apgar rating and a lack of sophisticated medical attention. If he did manage to survive infancy he almost always died in childhood due to clumsiness and low impulse control.

     Each time Charlie’s DNA replayed in a new universe, the events of his life were depressingly similar. Even with the best foods and nutrients available, his DNA structure was unable to build a strong, dextrous body, and he fumbled through life after life with the same clumsy embarrassments scarring his emotional development.

     Not that Charlie had bad genes. Genes are good or bad depending on what kind of environment the full-grown organism finds itself in.

      So far, in how many billions of iterations, he had yet to live long enough to reproduce. In all the universes there wasn’t a Cosmic Charlie who made it to his 21st birthday. But the Charlies kept on relentlessly coming into existence.

     Charlie was a flashbulb of existence once every hundred billion years. Imagine a creature so long-lived, and so slow, that it perceived the flashes as a continuous glow. That’s what Charlie was: a collection of miniature flashes of DNA existence, one  per universe, that piled up until they appeared to be a continuous stream of consciousness.

     As trillions to the trillionth power of universes blinked in and out of existence, a resonance built up across a timeless dimension, and when the number of individuals with the Cosmic Charlie DNA reached the high quintillions, the resonance linked with itself into a higher sentience.

     UltraCharlie became more and more aware of the huge network of his being, but he couldn’t control the individual cells well enough to discuss it or cause a change in the life-pattern. Might as well ask a neuron to explain a thought that has passed through it as a chemical pulse. He still kept driving that red Tesla over the cliff.

     Charlie rode through googolplexes of universes from big bang back to coalescence, and it seemed that the bangs were happening faster and faster. But as his meta-experience grew, the infinity of other individuals with his DNA structure became apparent. The more he learned, the further away his particular childhood seemed. Now he resonated with the consciousness of all the members of his genetic structure–the young ones, the maimed ones, the ones hopelessly mired in pretechnological poverty and malnutrition.  

     And suddenly this time when Lilla said “Slow down”–he slowed down.

     He drove flawlessly over the mountain to the reception. That night Lilla became pregnant, and a new universe began. Charlie moved up a notch on the Karmic wheel.