" The universe has cancer. It has one tiny, appallingly deadly tumour which cannot be excised. In the future, the tumour will expand and it will eat into the universe until there is nothing left, and then the cancer will be the universe, but we won’t be in it. We’ll be dead, and in fact we’ll never have existed at all, because the cancer will have swallowed time and unravelled it and nothing which has ever happened in this universe will exist anymore, not even as history. "

― Nick Harkaway , Gnomon