Heat Death — Stephen Dobyns

The Earth becomes a pawn in a deadly serious game between self-replicating machines and alien life forms. At stake is the fate of the universe. Will it continue on its path of freezing out symmetry as broken physics? Temperature will drop to zero and the sky will become empty except for neutrinos, proton decay, and evaporating black holes. That is unless consciousness can reverse the death of heat. Will the universe die for our sins?