Standard icon: a square grid of 32 x 32 pixels.

Top two rows = duration counter.

Bottom two rows = repetition counter.

In-between = picture area: 28 rows of 32 pixels each

The duration counter measures the time within a single aeon.

An aeon is one full cycle of 2⁶⁴ time units. The leftmost upper pixel takes two time units for an On-Off cycle.
According to my computer, the age of the universe is 2.00 plus or minus 0.005 aeons. (**)

Any picture will appear for the first time within 2⁸⁹⁶ aeons.

Let THE PICTURE be your favorite picture: your art agent iconized, or yourself, or whoever... or whatever...
It will gradually emerge from the white.
All kinds of strange patterns and imperfections will first appear.
Each imperfection takes exactly one aeon to disappear.

Then at a certain moment THE PICTURE will appear.  It will stand there in perfect state for exactly one aeon!

After that time imperfections will start creeping in.
Each next deterioriation will appear after exactly one aeon.
In that way THE PICTURE gradually vanishes into the black.


This rise and fall will repeat itself for a total of 2⁶⁴ times. The repetition counter will keep track of this.

Then the game is over and all is black. It was all in vain. End of universe?!?

It is a cold comfort that all this happens only once.

(*) Inspired by the web art of John F. Simon, Jr:
"Every Icon" web page at URL http://www.numeral.com/appletsoftware/eicon.html

(**) With a time unit of 12 ms (as observed on my computer (2400 MHz, no programs using up all remaining CPU time) an aeon would last 50,331,648 x 2³² seconds = 582.542 x 2³² days = 1.594946 x 2³² years = 6,850,240,909 years. This is 50.0%, i.e. about exactly half of the age of the universe: 13.7 x 10⁹ years, according to the most recent big-bang theory and the most recent figures from astronomical observations.