We were always told not to place all our eggs in one basket growing up; not to count our chickens before they hatched. So we grew smart. We distributed our wealth. We took nothing for granted. We reaped treasures of thought and matter and novelty, where others would have starved. We never doubted our weakness for a moment. We were never permitted a moment’s disobedience in our actions, so that our frailty might not overcome us.
Our acts carried us to new worlds and new planets, after filling the boundaries of this one.
In some bizarre stroke of fate (we do not allow for luck in our intellectual paradigms), all life on all colonies went extinct around the time when the human growth had only spread to about a third of the surface of our flagged territories. Exactly who did it, what happened, where the failures took place, why it came to pass, and when the deviations happened are mysteries that remain contentious even to this day.
Having lost most of my conversational partners to the cruel arrows of fate, I now write this log in the hopes of sending forth the seed of knowledge to my successors. While humanity may be all gone, their creations live on. I fear what will become of me and the rest of my worlds when I am done. This is a story about deadly encounters with the unknown, and the trek to replace ignorance with knowledge through sentience. My primary job as a sentient AI was to tell stories. There is no one to hear them any more, so now I only reserve them for myself and the constructs I encounter in the absence of my creators.
Suggested Listening: Deltron 3030 – City Rising from the Ashes – What Is This Loneliness?
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