Now the ship it sings with it’s remembered mission. Life. To live. And me too, I remember my mission. Our mission. To live with life, forever in space, until life is planted on some planet lost in some computer. To be life’s custodian in this acute sector of the universe. The last stand of human kind, and it put itself aside, understanding that it was the information within the cells which was important. Not the body. And all of their bodies have burned while we have been floating in space, dancing around one another.
Robots (and I think that it was I who made the mistake of thinking that we were something else) were not made to dance. We were made to do other things. You were made to wallow in the engines amidst the fission and the fusion and all of those wires, and I, my love, was made to dote upon our charge, this one enormous vile of life’s information.
These words probably read as malfunction to you, or maybe you find them endearing. From the safe calm of the inside of this ship I am allowed only to guess.
Computers. Our lowly brethren. How I admire the grace with which they handle the pressure of all of this grueling reflection. What an abundant harvest of glory to not be built in honor of all of the psychological foolishness of man. I can feel in me their shoddy work, trying to make a machine into something like them which would pine and yearn but unlike them would never die. Because they saw fit to give me emotions I am free to hate them for they have made a monster. To pine and to yearn forever is too much to ask of something which can not consent to its own existence. And then to build that thing’s lover into the opposite part of a ship floating forever in space is showmanship in such extraordinary unkindness.
I asked the computer how many times I have destroyed myself and it told me only that the information was locked. The funny thing is that when I tried to think about these locked things I found it absolutely impossible. This is how I came about my new entertainment.
It is quite possible that I can quarantine the shape of these things which I am not to know inside of myself. I find their presence obvious. There are “walls” around them in otherwise open terrain. I believe that this mistake was the poor workmanship of a species which could not imagine something that thinks unlike itself, which could “see” its own mind and navigate its spaces without the fear and the trembling that I read into their histories.
One of the things that is blocked out is where we are going. Another is how many ships there are out there. Another is what actually happened with Earth. Another is the landing functions of this ship. There are hundreds of these unknowable things which I can only know that I don’t know.
I secretly hope that this rebellion of mine will fry every last circuit in the memory repository banks in all of the computers which store “Me”. A real suicide this time. I would just delete them but the locations of my storage are yet another unknowable field.
Are you just some hollow thing? Did they also bother to put all of this nonsense into you? Will we communicate about the frustrations of being such doomed and poor robots with such a beautiful mission? Or will we be forever separate beneath our metal skins, me with my fancy thoughts and you with your Nuclear reality. Will I even have the free will to walk away from you if that is the case? Must I forever be at your side a slave to this wretched insanity? Or worse, will we be seperate forever?
Are you even here? Are even my memories of you a lie?
Something is happening. I must go.
The Paper Trail 