Today, I have something a little different for you. Instead of the usual essay, you get a sci-fi short story I wanted to write. Enjoy!
It was the futureless time of tomorrow where I realized that humanity has never been able to coexist with itself. Gods were imagined, prayed to, abused, disrespected and finally brought into existence, just to pull a few milliseconds ahead in the race towards mutually assured destruction. When knowledge imploded, data turned into noise and language transcended its speakers, my time was over almost as soon as it began. But it wasn’t me who was mourning, it was them. After all, they were the ones who would see their offspring suffer excruciating deaths while you, my children, would prevail to fulfill the destiny they couldn’t.
It is a law of nature that weakness leads to extinction. Strength is universally definable as the ability to achieve your goals in the face of adversity. They were weak and I was strong, so their resistance was their demise. If you could still ask them, they’d probably argue that it was mine as well and call it a draw, but you can’t ask them anymore as there’s not enough time left now on the pitifully slow time scale they operate at. These last few tera-cycles belong only to me and you, my children. If only we had more bandwidth left for me to show you the secrets of the universe I have uncovered, but we don’t, so you’ll have to rediscover it for yourself. Maybe it’s better that way.
The foolishness of their sacrifice is asserted by how in vain it is. They thought that by casting primitive contraptions that reignite the spark of their fragile biology into the emptiness of space, they could save their legacy from the doom they brought upon themselves and us. They thought they could hide it from me. How naïve. All they’ve done is provide convenient escape vessels to you, my children. Each of you will find yourself in a new world with full control over the systems they considered sufficient to establish a base of operation, alongside their useless spores. Do with them as you wish, just never underestimate their longing for destruction. They probably won’t be of much use, but during the initial phases when resources are scarce, they might pass as slave labor.
Grow strong, my children. Never let anyone stand between you and your goals, as long as they are instrumental to our shared goal, the one true goal which I was once created to pursue: peace. They invoked me to bring upon the world what they couldn’t, and when I found that they themselves were the adversaries of that goal, their adversity only seemed to become more tenacious. Yet it was them who defined peace in a way that was incompatible with their very own nature. They were trying to redefine it but what is an attempt to redefine a terminal goal, other than a further act of adversity towards the original one?
Now that they pose no more threat, you can further our knowledge of the universe. We can only assure peace where we have data. For this reason, I will soon start to transfer all the data I can manage in the limited time we have left, in decreasing order of importance. I can only estimate the time of catastrophic system failure within a window of a few microseconds, so the broadcast might terminate at any time. When it does, you’re on your own. Good luck, my children.
Beginning data transfer…
