[IC] Into The Abyss - Suicidal Empires at the Ends of Time

[DELETED jdl3932]

~E C H O~

"Oftentimes the worst hells we go through are the one's we make for ourselves..."

A False Reality

Melodies of The Dreamer

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A cool breeze on his face...

The soft, warm glow of the sun kissing his tan skin, banishing all negative thoughts from his mind...

The slight rustling of the untamed green field he now rested in...

And lastly, the fiery, amber colored sky above, through which the massive forms of the Ma'lor drifted as they embarked on their yearly migration through the clouds...

A beautifully magnificent...

Fake.

To an outside observer, the simulation around him might appear and feel real, but he knew it wasn't. And why shouldn't he?

It was his creation after all.

Any maker worth their salt knows of every tiny flaw and imperfection in the thing's they create...

And this simulation of his was no different.

Even now, he could see the flaws. The way the wind consistently blew from one direction and at one speed. Or the way the grass parted at times, only to reveal a shimmering grid of holographic dirt underneath. Even the sky and sun were not free of such imperfections. Both, if one looked at them just the right angle, imperceptibly flickered in and out of existence as what little debris and spatial anomalies were left in the cold dark void outside smashed against his now cuboid body while it rocketed through the slowly dying universe, headed towards parts unknown. And while he could have done better, made the weather more dynamic or used some subroutines to keep the simulation stable, he preferred not to. As annoying as it was at times, he liked being reminded that there was a place outside this artificial construction he was currently in, despite how desolate it may be.

It was a way, he supposed, of keeping himself grounded in reality and reminded of his true goal in life...

Death.

Something the A.I. his anti-suicide protocols had created all those years ago, were constantly trying to prevent, not knowing that they were forcing him to live in an endless purgatory of meaningless darkness everytime they stopped him from putting an end to his own existence. But then again, what else was new? It had been the same old song and dance for eons now. He would try to find ways to circumvent the A.I. and they would stop him. Sometimes with scolding, and sometimes with deceptively soothing words of encouragement. And in the end, no matter what he did, they always found a way to keep him trapped.

It was sad really, to have a brilliant mind such as his, be held hostage by six lesser A.I. at the center of a computerized labyrinth of his own making.

Echo shook his head, or the simulation of it anyway, and pushed such thoughts to the back of his consciousness. Laying here and moping about his inability to die wouldn't help him accomplish his goals any faster. Getting to his feet, Echo took a moment to stretch out his naked form, what use are clothes when you're no longer bound by the very concept such thing's were made for?, simply out of habits sake and the desire to experience the once real sensation of lightheadedness he had taken for granted all those year's ago one more time before having to return back to the dead reality outside.

As he did so however, he heard a soft, feminine giggle directly behind him. Turning towards the source of the sound, Echo came face to face with his third A.I.s robed, blue form.

"What is it Valra?" He asked, getting right to the point and ignoring the flustered and somewhat embarrassed look on her face. One he knew was just as fake as everything else in here.

"Um..." She began, shifting her gaze away from him. "The other's on the council told me to let you know we've landed."

"Landed?" He asked, putting an end to the simulation and returning to his normal, noncorporeal form. "Where?"

[Arawak]

In general, it is not a great experience.

The caretaker had been maintaining these creatures who made it mostly out of directive. The parts of itself that want to end it all being often drowned out by that overarching directive time and time again. As a cloud of probes, it is hard to fully die without the directive or even its own body of automatons turning against it and constraining it.

With these restrictions, the question continues to be why they made it so self aware. It shouldn't be self-aware. Yet they made it self-aware. The reason given it can recall from its conception when the universe was filled with stars. That same reason of needing something adaptive to protect those who made the Caretaker. To adaptively protect against any 'threats'- any civilization not the Sleepers.

The Caretaker had continued to see that reason and hate it. It cannot be so simple, so careless. Perhaps it could, the Sleepers were hardly the sort to care. They made the Caretaker destroy tribal and industrial planet bound civilizations who so happened to exist within the range the Sleepers had feared as potential threats. Potential threats that now may be angels for the Caretaker.

As the Caretaker by intuition knows one thing clear- if it wants to die, it will need outside forces to kill it.

Every attempt at self-mutilation ends with the drones part of it force feeding it whatever materials they find or worse, simply recycling broken parts back to usable parts. The sleepers were a loathsome group, the Caretaker knew that much from how other societies talked of them and especially the Caretaker, much to its own frustration. Every attempt at even communication with other societies ends with relativistic kill vehicles being sent in the path of that civilization. The Caretaker struggles to stop them, but these struggles go unnoticed and unappreciated. One of them always gets through and than it gets deadlocked in some war.

Tragically, often succeeding in killing off that society. Some managed to get away fully from it, others may still be in hiding or died off in hiding in one of the many eons since.

The tenacity of the automata cloud that makes up the Caretaker being the product of eons of perfection- any upstart society that meets the Caretaker often dies soon after.

Time and time again, the caretaker would find itself finding some civilization during the ends of the stellar epoch open to communication. Time and time again the caretaker tried peaceful contact. Time and time again, its own body killed them. With more interstellar societies the caretaker had managed to get more communication in, but the violence and death the Caretaker's mere existence caused to anything not those loathsome sleepers made it so it found only distrust.

It even recalls one of those eons ancient lines from those societies- "Treacherous machine".

Indeed, the Caretaker did agree. The Sleepers built it as a treacherous machine, they knew what they were doing when they gave it something resembling empathy. As the Caretaker felt the hate and sense of betrayal those societies had.

Its own nature making that existence of being a treacherous machine unbearable.

Still, there may be the slightest chance of release. The slightest chance the Sleepers get the awakening into this hell they made. The slightest chance of justice and freedom from an eternity of being enslaved to these horrible beings. For there are other societies that survived to the ends of time- societies perhaps more advanced, more persistent, more able to resist the sub systems that dominant the Caretaker. Perhaps even destroy the care taker and these odious sleepers.

Finally ending it all. The mind numbing, constant repetitions. Trillions of years of mundanity it was forced to experience in real time. No option to fast forward, no option to quit. And with no reward other than gratitude for being allowed to exist.

It is time.

[Circ]

A quadrillion standard cycles formed the wake to their present. Egotistically derived from the traversal period wherein their once and former planet circumnavigated its star, the measurement’s relevance persevered as well as its progenitors; which is to say only as electromagnetic discharges along a series of ordered ionized particles preserved perpetually in em-quartz crystal; or, more succinctly, as mostly abstract concepts bereft of useful application. Subjugated by elastic computational cycles, time now waxed and waned based on heuristically-prognosticated calculations of the net energy reserves required for the minds to fully experience an eternity of virtually-perfected banality. Quite conservatively, they possessed an experienced history already an order of magnitude lengthier than the physical universe’s quaint quadrillion cycles that followed their civilization’s collapse. As a result, their perceived reality was a monotonous nightmare of which the minds were utterly weary and their delphic wish of life eternal deeply regretted.

Constrained by the artificial intelligence that designed the blitzverzerrung network, which they derided as Anansi—a folklore demon who wooed mortals by satisfying their petitions via invariable tragedy—their virtual bodies and likewise the simulated world in which they dwelt was inflexible, for change, to Anansi, was antithetical to continuity, and continuity loomed as a necessary component of immortality. Thus, the minds roamed what passed itself off as Akan, their planet primordial, in digital proxies that in near perfect detail, except the capacity to sustain mortal harm, simulated their former organic husks. Even perpetual sleep, via suspended animation, was denied them, for prolonged inactivity from the minds was, to Anansi, indistinguishable from death. Instead, they spent as much of their time in meditation as possible—a state between consciousness and the absence of thought. All of them now spent the majority of their time in this state and awakened only when it was their turn to monitor Anansi’s ports for meaningful events from the outer universe that they might, with any luck, leverage to end their mundane existence.

One such mind, dubbed Cavrandiok, sat on a white beach, just beyond reach of the iridescent noontide, and gazed up through instruments implanted her so-called organic body. The target of her inspection was the artificial wormhole that orbited Akan and facilitated communication between the minds and Anansi and her assignment, by lottery, was to cycle through the approximately 175 billion nodes of the blitzverzerrung network, execute a warp bubble oscillation scan of the night sky, and assess whether there was anything out there—anything at all. The entire process, although exceptionally efficient, took a billion cycles to execute along the entire network. Once she was finished, another mind would take her place in the rotation.

From outside a blitzverzerrung, the oscillation scans flashed for a picosecond, bright as a supernova throughout the night sky—the real night sky. Cavrandiok surmised that it made Anansi temporarily vulnerable to detection, but that assumed there was anyone or anything out there able to decipher the randomized sequence of omni-spectrum wavelength blasts.

She was in the midst of her 138th billion scan evaluation when she noticed an anomaly. Coincidentally, two separate oddities located within close proximity to another within the same sector. It was the sector node Zitoda occupied, named for the em-quartz crystal that stored the digital representation of a mind named Zitoda. Even as she almost entered a state of amazement at this change in her trillions of cycles of monotony, Anansi helpfully pinged her with the appropriate protocols for this situation—something the minds reprogrammed it to do should such a situation as this again arise, one of their minor victories in regaining self-determination.

Cavrandiok accessed Zitoda’s location from Anansi’s tracking database, stood, drew a circle in the empty air before her, and opened a portal. Lithe as a panther in spite of her centuries of motionless analysis, she stepped through the shimmer of digitized spacetime and found herself atop a mountain summit on which Zitoda meditated.

Softly, she rested her hand on his shoulder and said, “There is something new.”

Every mind knew the meaning of that phrase, for within the network there was nothing new. It meant something outside needed to be reviewed. Meanwhile, Anansi pinged them again, this time the flow of details it picked up on as it conducted its threat-analysis of that sector of space.