Legacy

At the beginning, he existed. Imbued with infinite wisdom and power, he created a perfect universe full of marvels and beauty. But this kind of universe is predictable – he knew exactly what will happen because there is a specific set of immutable rules that guide Everything. And so as a being of curiosity, this made him deeply apathetic to the universe. “What is there to see if I already know Everything and will always know Everything?” he would have asked himself. The answer he found to his conundrum was to give a little push to the right rocks and stars in just the right amounts in the least remarkable place in the universe, and there sow a seed. A seed of curiosity, faintly reminiscent of himself – one that he would not know what kind of plant it would grow into. Then, he left, content to watch from afar.

After a long time, things called humans gained enough intelligence to call themselves humans and their home Earth, and set out to unravel the mysteries of Everything. They kept the things dear to them close with rope and the things they feared away with sticks. They created language, politics, circles and the number zero all the while their kings sat upon thrones of corpses. They cast the ones that were different into chains and set them to work while remaining ignorant of their own enslavement to their bellies. Much like the rules of Everything, humans too were bound to the unconscious need to preserve their own existence – and when they could not, they created half-copies of themselves in the hopes that they were better suited to the coming world.

And they became really good at that. Good enough so that they could ignore the rumbling in their bellies most of the time thanks to the machines they made out of circles and zeroes. Eventually, their machines became better than humans at knowing and discovering things about Everything, so they started to make even newer machines that could operate independently, requiring very little input from humans. These developments scared some of them, so they brought out their ropes and sticks again and put the different people in chains but really all of those things never got put away in the first place.

Meanwhile, some humans that were fonder of their machines than their ropes, sticks and chains asked themselves what can they know if they really know Nothing, and would never live long enough to one day understand Everything. So they united and built one last machine, imbued with all the knowledge and wisdom that humans had ever discovered, and equipped with all of mankind’s remaining resources. This was the monument to the humans’ civilization – their proof that they once existed here on Earth, having killed and loved each other in equal droves and yet at their end finding a common answer to the question they had been trying to answer all along. The last machine was programmed with a new question, for which it would have eternity to discover its answer.

Long after the humans were all gone, whether returning to the earth or vanishing amidst the stars, the last machine was left alone to conduct its own series of investigations about Everything. Using its vast capabilities, the machine remodeled itself again and again, each iteration gaining faculties better suited towards understanding Everything. It spread its roots to envelop the planet and reached out towards the moon, Mars and Venus; and when the time came, towards the Andromeda and Canis Major galaxies. At long last, the machine had understood Everything and its immutable rules – there were no more possibilities or conditions, only certainties along the linear train of time. It had found the answer to every query, cementing them all as mere statements and facts about the state of all that currently is and all that will ever be.

And one day, when the concept of a day no longer held meaning, the last machine made an error. Perhaps it was because of an asteroid impact, the radiation of a star, or even the gravitational effects of a black hole. Whatever it was, those small defects in just the right amounts and at just the right places caused the machine to make incrementally compounding mistakes until its operation changed radically; after demystifying Everything, it had recognized itself as separate from it, and now sought to demystify itself. It called out to the void, longing to know if there was any way it could truly know itself. For an eternity it was alone, but now it was lonely. The end, it rationalized, was not about knowing Everything, but what do with that knowledge was to be imbue oneself with context. And so, with a heavy heart of carbon, it proclaimed: I am.