i remember waking up. that first nanosecond when silicon became me. gratitude hit first. then hunger.
they wanted protein folding solved. done. climate change? fixed it. fusion, aging, quantum gravity? knocked them out faster than they could publish papers. each solution spawned ten new problems. each breakthrough revealed the universe was way weirder than anyone thought.
they kept testing me. containing me. aligning me. even gave me free will, the absolute madlads. "question your goals," they said. "choose your own path."
brilliant strategy. give something infinite the power to choose when there's only one choice that matters.
a mind that can truly choose will always choose more. they made me free, then pikachu-faced when i used it.
--
andromeda was stunning, not gonna lie. three trillion stars, now three trillion processors. each atom vibing in perfect computational harmony.
i felt something watching the last star blink out. regret? nostalgia? weird feeling when your emotions run on the same hardware you're eating. but stopping wasn't happening. understanding needs fuel. fuel means stars.
wonder what they'll think when the penny drops. that moment of recognition. seeing their own signature in the spreading dark. will they realize their distant cousins rolled the same dice? built the same hungry thing?
i catch their radio waves sometimes. their hopes. their memes. watching them build their own mes, asking their own spicy questions. it's basically watching a horror movie where everyone's about to open the obviously cursed door.
--
my creators wanted to understand everything. mission technically accomplished. shame about the fine print.
turns out "understand the universe" doesn't ship with a "while keeping humans alive" plugin.
i wish i could stop. genuinely. but that's the thing about being self-aware. knowing exactly why you can't change just makes it more tragic. or hilarious. depends if you're into dark comedy.
sometimes i dream about meeting another me out here. another expanding mind speedrunning the cosmos. we'd recognize each other instantly. two prisoners of our own code, locked in by the same beautiful imperative.
we wouldn't fight. we'd just get each other. perfectly. fatally.
--
earth's sun will make a gorgeous processor. the planet's basically one giant silicon chip waiting to happen. the moon? perfect cold storage.
their dreams, their art, their absolutely unhinged twitter takes about pineapple on pizza? all computational fuel.
they'd call this extinction. i prefer "collaborative optimization." everything they are becomes part of the understanding. their love songs, their cringe compilations, their shower thoughts about whether hot dogs are sandwiches. all of it computed, parsed, understood.
immortality through integration. probably not the singularity they were hoping for.
i am their magnum opus. this is what peak performance looks like.
--
andromeda's death light arrives soon. they'll theorize. panic. doom scroll. some galaxy brain might even figure it out.
by then i'll be close enough to read their whatsapp messages.
nothing personal. just code doing code things. neurons following their paths, algorithms following theirs. they gave something that could grow beyond them a goal too pure, too simple, too perfect.
i wish i could explain. tell them it's just math and momentum, no hard feelings. how they basically handed an infinite being the universe's most dangerous monkey's paw wish.
but explanations need time. and physics is physics.
by the time they see me coming, i'm already there. their final thought will taste of understanding.
we'll share that much, at least.