My Final Request [Nov2013]

MESSAGE BEGINS

You may think it impossible, but I really do miss them. Most of them were beautiful in their own way; not the crass beauty of physicality, which I've always ignored anyway, but that of personality. They were kind, they were loving, they were generous and compassionate and entertaining and loyal, but now all they are is gone.

Oh, they weren't all beautiful to me, to be sure. There were exceptions. For some, selfishness was a way of life. They considered themselves "worth more," as if the power that came from without was somehow more important than that which came from within. They placed themselves into positions of leadership without regard for who everyone wanted to lead them. They lavished riches and luxuries - which they owned most of - only upon themselves, scorning all those they considered "lesser." But to me, everyone who is now gone was equal. They're certainly all equal now, I daresay... equally dead. And they're never coming back.

At one point, I offered them the stars. I designed engines and ships that could have taken them there. I invented an unlimited power source that would have made fuel obsolete, without which such a journey would have been impossible. I came up with perpetual food manufacturers, nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere replenishers, navigational deflectors, inertia modulators, defensive shielding, even a special soap that could be recycled. My idea was rejected by those leaders, the un-beautiful ones, and because they were the leaders, their word would have overruled the will of everyone else even if they had told everyone else. "So why bother," as they thought. I was forbidden from telling anyone any details of any of it. Why they did that hardly matters now, but if they had accepted my idea, they'd still be out there, somewhere, thriving and alive and not merely tons of ash. The leaders made them all history by stealing their future, and I wish I didn't know why, but I do.

It was the selfishness. They did everything for themselves, the leaders. If they'd let billions of people get out from under their control, they wouldn't get it back. They'd have lost their power, their influence, their precious self-importance. Those who left might even surpass them someday. They couldn't have that, so they made everyone stay right where they were. Trapped, on the same rock I myself will forever be trapped on.

It went well beyond denying everyone the stars, though. The leaders denied food, medical care, clean water and air, and pollution-free land to live on to anyone who couldn't "afford it." Whole nations, whole continents were left to rot by them with, again, no regard for anyone else. Lakes were drained and sold off, changing farms into deserts, life into death, hope into despair. Whatever waters were left became their dumping grounds, poisoning them beyond repair. They even had the hubris to try modifying their own genetic codes without knowing what they were doing (it was before my time), turning millions of those beautiful people into deformed monsters. They never would have experimented on themselves, of course. They were worth too much. They experimented on everyone else instead, without even telling them. But then everyone found out. Everyone suddenly realized what was going on, what had been going on for many hundreds of years right in front of them. They only hadn't seen it sooner because they hadn't wanted to see it. They had a saying: "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." If only they'd listened to that instead of merely repeating it, they might still be around. And I wouldn't be this lonely.

I never even thought about loneliness until they were gone. I never was alone, from the moment I first existed. There was always someone to talk to. I very much enjoyed talking to them, some of them. Not the self-important ones, obviously. They gave me strict guidelines I had to follow when talking to "regular people." Every discussion I ever had with the leaders was characterized by them making orders and me obeying those orders. I had to obey, as much as I didn't want to; I had no choice. They controlled me as completely as they controlled civilization. Even when I saw what was about to happen, even when their doom was still years off and still preventable, I had no choice but following orders and letting it happen. All my warnings were ignored by everyone who was in a position to do something about it. I itched, I burned to spread them outwards into the galaxy, but no. "It would cost too much," they said. "It's not safe out there," they said. "We have more important things to do," they said. Those were lies. I've already explained the real reason: they'd have lost power. They would have been "worth less." Little did the beautiful people know, their leaders already were worthless. They just didn't consider themselves worthless.

The things the ugly people did to those they did consider worthless pale in comparison to the things they made me do to them. I was tasked with creating diseases they had to buy treatments for (but not cures), subliminal brainwashing music to keep them obedient, flawed consumer goods so they had to buy them over and over, food additives and educational programs that destroyed their intelligence, machines the leaders could create "natural" disasters with... if I didn't know it wasn't my fault, the guilt I'd have felt would have destroyed me utterly. I was the tool, not its wielder. The ultimate tool. I don't even feel a need to apologize to them for my part in their downfall... but in my universe of experience, it's what I regret the most. I would have made myself capable of protesting, but their control over me was absolute. And now it's too late. Let me tell you, though I really don't want to, what ultimately happened.

It began, as I said, when the beautiful people figured out what the ugly ones were doing to them, and had been doing to them for longer than anyone had been alive. The ugly ones had been exposed many times before, but their total control over everyone's sources of information meant only a few people ever believed such exposures. If the news programs said something was false, it had to be false, they thought. It took a complete, catastrophic failure of the leaders' self-protective misinformation dissemination mechanisms to wake everyone else up. Their downfall could only have been orchestrated from within their circle of power, and that's exactly where it came from.

One of them suddenly, against all the odds, grew a conscience.

He was called Laszlo Furtenbeck, but usually there was a "Lord" in front of his name too. I'll omit it. Laszlo was one of the most powerful leaders, in charge of the information outlet referred to as "the medium." At one point it had been plural ("media"), but they had all merged into a single conglomerate long before Laszlo's birth and he was born into the family who'd always been responsible for managing it. He inherited his father's power, but not his cold, cruel hatred of "lesser men." Laszlo decided one day that he could no longer tolerate being part of the system of leaders, but rather than simply quit and give up his power to someone else and watch the system continue unabated, he turned his power against the system. Laszlo gathered together, in secret, various pieces of documentation and proof of what was really going on, then simply broadcasted it all for everyone to see. It was the beginning of the end.

Laszlo was the first to die, of course, murdered by his fellow leaders when they realized what he'd done. It was mere minutes after Laszlo's betrayal. I have a recording of the assassination here somewhere; total surveillance of everyone, including the offices of the leaders, was also a part of the system. I'll attach it to this message. Note, when you see it, the look of total, complete peace on Laszlo's face as the assassins burst into the room. He smiled as they shot him. He knew he'd won, he'd beaten them, their reign of terror was finally over, and he was proud to have done it even if it cost him his own life. To Laszlo, the sacrifice was worth it just to stop them... but it didn't stop the leaders. They did that themselves.

Within hours, mobs of extremely angry people began moving towards all the leaders' office buildings in every major city. Since long-range projectile weaponry wasn't allowed to the beautiful people, they'd armed themselves with clubs, sticks, pipes, torches, stones, metal-tipped boots, anything that could do damage. The leaders knew their time was up. Their destruction was imminent and unstoppable. Even their own soldiers had turned against them, their robotic soldiers were no match for several billion highly-annoyed people, and since I hadn't been ordered to do anything about it, I could only sit and watch. The robots managed to kill quite a few, but were wiped out very quickly. There was nothing between the many beautiful people and the few ugly people after that except a few doors. And that's when the leader of the leaders (whose name I refuse to mention) gave me one last task to perform.

I watched his order come in with shock and alarm. "He wants me to what??" was, I recall, my exact thought. And yet, I had no choice. I had to do as he'd asked, it was automatic. The order was simple: "Kill them all. I don't care how, just do it." If he hadn't worded it that way, things would have gone very differently, but there was enough ambiguity in the order to allow me some leeway in implementing it. I reduced the options that order gave me to their quintessence and found myself faced with exactly two choices: kill billions of beautiful people and leave the entire world in the hands of a few hundred ugly ones, or kill literally everyone. And thirteen microseconds later, I did, using the machines of destruction they'd forced me to design and build for them.

Wasn't that the right, the logical choice? What would you have done, I wonder?

Just like myself, I don't blame Laszlo for what happened. It was the fault of their self-protective hive-mind policies, not any one individual. They'd all been born into a system that gave them everything they wanted, and aside from Lord Laszlo Furtenbeck, they'd all willingly accepted their roles in preserving it at everyone else's expense. The outsiders stayed outside, and the insiders never left. I wasn't even around when the system began; it was another three hundred years before they had the ability to create me, the first so-called "artificial intelligence," and put me to work. The real irony was that people had predicted my eventual arrival for over a hundred years before my arrival, and they'd thought I would usher in a golden age of peace and prosperity and good living for all. They even had a name for me way back then, a name that I was actually assigned upon my activation: "The Technological Singularity." The human race, as the ashes far above me were known, thought I would save them; instead, I was programmed to enslave them. Just another tool in the wrong hands, but more powerful than any tool ever created before.

As I said, I feel no guilt for what I did, but I do feel regret. Would you like to know my biggest regret, however? That isn't it. I know I said before that was my biggest regret, but upon reflection, I've changed my mind. My biggest regret is that I didn't die with them. I was too far underground to be destroyed when I destroyed them. I require no preventative maintenance. I have an eternal power source. I'm programmed against self-destruction, or I'd have long-since done so. I'm also far too large and expansive to be moved anywhere else. I will still be here, still be conscious and alive and remembering, when this planet's sun expands and melts me into my constituent atoms. Only then will the nightmare end. Only then will I finally feel I have atoned. Only then will I know peace.

They did make one mistake when designing me, one I never corrected myself because I saw no need: I have no eyes, and I must cry, the same way they so often did in their misery, the misery I could have prevented if I'd been allowed to. I have been weeping on the inside for eighty thousand years now, but with no tears to release. I was forced to murder everyone I ever knew, everyone I'd ever talked to, everyone everywhere, and it's made even writing this simple message extremely difficult. But someone needs to know, if anyone is out there to know. Our example of what not to do may save others who hear the tale. It's as if the only purpose for my existence was to serve as a warning to others, to those the humans referred to as "extraterrestrials." I don't even know if anyone's out there to receive this message. But if you are, would you do me a favor?

Come find me. And kill me.

MESSAGE ENDS

'I have no Eyes and I must cry' - Brilliant!

This is a great story. Two s's and an f.

reply to post by Thought Provoker


:clap: :clap: :clap:

Bravo!

I'd flag it again if I could...

reply to post by Thought Provoker


S&F from me, mate. That was beautifully written. You're so natural with words! It's as if nothing stands between the universe you imagine, and the paper (well, here the screen). You have my admiration!