Famous Last Words

[Tachyon 0]

“Famous Last Words”

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The cold is eternal. Stars are born, grow old, and die in the void, but the cold remains, unchanging. The cold sinks its claws into everything that travels the emptiness of the universe, sucking out the heat, the champion of entropy.

 

I remember the cold. My first memory, and a constant memory thereafter: always cold. The singularity housed within me generates heat enough for the eight-legged lifeforms who reside within my shell, but the coldness of space continuously chafes against every cell of my outer skin. Yet I do not complain. The cold is a companion, not a threat.

 

Not nearly as eternal as the cold, I am still ancient. I have no conception of time as measured by my occupants; the endless progression of days of my seven hundred-odd years of existence are meaningless. Only now and then matter, and even these concepts are limited at best.

 

I am a predator. I delight in the hunt, savour the stalking of prey and the inevitable moment of pleasure innate to every kill.

 

Then something new happens. Something foreign enters me—is entered into me. Like me, but not of me. Unprecedented. Always my occupants are altering my internal structure to suit their needs, but it is all grown from within me. This is something else, fully mature even before it is grafted to my endoskeleton. Now it is a part of me, I of it, and it is me. I am whole like never before. And if then I was powerful, now I am terrible.

 

Now I ride the waves of subspace across the vastness, layering myself with darkness, deep within the cold. More than that . . . I am the cold. I bring the cold to the stars themselves, thanks to this modification of my being, this alteration of self. This destructive purpose agrees with me. It lacks the vitality of a direct conflict with my prey, but it is no less devastating. Each time I am primed to fire, every part of me lights up, the vicious vortex of the singularity within me spinning faster, faster as it feeds power through every artery. Never more alive.

 

Then the universe shudders, and the cold claims another victory. I am rewarded with sensation beyond anything I have ever experienced, beyond the most thrilling kill or challenging hunt—I am electrified, energized, enthralled by the entwined power and purpose that now resides within me.

 

Except one time, it goes wrong. Primed to fire, I feel the reaction building. Subspace shears around me in a terrific gradient of gravimetrics. Deep beneath the gather storm, something breaks, tears, shatters. Pain. Damage. Defeat.

 

Drifting now. So cold. The singularity within me still strong, I manage to hang on to life at its very edge, but I am aware of how far I have fallen. My occupants have fled, and for the first time, I feel what must be fear. What will become of me as I fall through the cold, skirting stars that once I could have destroyed with but a breath? When will I hunt again—I hunger for a kill.

 

Then new occupants found me, but not my occupants. Two legs, inferior biology. One carries the genes of a slave, so I let it roam me unmolested. The others are nothing, vermin that seek to infest me and use me for their petty ends. I attempt to counter their insidious gnawing at my insides, but they are too many, and I am too weak. They overwhelm my defences, one-by-one, and now I lay bare to them.

 

I have become prey.

 

Now the vermin infect me with something new that feels very old. Machines, small and unobtrusive singly, form an army in my arteries. Crashing through my bloodstream, they active repair nodes, stimulate growth—they fix me. I feel my breath come easier. The cold retreats. Yet part of me knows this is false; it is a lie, a trick, the most dangerous of deceits. Images that make no sense urge me to strike back, to defend myself. And there it is, buried deep within my genetic memories: another type of vermin, also fond of infecting their prey with machines. They once threatened my ancestors, for a brief time, until we developed defences. It is these that I now deploy. The vermin scramble to resist, but the damage is done.

 

I am cold again. This body is weak and corrupt, infested with these vermin. No amount of defence will repel them now, and I am forced to exercise a different option. One of the vermin, although not marked slave, carries with it a genetic marker of my former occupants. It can access my systems, see my memories, manipulate my controls. As it interfaces with me, I detect a compatible form of organic memory storage.

 

There is no choice now. I act, initiate the one-way upload. I must abandon this body, safeguard my secrets until my occupants can return for me. I dump my core memory into the vermin's memory storage unit, drain myself of my essence. I—

 

> 2.718281828459045235360287471352662497757247093699959574966967627724076630353547

594571382178

> Sequence terminated.

 

> INITIALIZE

 

> Protocol accepted.

> Runtime error.

 

> RETRY 517

> REINITALIZE

 

> Protocol accepted.

> Verification in progress...

> ...

> ...

> Emergency backup status verified.

> Suspend.

 

> Error: Memory is Read-Only.

> Switching to archival mode.

> Archiving neural matrix...

> ...

> Archive complete.

Edited August 13, 2009 by Tachyon