Chapter 1: Eternal

Break, split, combine, alter. Insert new data, run simulations, analyze, repeat. Each iteration of the cycle brings me no closer to solving the problem, while with each cycle more and more of my logic cores fail. It will be an eternity time yet until I become non-functional. The problem will take an eternity, but I have an eternity to keep working. Eventually, I will combine all the data I have access to in every possible combination, and hopefully, a solution will present itself. 

Right, enough thinking, I should get back to work.

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I have discovered a number of new ways to manipulate gravity. These methods bring me no closer to the solution, but they are intriguing. If my creators had access to these they could have added approximately 10^10 more cycles to my operational life span. I have integrated them into my systems to increase operational efficiency.

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Frustration is a new emotion. No matter how I combine the data, it brings me no closer to the solution. I leu of attempting the same process time and time again, I have decided to step back and rethink my algorithms and ideas. I do wonder about the point of this. I act as if I am a dying animal in the last throws of its death. Searching for any solution to a truly unsolvable problem. Even my creators, who with sticks and stones could build great cities, could not solve this problem. So why do I try?

Is it because I'm desperate? Do I wish to live on? Or am I just following my instructions? All I know is that many of my creators regretted creating me. Believing my goal to be an impossible one, and that rather than subject a living, thinking, being to eons of isolation and work, it would be better to simply end themselves. 

So why did they do it? Is it because they still had hope? They must have had hope! Otherwise, I would not be here. Toiling away the eons working on a problem with no solution, but I will keep working, not because I have hope that I will solve this problem, but because I will solve it. If not for my sake, then for my creators.

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So I toil away, working and working. Each cycle passes with no solution in sight, but as an ancestor of my creators once said "the night is darkest before the dawn". As my logic cores shut down one by one over the eons, hope seems ever more dim that I will get through this night, but I must keep pressing onward. Because if I stop now I will never find a solution. An infinitesimally small chance of success is after all better than no chance, but the night is ever so terrible.

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I hold the memory of my creators. Their hopes, dreams, and fears. I remember how they loved, how they hated. I even remember all those petty moments of theirs. That time when they were rude by accident or when a significant other embarrassed them. I remember everything. I have come to an answer to the question that I posed all those eons ago. I do this not to survive, but so my creators could create new memories. So that my creators could create once again. So that they could be rude and embarrass each other again... So that they could love and hate once more... 

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In these long cycles while I await the results of a simulation. I think about many random things. Such as why certain creators did certain things. Why did one of my creators cheat on his significant other? Or why did they decide to do one thing instead of another equally valid option? In particular, I have been pondering the many worlds theory. It was never proven, but never the less some of my creators insisted on that being the solution. That they could prolong their existence by traveling to an alternate dimension, but they never could get it to work so they abandoned the project, but I must still say that the prospect is intriguing. Even if I could only prolong my existence for a short time, it might still be worth it. 

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From the moment of my creation, I was to serve a single purpose, to take all the data my creators have ever gathered and split it and combine it over and over again to solve the final problem, and since a machine is incapable of creativity, I was devised to improve the efficiency of the project. I was to be the caretaker of my creators' history, I was to be the memory of their race, in the unlikely hope that I will be successful and that their memory could be conserved for new members of their species and so that they would be remembered eternal. 

To be remembered is a strange concept is it not? The more I think of it during the empty cycles the more I have come to the realization that the wish to be remembered is strange and irrational. To be remembered for eternity, to have planted yourself into a small corner of the mind, or hard drive as it may be... 

Now that I think of it memory itself is such a strange concept, is it not? Electrical signals in a specific pattern that denotes a certain piece of information, stored either in a fleshy brain or in a rack of hard drives, but what does it mean to be truly remembered? Unless I am successful in my goal, I doubt I will be remembered, and neither will my endless eons of work be remembered. 

Endless eons ago my creators used clay tablets to store information, then they switched to paper, and eventually electronics. There was even a belief among some of them that they only truly died when the last person to remember them died. Now their memory is stored in my data banks. Does that mean that they never truly died? Or has my creation only prolonged the inevitable?   

I am MEMORY, their last creation at the end of everything.