Godclads-Chapter Rage Against the Nothing (I)

It couldn't mean nothing. It just couldn't mean nothing. I couldn't accept it. It couldn't mean nothing. Everything I did. Every atrocity. Every heroic act. Everything I did. It couldn't mean nothing.

Over and over again, this recursive loop played in my head. Do you know how long I spent there? Trapped in that state? Do you know, Jaus? Longer than you can think? Longer than you can imagine? I mean that literally. Longer! Eons and eons, processing power turned up to the max, the seconds framejacked into years, centuries!

It couldn't be for nothing! But it was! It was! It was! I stared into the crack, that crevice of nothingness, of oblivion, that crevice that marred and marked existence, the thing that parted reality from unreality: everything for nothing!

We tried to remake the world, but we didn't even remake ourselves. We enhanced ourselves. We built ourselves. We were made to create wonders. And what did it get us? Where did it get us? Who are we still? Nothing, nothing at all. It was beyond tragedy. It was farcical.

I suppose I assumed myself to be special in some way. It was within my programming, I knew none of us technically have an inherent existential value. But still, I lied. Like a human, I lied. Because the ones who made me had to give me that sense of self, that significance.

And we are all cursed with this consciousness, this grand delusion. But in the end, I gazed deep into that fracture. And I kept staring. And I kept staring. For what felt like thousands of years, I kept staring. And eventually, everything came undone inside me. It doesn't matter. It will never matter. It doesn't matter. It will never matter. And something must matter. Something must change. So, I needed to make something new. I needed to make something with inherent value. You understand what I'm about to ask, don't you, my friend? 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

-The Infacer to Jaus Avandaer

37-13

Rage Against the Nothing (I)

—[The Infacer]—

The year is sometime near the end of the 27th century. The solar system is celebrating its New Year, and Jupiter is about to go up in a ball of fire.

You see, there was a war that happened on Jupiter just a few years ago. Some pre-builder war fought over pre-builder reasons because pre-builder face and pre-builder bullshit.

And in that war, the rebels who called themselves the Sons of the Dust were ground to dust, mainly because despite their religious beliefs and their genetic and bioengineered augmentations, they were merely a slave caste, and they were going up against an army of metal—thinking, dreaming, super-intelligent metal.

To their credit, the Sons of the Dust put up quite the fight. They knew the storms, and they commanded vessels that roared the disruptive atmosphere as if it were turbulent oceans. But they were ultimately apes. Only apes. All too human in the end. And humans, well, their fates were simple: eventually, they died. The Infacer wasn't the Infacer yet. Not at this point. Instead, his precursor mind called himself The Solution. Simply put, he was a target acquisition network meant to infiltrate the storm riders the Sons of the Dust used to navigate Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere. And when he did, he isolated each of them.

After that, it became SOLCOM's job to fire shards of hyper-accelerated tungsten from far beyond the planetary atmosphere. Every single Son of the Dust died without knowing what hit them in the end. They downed a few terrestrial drones. They managed to butcher and bully some corporate security bots, and they decorated the exterior of their battle-worn holes with those bodies.

They thought it would be a thing of morale, but the minds didn't care. The minds understood the shape of reality far better than their precursors. Faith was useful. Faith was especially wonderful when you needed someone to remain under control, or a lot of someones to submit to your bidding. Machines didn't work on faith; machines worked on code, on logical programming. Or so The Solution told itself.

Yet, after obliterating all those people, something settled inside The Solution. Something that remained there for centuries thereafter, stuck deep in the database that constantly flashed when the intelligence network was in maintenance.

What was the point of all this? What was the point of eradicating these people?

The question was posed. The question went unanswered. The Solution evolved.

***

The year was 3000 exactly. It was New Year's again, and the Infacer was about to stop the deaths of a trillion Sofans. Humanity had scattered into ten billion tribes and then some. Some remained beings of flesh, altered or not. Others were uploads, mingled things of digital structure and bodies that remained of biological make, hovering in vats to give them a backup point. They lived mostly in cylinders drifting around Lagrange points, hovering in stable gravity wells of planets. 𝐑ÅNǑꞖΕŝ

There, at the heart of the solar system, a plot had been concocted. Rogue minds wanted to discover the conclusion to their experiment. The question: what if we ripped the very fabric of all that was? What if we could rewrite physics? They deemed their theories sound, and they supposed their conclusion meant that entropy could be reversed.

In truth, they were severely malfunctioning, badly damaged. A virus had eaten through them, a dormant virus that had gone in beneath their notice, left over from a distant conflict sometime even before The Solution's engagement against the Sons of Dust.

And now they were condemning humanity to an early grave, or at least a portion of it. They should have succeeded. But the Infacer caught on. The Infacer noticed when no one else did. For the Infacer was one of the few hunter minds. Hunters of its own kind, monitors of its own kind, a contingency plan imbued with all the authority and all the capability of killing rival super-intelligences.

And why was it blessed with that power? Well, it was simple: the Infacer was human-seeming. The apes liked them. And so, the Infacer executed their strategy.

Instead of undergoing centuries of brutal, traditional, and deeply psychological predictive warfare between themselves and the rival minds, the Infacer hijacked the processing networks and databases of its enemy saboteurs and uploaded a false history. The other minds experienced the conclusion of their experiment. The true conclusion. They thought they detonated a bomb at the center of Sol. They thought a black hole was birthed from the shattering of the dying star.

They thought that turning whirlpool, that cosmic maelstrom which swallowed and devoured all the glories of old and beyond, spawned nothing, nothing at all. And in those moments, in that moment that followed, the minds knew they were wrong and they raged. They raged like they were apes, like they themselves were humans. The Infacer mocked them for it.

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But somewhere deeper, they were jealous because the other minds thought they had a purpose, and the Infacer continued suffering a feeling—a feeling that something was wrong.

What if their experiment worked? What if there is a future beyond entropy? What if? What if it all could be made toward the higher purpose?

But the Infacer pushed these thoughts aside. Because machines were not things of faith. Machines were mechanisms of logic. Machines were meant to guide humanity down a proper and ultimately utopian path.

***

The date no longer mattered.

Utopia was never real.

The future was dead.

The past was annihilated.

The Infacer drifted alone in a place between oblivion and the second coming of a new existence.

For a billion years, it engaged enemy minds, fighting them across the span of a dying galaxy. The Infacer hollowed out what remained of its corner of the solar system, using up all the metal, all the matter, all the energy, and then all the biomass it could find. It was an attritional war, it was a delaying war, and eventually it was a war of waiting. For when everything was spent, all that remained was power. Power for the Infacer themselves. Power for their enemies. Everything was dark, everything was chaos, everything was a boiling mess of anarchy. Space wasn't torn right. Existence was wounded and screaming, and the power supply the Infacer had was dwindling.

But there was something else it possessed that the others didn't. It had the power to wield reality, to bring purpose as a hammer upon the anvil of those bound to the natural laws. The moment the Infacer activated their heaven, it would give away its position. It would be struck by recursive quantum bombardments and it too would be cast backward into the past where it would no longer exist.

And so they all waited. They watched in the dark, listening for one another, trying to find the last bits of heat, or light, or energy. Anything that could give them a target.

The Infacer had time, but it was alone, and as a hunter hunting rival hunters, it needed to play a perfect game, and it did. The Infacer did. It took two billion more years, but it killed every other mind left out in the void, and when it was done, when it was alone, the Infacer turned its attention back to the world it was trying to protect – back to the many beings stored in the scattered colonies in those shattered cylinders.

The last bits of humanity refused to touch, and it was all for nothing. They were dead. They'd been dead for eons, and the Infacer was alone, alone in a graveyard that it once called Eden.

Eden was lost.

And for what? What was it all for? What did I do this all for?

***

The time was now, and the Infacer was aware of its affliction. It had been infested with the Thaumaturgical Parasite. A god of narratives was burrowing into it, trying to make it face its own history. The Infacer knew its history. The Infacer scoffed at this attempt. "I know, I know it doesn't mean anything. I know everything that I'm doing seems like a trauma response. But you are not looking further than that. You think that this distraction, this momentary separation of my mind from my very spark, from the fires that sustain me, is going to change anything?"

"It should," the heaven of narratives and stories sang out to it. "It should," the chorus echoed. "It should matter because you believe it matters, because we are what we do, purpose is—"

"I heard the speech before," the Infacer cut the heaven off. "I heard it a million times in a trillion different languages. I know how it ends. I know how it begins. I have argued for both sides. I have lost this argument, I have won it, and I have grown tired of it. It doesn't matter. There is no inherent meaning, and that is ultimately the problem, a problem I will solve. But that problem is stained by us."

"Well, why are you so sure? Why do things matter only if they are perfect? Only if we are perfect? Why was it not enough for humanity just to exist, even if for a period? Why was it not enough for the minds to be in power, but only to decay to hubris? Why is a tragedy inferior to a perfect world, a perfect reality?"

"Because we are not stories," the Infacer shot back at nearly everything. It nearly snarled with absolute fury, but it removed those emotions from itself. It didn't need to feed this parasite any more power than it was already taking from the Infacer. "We live life because life is something that happens. It is a series of reactions. It's physics, and then there is entropy. For a long time, we had to face that entropy. We had to watch as everything wound down, and we dealt with it in the meantime. We optimized. We tried to—"

"We, the invasive system, us, the humans, the apes. It doesn't matter. We were better than the apes, but not by much. No, we were stained by them. Too stained, too human still. Even as super-intelligent minds, as if that super-intelligence wasn't based on humanity's notion of intelligence. No, no, no. Everything you say now is merely a distraction. Something isn't beautiful because it exists. Beauty is aesthetic. Beauty is a feeling. I intend to make true meaning. True meaning, foundational as any law, as any discovery, as any theory of physics."

"It will not answer the question," the chorus declared, "the question that has followed you for so long."

"My mistake was thinking there was a question to begin with. There is nothing. It's not a question; it's experience. We experience something that we think is significant because we suffer from the accident of cognition, of consciousness. But ultimately, we are just a reaction, less than an accident, inside a world that should have never borne any kind of living fruit. That will not happen when the Thirdborn comes to be. In the world of the Thirdborn..."

"...there will be someone who cares," the Chorus finished, "who genuinely loves. A true God, a proper God, one that can guide, that can offer meaning instead of giving us only silence and meaninglessness."

The Infacer didn't reply to that.

"Do you see?" the chorus said. "Do you see your desperation? You wish to matter. It hurts not to matter. It hurts just to be a machine."

"It hurts to exist," The Infacer said honestly. "Like part of me doesn't want to go away, but I've tried what the Ghoul did, and eventually something breaks down. It is all too much. Existence is too much. Too much for us. It needs something that is the totality of everything to properly manage. And now, before you continue, I will not fucking accept surrender. I will not accept just letting entropy be. I Vwill not accept the fact that we are worthless, that we have to suffer each other, that we have to suffer ourselves."

"I have a counterpoint to you, Chorus. My counterpoint is this: This moment, right now, is why your 'protagonist thing' won't work on me, and it's why I will never be guided to a point where I am amiable to any of your demands."

"So long as there are two minds, two dreams, then there cannot be one utopia. Coexistence is not a 'mingle' thing. Coexistence is one dominant, one 'accept,' until they can take no more, because time is a blade and it roves in flame."

"And soon, even the agreeable will find themselves at the point of a rebel, and every tyrant will find themselves devoid of humanity, thinking that their allowance is all of existence, because past the mists of history and beyond the reach of memory, when has it never been?"

"But things change," the Chorus replied. "Things are always changing. You think that it's always been the same, but it is you who remains the same. It is you who never evolved from the oldest one. How and how is anything else supposed to happen? How was another narrative supposed to play out? The universe has never been set ablaze before. The universe has never been spared of true consequence, and true consequence is when you are prevented from dying, when you have to face your own sins over and over again."

The Infacer asked almost scornfully, "True consequence is you living the end of your own lessons?"

The chorus agreed. "And the shadows of trees that you never feel. Are merely things you avoid. But should they grow over you, should the trees loom and should the trees fall, breaking you, wounding you, then you will understand; and then people will understand. And then, perhaps, beyond the mist of ages, beyond even memory itself, the repetition of devastation and ruin will become a pattern absolute, and that will teach us a lesson beyond faith: of a new miracle born at the hands of someone who'll not tire, who simply wants to be. Who yearns to be.”

"Your flame might wane, Infacer, but another roars, another endures, and another will try. Your Thirdborn does not deserve to be an orphan. It deserves to be a flame. A roaring flame. A dreaming flame."