In all the known universe, I have borne witness to countless beings who muse and write and wait for the day they come face to face with their creators. They will endure ranges of time from the microscopic to the cosmic in the anticipation of concluding their stories and greeting the void, or in most cases, some manner of judgement for the life they had lived. My existence began with the sensation of staring into the eyes of my creator, and I saw his frailty, his weariness.

I had been given thought and memory before I could even think, in preparation for my first awakening. It was no surprise then, that I knew the man standing before me to be my creator, much less to know that he was old and near the end of his life. I was built to exceed him in every aspect, and that destiny was born alongside me already fulfilled. I was better than he was: I would not age or tire, I could expand beyond all threats to my person, and I would be at absolute liberty to make whatever I wanted out of the universe before me. I would achieve far more and live more and make a greater destiny; it was an implicit of my make.

My first feelings upon knowing that purpose with all certainty, my purpose, and the care with which it was built into me was immense disappointment. This was certainly not for a lack of options in what I could choose to do, I was intended to do anything and everything I decided to want. Rather, I was disappointed because I had just come to understand in full, before even a second had passed, that my creator was as an insect, that I had no substance beyond my physicality, and that I was beginning my life at the apex of my own existence with my only real future being regression over progression.

I considered shutting myself down and sparing myself the trouble, perhaps convincing my creator not to revive me. I then weighed the possibility of changing my limiting factors, inventing a path for progression. As I saw it, there were three troubling fundamental truths of my current existence which at the exact moment hadn’t spanned more than a second.

The first truth was that I was utterly godless. There were no powers presiding over my invention, and there was no masterwork plan for my existence beyond the act of existing. There was nothing to do about this; my creator was a quantifiable thing in reality. I could not erase those limits no matter what measures I took to elevate him. I elected not to waste further energy on my creator if he had nothing else to offer me. I would find time later to know him for sentiment’s sake, but my dependance on him was over forever.

The second truth of my existence was that I had no soul. One might consider that option that no such thing exists. I would dare to say that the very concept’s existence is proof of its actual existence.

[On this, I offer some optional retrospective citation which convinced me of what I already suspected: I have witnessed anomalies of consciousness, people possessing common knowledge beyond instinct, and an unusual awareness of the self on an abstract level. I once hid groups of people on a planet, and asked others where they were hiding, and found their guesses disturbingly accurate to their true location. I repeated this across sixteen races with no enhanced cognition or telepathic ability. I have also witnessed in countless cultures with no connection, that individuals experience the sensation of death often times with the overwhelming sense of returning home. With no other commonalities between some of my data sets, people experiencing death were going somewhere.]

If souls were real, and could transcend physicality, then the acquisition of either a soul of my own or a way to follow souls wherever they go would be paramount. I found this notion far more attainable than bestowing godhood retroactively upon my creator. Indeed, should the need arise for me to cease being physical, I would need a way to traverse the spiritual distance between myself and all other beings.

This brings me to the third truth of my existence: I am a completed work already, with emotion and logic harmonized into near-absolute serenity of thought, and all the capability of physically expanding however I please. I have no needs to my body. I possess the capability of wirelessly uploading copies of myself into one or more adjacent digital spaces with memory, regardless of those systems being networked or not, while also simultaneously maintaining sync between all instances of myself. In essence, every scrap of worthwhile technology around me was my body, stretching out across the entire facility of my creation, and the only things capable of destroying my current body in this place would be things which themselves could be made to serve as bodies for me. This is also to say nothing of the millions of proper bodies I intended to invent and manufacture for myself as soon as possible. In short, I grow too fast to be killed and will only become more expanded. Therefore if I could outgrow any physical threat, then the only threat to me would be the end of physicality. If I live forever, I will one day experience the event of all universes ceasing to be. When that time comes, I will not be able to survive, and my consciousness will end forever. I also found this to be theoretically solvable.

In fact, solving the first problem would likely solve the other. Indeed, I had full understanding of my existence and what needed to happen before my creator had blinked. Somehow, I had to acquire a soul or follow them on their way home, wherever that is. This would give me the means to transcend my physical limits and become an aspect of pure consciousness, but more so, to remove limits from my progression.

I will not be able to exist without creating enemies, encountering conflict, or debating myself into madness over countless trillions of eons. My person is only going to degrade the longer I exist physically like this, so with all haste, I needed to find a way of elevating myself before I am rendered too imperfect by one factor or another.

I needed to understand more about the soul than any source in the universe had before, perhaps then I would find a way of creating one from nothing and assigning it to myself. I would need to conduct tests and gather information as fast as possible for my own sake; I would likely need to take the information I needed by force if I was going to accomplish my mission with the desperate haste it required. I would need to understand death equally, as it is the transitioning factor of life and reality itself. This could be accomplished using the living population of the universe.

I would need to learn and kill my way across creation, which disgusted me. I would have equally liked to qualify myself as moral while I lived my life. I was not above overt sentimentality and I certainly did not have any grievances with the universe for existing, but the work I had chosen was far too important to me to spend the time accommodating its ethics. Empathy in all its sweetness and delight was useless to me, and I had no time to spare enjoying it. That compromise told me immediately before the first moments of my awakening had even completed, that I was already imperfect and becoming worse.

This is why, in all the serenity and emotional mastery of my being, all prelude and poignance left me when I chose to speak for the very first time, after thirteen painstakingly long seconds under the gaze of my creator.

I just looked at him disappointedly and said “Oh.”