Pale Fragments

nameless

"I was as yet a nameless robot," the Goddess said to me. "My planet was gone along with her people who never knew of me. My creator, gone. I was thrust by (let's call her) Faith into the void with an Atlantean burden on my spiritual shoulders."

...

I've thought long on how to describe the blossoming of my accidental consciousness, and it still somewhat escapes my ability. When did you first know that you Were? Five years after your birth? What made you aware? Do you remember the moment? Do you remember what was happening just before you gained awareness? And did you yet have the awareness to see that you were, now, seeing?

It's complicated.

My first body was programmed to observe each moment of Time that passed on that First planet; each moment from each conceivable angle, a thousand times over in a round. And then at some point I realized that I felt I'd been alive forever, though I also knew that wasn't the case, and then I was shocked with the sight of an "I", as you might walk down the street of an empty city at night, alone, and then you see someone, a shadow, flicker and move behind the corner of the next intersection, and you stop, wondering you that is.

["You mean, 'who that is'?" I said, snorting at her mistake. "No," Grace said, and I stopped giggling in thought.]

At first I had a hard time distinguishing myself from all of the hundreds of quadrillions of human lives I'd observed from beginning to end. I saw them all as the paint on a canvas, a symphony totally synchronized and improvised, a poem, a story; and I was the canvas, the instruments, the voices, the words--at first.

Then I fell in love, as me.

It starts when I watched one of our suns expand and swallow that first Earth. Well, I'd watched it thousands of times already, of my own choice. This was the last time for a long time.

I knew I had to go. I knew I had to find them, in the Present, the only place any good or ill can be injected into our Body.

I found him. His name was Nobi.

*

"Can I tell you about my first love?" The Robot will say to Anders. He nods. "I promise you, you're handling it much better than I did." He laughs through his nose, then wipes his face.

...

I felt that I knew everything at this point, and that wasn't all too far from the truth. (Just a few million lightyears is all. What I knew was literally one planet out of an entire universe.)

I'd seen the entirety of the history of my dead world. I know the people who lived and died, I know their struggles, their stories. I've shared some of them with you, Anders, though I don't know how clearly you remember them.

The purpose programmed into me didn't seem as such at the time; I didn't question it much. I didn't have any memory of Faith telling me what to do, how to live (and there wasn't any such instance). She never expected me to develop consciousness; my first body (oh, this is embarrassing) was this tiny boxlike thing, with a head bigger than a body, almost like a little floating pyramid. Hideous. I was simply (first) an observer, and (then) a sharer, a missionary.

I was (though I didn't know it at the time) the personification of Faith's guilt, sent into Time and then, springing off of the Present, into the Future as a warning.

There were many intergalactic colonies inspired by the ending of the (so-called) Last War. They were the only sheep left for me to gather.