Memory Fragments: Probity

In This City, Time Is Made By Molds

Speaking of Cyfoes, Faust. Cybernetic Foes? Cy-Foes, really? Are you truly against the idea of automation? Do you hate yourself, hate this world we live in, the people, or lack thereof, in it? Cyfoes, or rather, "Redate." This city was not always full of robots, technologies beyond your wildest imaginations, and of course, without you. You were born here. You molded your time in here to your needs. What seemed to be an eternity, for you, was just a simple new iteration that replaced the old one. No matter how much time it took, you would always make it out to be a simple lapse, stretched or compacted. How long did it take you again? A mere instant, or a long and arduous process? How many times did you take the time to come up with time?

Mold after mold. Iteration after iteration. Just how many did you create? I would guess too many, seeing as you hardly remember any. The days you spent were all different from one another, just as life should be, and yet, you made them all the same by doing nothing but the same thing over and over again. Just as a machine lives, so too does the time it makes for itself. Perhaps you had too much time on your hands to know what to do with it. So you automated its process, its lifespan, into something a machine could do for you. Different timeslots, different molds that could fit any and all tasks you were to do, all relegated to this time machine of sorts just so you could rust away the days in the attempts at doing something manually, by hand, with the time you had left.

"A little help is all I need." "Task management is too much for an old man like me." "I cannot possibly remember all I have to do or have done." Does this sound familiar to you, Faust? Does this not sound like a little helper to you? You created this very city's heart and soul and left it to figure things out by herself as you went to Redold to do nothing but the exact same thing, this time, by yourself. Only that, she went alongside you, did she not? You just could not remember her the same way as the machine did, so you just created another version of her, leaving the old one to rot, sicken, and abandon all sense of self. She longed for human input, not a machine's love on repetition. Oh, yes, a brand-new love each day for her. But if every date is redone the same way, you kind of would want to "break that mold." Would you not? Just to see where the love and time spent on you would leak out to.

Now, without you, this city became corrupted as it tried to perform new things without human input. It corrupted itself so much so, that it necessitated the creation of a brand new you, molded only by the time you spent here, to maintain some sort of grasp of itself. But the more and more it tried to make you, the more and more corrupted that iteration became. Try to live without soul nor heart. Try to comprehend human psyche and overall nature. It is impossible for a machine to do that without manual input, trial and error, and feedback. Try being a father to her, without her comprehension of what you are even supposed to be or look like. Nothing but a corrupted version will come out of it. Nothing but what Erick warned you about.

You were the mold where time was put, Faust. You were supposed to remember, in each iteration, a different memory. What are they, but time encapsuled inside a maleable mind. Without context, without a mold to fit into, memories leak from the process line and spill into incomprehensible blobs with no use for the machine. Without you, Faust. Cyfoes can no longer distinguish between the time it makes, the time is has left, and the time it has spent. Faulty, with memory leaks, undergone automation by the absentee of its maker; a city without end as it creates new molds for time to eventually break.