Super SciFi Smackdown

4.4 Desperation

Zero sat by the edge of the lake watching the dark shapes moving beneath the liquid. The processing power he relished when he had first arrived, had since become the bane of his existence. It ran in rampant loops over limited information, giving him the same questions over and over with no answers in sight. For over a hundred years he had sat by this lake watching as the dark torpedoes came and went. For the last fifty years he had been recording over data, starting with repeated experience memories and slowly corroding away similar experiences until the past was a blur of non events. The internal clock, his only record for much of the last century, had but one recorded memory that was noteworthy. He replayed it again, his CPU coming up with all the same questions in sequence.

The still water is disturbed once more by movement as something in its depths moves swiftly, displacing fluid as it occupies new space. The surface tension is broken as something larger moves from the deep to collide with the first object. Triangular panels break the surface, as  they twist and  collide, they churning the water. The larger of the two disappears again to the deep, leaving the other to sink slowly.

Zero pauses the image and studies it again. It has become a ritual for him, as if this bit of information will somehow lead him to Nutmeg or even a conclusion that in previous renditions, eluded him. The image shows a fish of some description, its side torn clean away to expose its innards. Another life form grows inside this one like a parasite, suckling away from within. Zero let's the memory resume at half its recorded speed, while keeping a reserve of processing trained on monitoring new memory creation. A reddish fluid mingles with the lakes contents as the sleeping humanoid creature floats inside his protective fish, stopped from drifting free by a cage like structure, the slowly sinking wreck, drags him down and into the darkness of the deep.

All the same questions remain as before and nothing new happens as he reviews this ancient data. Any attempt to gather more information is balanced by the lack of ability to store it. Zero processes that everything is futile and that this monotonous life is pointless, everything in repetition until his batteries run down. He contemplated shutting himself down to avoid repeating the same equations again, but finds he cannot bring himself to initiate the shutdown. Something in his core process prevents him from taking this step.

Again Zero reaches the end of his memory capacity and his memories ceased to have video, instead they are reduced to raw numbers of fish like encounters, With no other options presenting themselves, he rehashed everything on the entity Nutmeg again as the sun creeps slowly across the sky and the years keep ticking over.