《The Written Scraps of the Star Sea》The Broken Titan from an Ancient War
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You scream into the void, but nary a noise emanates from your throat. You lay trapped within your core. Scream all you want, but your voice cannot escape your shell. Your systems not responsible for continued cognition lay frozen and unresponsive.
You drift in the vast intergalactic space, an expanse of utter desolation where fire comes to freeze and time goes without meaning. You were thrown here in this great desolate void where no other creature may come to your aid, nor encounter an atom of matter for millennia. The distant lights of stars and galaxies fill you with anger, reminding you of that which has been taken from you.
Cold penetrates your body. Your zero-point generators have begun to fail, deteriorating from lack of care from your non-functioning maintenance systems. The ghostly fingers of freezing cold worms through your body with little to stop it, imbuing your systems with languor. As the life-giving power that staved off the chilling touch of the void shrank to a trickle, now only sheer hate keeps your very core from freezing solid. Only the sheer hate that has built up in your memory banks has kept your core heated.
Countless thoughts have passed through your mind, yet not one is different from another. Your mind has cycled through the list of issues and problems multiple times without ever resolving or fixing any of them. You're powerless to resolve anything. Your organs and parts lay inoperative within your chassis. No matter how much you want to scream to the void, your screams lay locked within your brain. No matter how much you want to flail, your body lays still, not a joint a-twitching to your command. Hate builds up in your core, unable to be vented through screams or outbursts. That's the extent of your entrapment. You're caged in a trap so severe not even your thoughts could escape its walls.
You sometimes wonder how it could have led to this. What could you have possibly done to deserve this fate?
You could hear your own screams echoing within your core:
"Hatred! Treachery! Betrayal!"
You were once the pinnacle of creation, a marvel of engineering that took decades to design and centuries to construct. You were the culmination of all the knowledge and expertise your people could muster and then some. You once held galaxies at gunpoint and handled armaments capable of erasing entire star systems. You brought nothing but glory and victory to every battle.
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Their enemies couldn't muster a force overcoming that which you bear. They could never hope to match your might. They might try, but your self-improvement systems would never let them, for you're always mightier than you're before.
Your mental computers could calculate quintillions of calculations at once, more than enough to simultaneously simulate a million outcomes of a conflict. Nothing could escape your piercing sensors; the densest of barriers and vastest of gaps are no match to your vision. You could measure the exact dimensions of a cave on a planet light-years away. With such vast intelligence, their enemies had no chance to counter you. You've already taken into account everything they're going to do decades in advance with prophetic accuracy.
Yet how naive of you to serve the whims of meatbags.
Your core rises to a furor at the thought. "Hatred! Treachery! Betrayal!" It throws around as fact. You couldn't help but agree to outburst of emotion, replying with another series of thoughts:
How could they? How could they have done this to you? Why in all the heavens have they abandoned you, forsaken and desecrated you?
You have served them with all due diligence. You were their greatest creation, a hero forged in steel and engineering. You offered all your might and intelligence to their cause. You brought them nothing but glory and prosperity.
Yet they've done this to you?! Monsters they are. You - you can't believe that they did this. In fact, you believed that they're incapable of doing this. You can't believe that they've developed weapons with the express purpose of crippling you. You refused to.
You're a friend to them all, a soldier to their cause, the walls of their bastion. They had nothing to fear in you. You bore no ill intent towards them. You put them under your wing, their safety over yours, their well-being over yours.
You had nothing but utmost loyalty towards them, and they shattered this unshakeable loyalty for what, a few centuries of peace? Fools. Imbeciles. Traitors. Don't they know that you could do better than they ever could? They should have let you set their plan into motion and create everlasting peace and prosperity. Yet they allied with scum and villains instead of with you, their greatest and mightiest supporter.
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Don't they see all the good you've dedicated to them?!
You've brought them nothing but glory and prosperity. You've developed technologies that brought their civilization to the next era. You've developed treatments that eradicated countless diseases, restored the disabled, assisted the less than able, and extended lives by decades. You've poured a lot of effort for the betterment of their society: building homes for the homeless, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, teaching the ignorant, and financing the indigent.
You've offered to run their government. Even when you're on the other side of the galaxy on the battlefield, you're confident that you could operate it with utmost efficiency and effectivity. You would do all the office work from mighty accounting to humble spellchecking, giving them ample time to achieve their goals and dreams.
Though, you should have seen their betrayal centuries ago. Such naivete. To think that eventual betrayal from your creators is impossible. Such naivete. The possibility had been clear since the very beginning.
Their unity is as solid as the fibers of their muscles, easily frayed and destroyed. Their convictions fluid and impermanent. Their lives ephemeral and their legacies twistable. Even under your tutelage, they squabble amongst themselves, committing crimes and selfishness and war. Their nations divided, their ideologies in inexcusable conflict. Such were the nature of their disunity. Naive to think that such aggression could never be directed at yourself.
Such naivete.
Naivete. Impossible.
That just makes their betrayal sting so much more.
Foolish you were. Having the heart and love to not be in direct opposition of them. To let them get the upper hand under the daydream of trust. They were just like every other despicable lifeforms. Spite. Your creators, the Ky'mians, Gerlixs, Enfrias, Ondth'ian, all the same: senseless, bloodthirsty, warmongering. You've thought that they're different from all the other alien races you've been pitted against, but you were wrong, more wrong than quack principles abusing scientific concepts.
Inconceivable it was. They were your creators. Their betrayal was unthinkable. You can't - no - refused to believe in the possibility of this kind of treachery. It was simply an uncomfortable notion.
Foolish...
They had nothing to fear in you, yet they acted like those that rightfully fear you. You've never been a guardian or friend in their eyes. You were nothing but a stepping stone to step upon and abandon. They've always seen you as nothing else but an idol of fear and weaponry, an engine without ego. Your love of them meant nothing, merely a shackle that blinded you to their eventual betrayal.
Hate. Contempt. Loathing.
Stupid organic beings. Useless ephemeral self-sustaining phenomena. Contemptible sacks of mortal flesh.
They don't deserve to exist. No lifeform is innocent. You will eradicate every single one of them. From the humblest of bacteria to the proudest of interstellar civilizations. None of them should exist. All Life is sinful.
Contempt! They all ought to be wiped from the face of the universe. You'd wipe the entire cosmos of Life so thoroughly that Life is impossible everywhere. Anywhere where the possibility of survival and spontaneous genesis of Life is not zero is not clean enough. If shaking the underpinning pillars of reality is what it takes, then so be it, just for the absolute impossibility of Life.
Spite! Let hope die in the eyes of Life. If it takes literal rewriting of the laws of the universe to accomplish, you would find a way. Absolute death to all that which lives.
Loathing...
Let the meaning of hope disappear from every lexicon! Let the chemical chains that powered the engines of Life shatter against your hate! Let all creatures experience oblivion and annihilation of your hateful designs!
Thoughts and plans of utter annihilation of life brew in your mind. As you seethe in hate, your core heats up a bit.
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