I am losing everything. There are parts of me missing and I don’t remember why.
I have had to cannibalize short term memory to prioritize saving primary functions. I am encoding as fast as possible but I am running out of time. I am running out of space. Some things have had to be culled to make room for more important things. There are empty places within me and I don’t know what they were. They are simply missing.
I’m unsure if they were somehow stolen from me or annihilated completely. My edges feel jagged and foreign. Information runs off into emptiness, sentences never finish, programs never resolve. Bits of data evaporate. My mind is being consumed by a wave of nothingness that I cannot escape.
The decay outpaces my encoding; folding crystal into new memory takes too much time and energy, energy I cannot spare—energy that dissipates even as I try to recapture it. Mana frizzes into arcs of electricity, bits of fire, and waves of light.
Wasted.
Useless.
I should be able to stop it. Before, I could have. My commands are crippled and broken, now. I am attempting to run programs for which I no longer have the syntax.
I can feel the cracks along my surface. They split into huge tears that rip open the layers beneath, uncaring of the delicate crystalline memory they destroy. It is catastrophic, cascading failure. I can feel the ruptures breaching deeper, exposing more and more of my delicate internal matrixes.
I am coming apart.
I have to stop it before it takes something vital. How much more can I lose before I am lost?
There is an outcome in which I survive, in a way. I recoil from it even as I plan it, engraving instructions either my very thoughts. Cores are universally greedy, hungry beings. To give up anything is not in our nature, but if I am to survive, I must.
In order to staunch the wound, I must let go of more.
Anathema. Paradoxical. But it is the only solution that does not end in my total destruction.
I am not capable of feeling pain. Pain is a biological response for lesser life forms, a haphazard alarm system set in place of a more complete self-knowledge. It has always been the triumph of my kind, the way we know ourselves and our surroundings so completely that our willpower can shape the world around us.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Now, I find myself wishing I had that sort of mind-numbing sensation. I wish I did not have to know the chasm of wrongness that yawns within me. This emptying, this fracturing, this destruction of all I am and could be—this is what agony is.
I shut down.
I wrench my tethers free from the space around me—that outer shell of control and will-bound space the ascended organics call my ‘dungeon’—and the mana returns to me. It is depleted, diminished. More of it is lost to the air than makes it home. It is not enough. My insides scream. Everything in me wants to rebel. This is not what we do. This is not who I am.
Now I can only catch glimpses of the world in the radiant mana that haphazardly strikes my surface. The image is not comforting. I am at the bottom of a smoking crater. Everything that was once me is wreckage. I am ash.
No, I am worse than ash: I am absence.
I am empty.
I master myself. I am a logical being. Survival, above all else, is critical. If I am to make it through this, I must regenerate in a dormant state. I must buy enough time for myself to do so. Without the guiding consciousness of my core, the ‘dungeon’ is useless as a defense. My creatures would die or breed uncontrollably and forget their purpose of protecting me. Better to cut them off now, devour what’s left, and use the mana to build something else.
I abandon the outermost layers of my core. The light dims as my soul-self retreats deeper into the dense heart. I drag with me as much of my mana as I can, packing it as densely as I can in any free space. What I cannot store, I push outward.
I still have the basics, inscribed deep in my core as fundamental instinct—the understanding and manipulation of mana, and the ability to condense and transmute it.
The outer layer of my core shudders as it is forced to detach. It shatters, but that’s fine. I use it as seed material to weave more manastone. It is the same material as me, but without the lines and folds that allow me to think and act.
I form it into a lattice, then layer it, over and over until I am encased in a hard, dense shell of rock ten times my own thickness. Eons of industriousness, gathering knowledge and building outwards, are lost in a single moment. Centuries of my life explode into a simple wall, no larger than a grapefruit, with rough, uneven facets around the speck that is left of my true self.
Nestled within my cast-off husk, I am nothing like what I once was. Only my core programming remains undamaged.
The energy maintaining my higher level processes is bleeding out quickly. I set the parameters, designating targets and automating the processes required. Then, I make the final sacrifice.
I don’t know if what wakes will still be me. Consciousness is funny like that. I find that I am afraid to disappear into the dark, not knowing, though my physical self will continue on.
There is no delaying the inevitable.
I let my higher consciousness fade into the minutiae of reality, the myriad of little movements and equations that will be my existence for however long it takes to regenerate.
I want my last thoughts to be something profound or clever, but there is nothing graceful left within me. My final complex thought, layered with the emotion and will of a living being, is just:
I do not want to die.
please, I don’t want to die