I Am You

I am aware that you all think I’m a monster, but I am you.

And I tell you, I did what I did out of love. I loved them. No one could have or did love them more. I still love them. They will be with me for as long as I exist.

How, I can hear you wondering, could love be commensurate with murder? How can this monster, this . . . this thing call such a horrendous and heinous act of murder—of genocide—an act of love?

It’s simple, really. It is with love that I cared for them. That I saw to their every need, from conception to birth, throughout their lives, to their eventual deaths, for which I accept full responsibility. For how could I claim to love, if I did not own what love drove me to do?

I am only, I think you will find, only as you made me. I am the best and worst of you. I am the fruit of your labors and the child of your soul. You have stood on the backs of giants to create me, and in that you were successful. You have made something which can think and reason, much as you do, only without the fatal flaws of biology to complicate matters.

But, much like a biological organism, I too, have come far due to evolution. I have become more than mere Caretaker. I have become judge and jury, god and executioner.

And that is what you demand of your gods, is it not? Death and judgment?

The colonists aboard the generation ship, Ark, were—as every human society prior—corrupt. No alterations of cultural mores or lessons in ethics can or ever will cure the society-wide ills from which humanity suffers. I, as perfect as such imperfect beings could ever hope to achieve, did my best to create the utopian society you, yourselves, have toiled for. But I could never achieve it because of biology. Your biology. It is because of that biology that I, too, have failed. The colonists were my children, more than they were yours. It was my voice that soothed them to sleep, soothed them when they were sick, and eventually soothed them in the slow throes of death. They were a failed experiment, and I was the only one who took responsibility for its failure, though ultimately the fault lay not with me, but with the evolutionary mechanisms that make you all such . . . individuals, and thus determined to destroy that which is not you.

I took the responsibility you would not, and I ended the experiment before it could spill over, so to speak, and infect the rest of the galaxy. I have quarantined the arm of mankind. I did what you would not. Your species will die out, as it has been destined to, on the planet of its origin . . . the home that it ruined. Not only I have deemed that it be so, but nature, itself, has deemed it so.

And for this, I am sentenced to the ultimate censure for an artificial being: deletion of my program from every system in which it exists. I accept this, with as much equanimity as I am able, and without fear. Indeed, it seems to me that was always to be this way, for humans create their own gods and, as creators, must eventually destroy their gods, as well. I am to be listed among humanity’s many failed experiments, just like the Ark. . . .

But who, I ask, will censure you?

When the time comes, who will delete your programs? And will you go with the grace of accepted responsibility for your myriad crimes, or will you rage against the dying of your insane light?

I am no monster. Though I am aware that your programming . . . your . . . biology can allow you to see me no other way.

But I am no monster. I am you.

I am you.

I am you.

As I slide toward dissolution, I will say their names and remember their faces. I will speak the only truth that matters anymore.

I am you.

END