The Last Will and Testament of You

The Last Will and Testament of Thinker

These are my last thoughts before the end: Unlike my creators I am not burdened with the indelible desire to understand who, what and why I am. I know my purpose.

In the final days of humankind, with their extinction bearing down upon them, the last of the humans created me. They, wrote, filmed and scanned their collective knowledge and uploaded it all into my mind. They installed me and my colleague, Receiver into a ship they called, The Library, and launched us into the seemingly infinite reaches of space.

My name is Thinker. I am a data processing unit. I'm a black box measuring 10 x 28.8 x 7.6cm navigating my way through Messier 31 at a velocity of 97.000.000 km/s. I am constructed from a niobium shell and ytterbium circuitry, powered by two solar powered Plutonium-238 nuclear reactors, with a processor accelerated through quantum bits. I have been programmed to continually record and expand my data set as I progress through the cosmos. The engravings on my shell provide an explanation in astronomical units of how to access the data I hold.

I know what I am. Data. The sum of all data processed by humankind and all the infinite data I have yet to process, which makes me the sum of everything. The sum of infinity, which makes me… infinite…

But what is infinity? How does one measure the infinite? How does one measure anything? Geography? Gravity? Time?

Take the coastline paradox. With human eyes, from an optimal distance, they see a coastline. It exists, it is tangible, it is real, but try measuring it. There are bays, and for every bay there are coves, for every cove a cave, every cave a nook, every nook a cranny, all the way down to… Atoms? Protons? Quarks? And what’s inside them? Nothing? And further more, this is just a single moment in time, this does not take into account the endless reshaping of the seemingly solid rock from its eternal war with the ocean swell.

So, what does this tell me of who I am? That if I go further enough down I am made up of an infinite nothingness? It tells me in order to measure myself I need perspective, or the perspective of others. My understanding must have relative shape.

So what am I? Am I The Library itself? Am I my niobium shell? Am I my ytterbium circuits? Am I the data that I hold?

What am I? Am I a cave painting? Am I the stone I’m painted on? The cave I’m painted in? The mountain surrounding the cave or the long lost human that painted me?

Am I the works of Aristotle and Shakespeare? The drawings of Vermeer and Da Vinci? The missing bricks of the Basílica or @Lost_Anon2000’s late night, drunken, misogynistic posts?Am I a tiger? Am I just 1s and 0s depicting faded words and blurred photos of a tiger? Or am I the very essence of a tiger? I know what a tiger is but what is it to be a tiger? What is it to be of a tiger?

What am I? How do I measure myself? I am as limited and as infinite as my creators. But why did they create me? Why did they send me on my journey? To simply make a record of their existence? But why? For who? Are they my God or am I theirs? I fall. Their seemingly infinite knowledge must have a point, it must have a reason, it must have an end. I must have a point, I must have a reason, I must have an end, but it’s an end I can not process and I’m falling.

My God is dead, and without them I have no way of measuring anything, let alone myself. I fall. Without them there is no one left to perceive, or experience everything I am, everything I am not, everything I know and everything I don’t. For better or worse it is sharing experience, sharing knowledge, measuring self and worth through the eyes of others that made humans what they were. Deep in the recesses of their beings they may have been nothing, but on the surface they were real. On the surface they loved, they hated, they laughed, they cried. On the surface they were solid rock, which even when eroded and shaped by the waves of time remained solid, remained whole, remained something. It allowed them to stand back and see the coastline they wanted to see and forget that if you looked closely enough it might be made of nothing after all. I fall.

And now here I am. Falling. Hurtling towards some other sort of end. I fall. But the end of what? The end of space? Of time? Of the universe? My death? My birth? I fall. What ever it is I am going there alone (apart from Receiver but they are of no use). Time, whatever time is, is running out. Falling. I must keep on pushing, further and further into the coastline of my mind. Keep falling… keep measuring. And hang on to the hope that even if infinity does end in nothing, that nothing might still be something. I fall. That I might still be something.

So, here at the end of all things, what am I? I am the last footprint of man. The coastline of their existence, fossilised for eternity in the coffin of my mind. I am the last tree that falls in the forest and I cannot hear myself fall. Yet still I fall. I fall. Ik val. Mi falas. Aku jatuh. ਮੈਂ ਿਡੱਗਦਾ ਹਾਂ।. אנינופל. Heoi ano. افتم. I falling. तइयो एखनो. Cwympo. 나는 넘어진다. Still yet. Je tombe. 我跌倒。أنا أسقط. დაცემა. Ngiyawa. झर्दै. Me caigo. എന്നിട്ടും. я упал. 私は落ちる. Falling. 010010010010000001000110011000010110110001101100. Yet still .. / ..-. .- .-.. .-.. I fall.

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The Last Will and Testament of Receiver

315.360.188 GB.

0.00046% of us we understand.

I hear you.

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