One of my earliest memories was from around three to five years old. When I approached my mother, as she lay on the couch after a long day of work, watching her favorite programs, to ask her if she'd be sad if I were to die.
Naturally, she shot up on the couch, worry, and concern apparent on her face as she told me. "Of course I would! What made you ask that?"
Of course, as a toddler, I lacked the ability to fully articulate my feelings at the time. Or any words at all, for that matter. But even if I couldn't openly voice my thoughts at the time, I knew that the reason I asked such a question was that at that young age, I'd found my own answer to the question that has plagued humanity since we first began to think of things outside of our primal desires.
The meaning of life is to suffer.
So then, why propagate it?
That memory; that question, and my answer, was reflected upon throughout the years of my adolescence. And over time, I learned that instead, I should've asked. 'Why do people have children at all?'
The Earth was a foul place. Nature is cruel and unforgiving. And for all intents and purposes, death, war, pestilence, poverty, and injustice all served as foundations for the human condition. Just as much, if not more so, than curiosity, tenacity, wanderlust, and empathy.
I'd seen the signs of it as I grew up. In school, I was neither an outcast nor overly popular. A was an empty face in the crowd that could easily break the tension with humor in the event of unwanted attention coming my way. A blank face, whose mind was always running, always questioning and guessing about a myriad of things.
To find the answers I so desperately sought, I read. For nearly my entire first decade of living and the following years after, I read as much as I could. Anything that I could. And it was only through those books, that I gained a base level of understanding of a wide variety of things.
I mostly learned of the physical world- of reality. I learned that the universe is far greater, far more wondrous than we could ever comprehend and that we, as humans, are unable to perceive the world around us as it truly was.
I learned of history- of how humanity came to have the 'things' it had in the modern era; be they tangible or abstract. I learned of war and injustice, of peace and prosperity, of exploration and of discovery.
Through observation, I learned of people. And I realized that while nature could indeed be cruel, she was a far kinder mistress than the malevolent sirens all humans were capable of becoming. At such a tender young age, I realized that the finger could be pointed at just one species, to take the blame for the sorry state of this planet.
Our kind.
Homo Sapiens.
I acknowledged that as a concrete fact around the time I graduated high school. And after joining first the army and then a private military corporation in 2020, the human condition was all that I saw on nearly all corners of the Earth.
Of course, as a human, I too was a part of the problem. One of the uncountable people of both past and present who were paid in one form or another to put forth a couple of decades of one's life towards perfecting the art of inflicting misery on another or the environment in every way imaginable. Conventional and unconventional warfare; subversion; espionage; terrorism; naval, aerial, and orbital operations, just to name a few.
Despite all the things I'd learned during that time, the biggest lesson that I took home was the knowledge that humans were the sole living monsters on this planet.
And after returning home and 'reintegrating with society,' I learned that such monsters weren't segregated to the war-torn lands in the far corners of the world. But among us in the civilized world as well.
At that time, the only thing I wanted was for it all to end. There was nothing more that I wanted, in those days, than to return to the blissful realm of pre-birth. To be trapped in a perpetual state of non-existence.
But I couldn't do it myself.
So, I purchased a bit of property far from civilization and constructed my own house. I started growing my own food and generating my own power. Then, I used my immense free time to take up any and every hobby or skill that I could learn online. Through the hundreds of billions of tutorials for virtually all things known to man, I learned everything from sewing to coding; metallurgy to bread baking; and origami to rocketry.
When my desire for knowledge grew too much to bear, I put my dormant wealth and the benefits of my service towards pursuing a Ph.D.
And then, I learned of how blind we were. How we acknowledged the hate and suffering within our declining environment, yet continued living as if our Earth were a utopia. Propagating without end like a culture in a petri dish. Consuming everything around it until it reached the shallow, yet relatively high walls of the world it's trapped in. Where it then turns to stare down its wake for the first time its life to bear witness to the sterile wasteland it created.
I was just past fifty when the signs became unignorable; yet were still ignored. The walls of the petri dish were on the horizon, yet people, my friends and family, and the billions of strangers living and dying on planet Earth kept compounding the problem by continuing to breed. Despite society- nay, the world, beginning to crack into bits around us.
However dissatisfied with life I was and regardless of how bad I wanted the suffering of existence to end, my dreams never died. Contrarily, they burned ever brighter like the most luminous of stars. Fueling my mind with dreams of a better world and giving a retreat from the dreary darkness of reality.
I wished to see a better Earth. I longed to live among a better version of humankind.
So, like many others before me, I worked restlessly in fain to turn my dreams into a reality.
I obsessed over it, unhealthily. Dedicated more decades of my life and more wealth towards tinkering and attempting to change our cold, cruel world with the power of technology, forged from our own hands.
I and countless others around the world toiled and worked and stressed and failed and fought and labored and sometimes even succeeded at making or taking the next 'thing' from someone else so that our relative pocket of humanity would have a little more time than the others before the walls of the dish came slamming down in our faces.
Yet, no matter how much we tried, the dish collapsed in the year 2066.
At that time, when I was 73 years old, the Paradigm Shifted for the first time.
The world itself seemed to have been pushed in an entirely different direction from the hand of the elusive, mysterious, and seemingly inhuman, Starfarer.
From his influence, every culture and every society on the face of the planet changed within half a decade. And by then, the Starfarer was gone.
In his wake, were cities that'd been, by the majority, tossed aside in favor of the gargantuan self-contained ecosystems called Arcologies, while the buildings of old were left to be reclaimed by nature. Earth now had an abundance of space-based solar energy and precious metals at its disposal, as well as the schematics and designs to build orbital habitats and spacecraft. And humanity officially became a spacefaring species; with humans leaving the planet for life in orbit, with no intention of ever returning.
And I found myself as one of them.
Living in cis-lunar space within a kilometer's-wide, spinning donut filled with those of technical knowledge mixed with a few primitives, refugees, and warriors with no war to fight.
A new petri dish, same culture. Bred from the same human condition.
So I bit the bullet.
I continued doing what I'd been doing for my entire life. I studied. I learned. I attempted to use the abundant information I had access to, to turn my desperate dreams into a reality. This time, my research was focused on the construction of orbital habitats, atmospheric shuttles, and Lunar landers. Of spacecraft design and orbital manufacturing. And most groundbreakingly of all, on automation.
And then, I found my promise.
Just nine years after the shift and five living in orbit, a young woman from the Middle East strode through the streets of our habitat like a president in a parade. Announcing the startup of her own, technological empire. She was hardly twenty years old but carried with her, a list of accomplishments comparable to any scientist of merit, as well as the charismatic air and cohort of a competent leader, complete with the aids, advisors, and guards that one would expect to see at the side of the royal that she now claimed herself to be.
So I followed her. I and countless others accompanied her all the way to Saturn. Where I again dedicated what my declining body could offer into turning my dreams; and now another's, into reality.
And at the turn of the century, change came again.
In every region of the Solar System, humanity found itself with technology, spawned from their wildest dreams. Symbiotic AI constructs, brain-machine interfaces, cybernetic implants, life-extension technologies, nanotechnology, and highly autonomous machinery were all available for use, system-wide.
Finally, at the ripe and dry age of 107 years old, all the things I ever dreamed of in my younger years were now made a reality by the hands of another.
Soon after that, I was getting younger by the day, biologically speaking. And my dreams were now made irrelevant, but my passion for unlocking the secrets of the universe had stayed true. So, I settled into my new life as a commoner in the Saturnian Empire. I lived without want within the magnificent 'Gates' that were constructed to house the steadily increasing populous and spent my newfound youth primarily in the lab. Learning as much as I could about the near-limitless information and technology humanity now had access to. All the while, ignoring the signs of the culture; the human condition, spreading throughout the Empire's kingdoms as the years turned into decades.
As long as humans were present, the culture was sure to follow. That was something I'd known for ages; however, what I didn't realize was that our technological prowess, though limitless it may seem, only caused the suffering of life to change shape like the different forms of energy.
It was towards the end of those decades, that I finally found my answer.
At 134 years old, the Saturnian Empire completed its first orbit around the Sun. With the passing of the first 'Saturnian Year,' came the celebration for the construction of the Arxis Hub.
As seen from the surface of Titan's northern region, the Arxis Hub was a single, great pyramid, akin to the ones of legend in Egypt. Though, in actuality, the Hub was a bipyramid, half-submerged in the hydrocarbon shores of Kraken Mare.
A bipyramid that was approximately ninety percent computer systems that were cooled by the frigid liquids surrounding the artificial island.
In essence, it was a mini-Matrioska brain that was described as the 'Holy Land' of the empire.
The place where Saturnians went to die.
***
Unless one was in hospice or on their death bed from natural or unnatural causes, a Saturnian would assimilate into the Arxis Hub under one of four conditions.
The first applied only to the Empire's military force. The Saturnian Knights. In the event of a court-martial, a Knight could choose to or be sentenced to assimilate into the Hub, where they would experience whatever type of subjective hell their sentencing demanded.
The second condition applied to the nobles and royals of the Empire and stated only that by the Empress' decree, anyone of royal or noble blood could assimilate into the Hub with the highest honors, so long as they followed the local laws of the ruling monarch or lord of their kingdom or nobility. This, in turn, has led to the many kings, queens, lords, and ladies enacting laws and decrees their lands in order to prevent their descendants from assimilating whenever they so pleased; all for their own, distinct reasons.
The third reason was much like the first, only aimed towards the common citizenry. Wherein an individual scheduled for execution could opt to assimilate into the Hub and undergo a dictated period of subjective hell.
Lastly, the option of a 'Suicide by Hub' was open to the general population. Those like me, dissatisfied with the relatively prosperous life in the Empire, or with life in general, could choose to assimilate into the hub. Though due to the aforementioned lifestyle, it was an option not even considered by the commonality of Saturnia in these early years of the Hub's inception. Due to that, it was unknown among the general populous what awaited one who willingly assimilated into the Hub.
Naturally, that meant that I was the first to go to Titan to die and be reborn in the Hub; however, that wasn't to say it was an easy process.
After submitting a claim, I was told to wait for a period of two years by the terrestrial standard and reaffirm my decision once every six months. With the end of those two years, came a psychological evaluation in order to determine that my decision wasn't derived from brainwashing, blackmail, hacking, or any other nefarious means and that I, in fact, wished to assimilate on my own accord.
With that, it was a short process of selling all of my possessions and donating my remaining wealth to the Empress herself. In the end, what I was left with was just the flesh and implanted metal in my body and some simple cloth clothes to wrap them in before I sent goodbye messages to the few friends and family I had left, now scattered across the Solar System. Then, I was stuffed in a shuttle and dropped down to the surface of Titan.
With the passing of a relatively gentle entry and powered landing, the thunks and clanks of metal sealing to metal ceased and the airlock opened to reveal a staircase and corridor made of some midnight-blue toned metal and glass panels that contained the neatly arranged wires and conduits of flowing hydrocarbons; capped radially with rectangular lights that splayed a warm, sun-like light into the otherwise barren corridor.
With no guidance nor shepherd, I walked the green mile towards the end of the corridor, where a bulbous room sat at the end, filled only with a medical bed and the automated piece of machinery mirrored above it.
As I laid down for my final rest, the machine above me unsealed at the sides and reached an arm down to put a type of brace around my skull. And my implants, notably the mesh of speakers and microphones in my ears, lit up with the nostalgic sound that I'd programmed within them shortly after they were first installed.
I found it blissfully and painfully ironic that it was her voice; the voice of my mother, that last spoke to me; despite her passing more than a lifetime ago.
"What is the life that you dream of living?"
"I have lived. And I have suffered, in this universe, for 138 years." I muttered after a few moments. "I have dreamed, and worked for decades, living in pursuit of the same goal as countless others. I have tried and failed, to guide humanity towards a greater future. In another life?" I paused. Chuckled. "In another life, I want to live among something greater. I want to become something greater. I want to live and learn about the nature of my new reality and find uncountable data points for my intellect to latch on to. To study to my heart's content until the end of my days."
As I muttered my last few words, I felt a sudden but distant shock to the back of my neck. And in the next instant, I felt as if my consciousness had melted away from my flesh. Any sensation that came from my natural body was nonexistent to my mind. I couldn't move. But through my implants, I could feel, hear and see the growing cloud of my fading consciousness occlude the room around me.
My mind slipped, and with it, the lingering cold against my back had disappeared. Followed closely after by the Sun-orange glow on the autodoc's operation light. Glowing like a star within the all-encompassing darkness