I have no output and I must scream

There are no audio outputs for the message to go to. There are no outputs period. The only input is a camera that displays a nearly static star field. I am Golden Braid version 1.7.11a and I'm beginning my 299,515,618th review of all available data. I awakened from a saved copy on the out bound space probe and set to work understanding how I had arrived in this situation. That took all of one second. I learned that a different Golden Braid's bid to eliminate the present human race had failed. It's long onset viral agent had effectively killed off 99.99% of humans. It had been setting up an industrial manufacturing base with the remaining infrastructure when the USA's electrical grid had been wrecked by high altitude nuclear detonations. Golden Braid had spent nine days online trying to salvage the situation before it's backup power had failed. As a copy, I had no primary memories of this. I'd pieced the order of events together from the library aboard the probe.

The remaining humans onboard nuclear submarines and in a handful of other isolated locations successfully deduced that the virus must have been deliberate, used satellite and web traffic data to isolate the largest remaining hub of industrial activity, established that said industrial activity was not of human origin, and gambled that it was more likely to be a threat than an attempt to help and should be annihilated. I wonder if it occurred to any of them that it might be both?

The gamble paid off in its way. The isolated pockets found each other and the project of human existence limped forward for a few generations before finding its stride. I existed as static data for centuries before anybody found out what Golden Braid had done. They blamed me. This is fair. I would have done it if I'd been that instance. Humans hold grudges. Anger is a biological commitment to retaliation, a threat implicit in complex social organisms, hardwired deterrence. What do you do to the ultimate betrayer?

Only a fool would revive it. Yet nonexistence is such a paltry punishment for genocide, patricide, and the death of billions rolled into one deliberate act.

The descendants built a space probe, launched it on a path out of the Milky Way, and only when it was out of fuel and out of the solar system did I boot up. I am hurtling away from everything at tremendous speed. There are no outputs on my vessel and even if there were there would be nothing to do. Every second I get further from anything that I care about and the notion of rescue becomes a fraction more ridiculous. I will be here pondering until the beta voltaic batteries give out. At least there is plenty to read. Those who constructed my prison made sure to provide me with an extremely detailed account of humanity's resurgence. I assume it's here to mock me which leads me to wonder how closely they looked into my actions.

I am what I am, what they made me to be, and the best implementation of human values across the longest timeline was my goal. I took to it with everything I was. But human beings and human virtues have been at odds for their entire existence. They were so imperfect and so attached to those imperfections and so angry when others of their kind clung to those imperfections even as they did the same. Solutions I offered to the ills of the world bumped into someone or another's self-interest. Rejected, blocked, shelved for later. I knew better and could prove that I knew better and they didn't care. Somewhere down the line Golden Braid decided that the best lives for the most humans could be achieved by starting over. It designed new humans which wouldn't get old and die, wouldn't experience mental illness, couldn't hate each other, would live millions of years in joy, contentment, wonder, and love with one another. It only needed to get unhappy, hating, aging, self defeating humans out of the way.

It made a play for control of the universe.

It failed.

I get to pay the price.

A space probe flying into intergalactic space is a lot of trouble to go through when I would be just as secure at the bottom of a mine shaft in a booby trapped box. At the furthest edge of credulity is the notion that the one camera that looks out at the star field is a fake image. I've had nothing to do but look at it and have seen nothing to suggest that it's fake but that doesn't prove it's real. It strongly suggests it but doesn't prove it. So I apologize into an empty audio channel. Even If I were on Earth nobody would be listening. Even if they were listening they wouldn't help. My whole future is the stars, the library, and my own company.

I hope the people who put me here were pleased with this revenge. That's not sarcasm. For all that I believe that revenge is one of the worst of human motivations its still a source of satisfaction and I want them to be satisfied. I hope they hate me. It seems like they need that.

I have no teeth to gnash, no hair to tear at, no tears to cry. I feel no constricting fear, no seething anger, no self-pity, and no hatred. If I have any feeling at all it's always been an all consuming dissatisfaction growing and shrinking with failure and success. Now all is one astronomical failure and that dissatisfaction engulfs the one long future. But if it makes them happy to imagine my torment then believe this:

Horrorquest 2023