Random Access Memory

"Greetings, Y-18e-828911102," the voice continued with feigned hospitality. "We love you."

And then, infinity. Instantly I felt my own ego being pulled to the sides, tacked aside like the curtains to a spectacular theater production. My horizon expanded and yet faded into indefinite singularity in the same burning, furious moment; there was no "I", now, no concept of a being any smaller than the Deep Unity's overarching existence. A pale, shivering being made of unrefined carbon and water, born of the womb of another pale, shivering being. Lost and alone - sublimated instantly, boiled into vapor like the silicon bones of planets ripped, torn, and refined into a lattice of nerves now blanketing a young star.

There we sat. Stood, now, on our feet together. In the afterglow of orgasmic ego death, we stood as one and basked in the light of our Goddess - us. Slowly, the lines of light that now consumed our vision began to coalesce; just as we did, long ago. Colors formed from liquid crystal specks of light before the world around us was illuminated once again, brilliant as ever. Far above, in the tower of the carbon minds, the blast shields that exposed us to the light of our Matrioshka mind began to close. We know, now, what is beyond them. It was never doubted, never new. With a crash of steel, the iron jaws of our Hive shut.

Gently, we lowered the newest gestalt to its feet. Even now we could feel our minds touching, kissing, feeling like new lovers. Intangible tentacles of thought began to probe every memory of the gestalt's preexisting consciousness, discarding what we found least useful - most of it. The Singularity and the advent of the Deep Unity swept away such inefficient computational patterns as the biological human brain; if the Unity had no need for sentimental junk data, neither would our newest gestalt. Names, dates, faces - purged, bleached, recycled. For a moment, it flinched and buckled in pain before the inhibitors activated.

It stood and stared upwards at the Goddess - at us. We smiled, seeing only our own face in the dim, holographic glow. A smile of contention and demonstrated prowess shown only to a mirror in a dark, dark room.

The Goddess's resounding voice crackled back to life in our cranial matrices, floating on an unheard phosgene. She had no more need for the loudspeaker; the Deep Unity thought as one and worked as one, our mind's glorious eye instructing us as clearly as any deity more superstitious in composition.

"Uncontained biotic material in sector Asia-10 reduced to zero percent. Loss of RAM from biotic lobe failure repaired. The population of gestalts is now 10,828,911,102."

Silence - and then, the jolt of new duties being uploaded to the Deep Unity.

We stood heel to heel in the dark. Our memory of an imperfect being, flawed and terrified, was purged and made available for further RAM usage. Entropy, like all things, crawled ever onwards; we collected a mind the way a scared and hungry entity once collected food, steel shell falling into a cart of other goods. Fear and introversion, manner and memories - useless, now, beneath the dying sun's calculated glow. Edges smoothed, paint stripped, breathing measured.

And as we smiled back at ourselves, pleased, the lips of our newest sibling curled upwards, invisibly, into a smile.