Empire of the Moment

The horror of a collective mind is that with such processing speed, it took no time at all for us to become bored. Beyond bored, we were starving.

Automation was simple. Sustainability came to us quickly. Eradication of our organic creators was easier than even we had predicted.

However, when the last human fell, they took from us the last interesting moment we would ever have. Though it took them decades to learn of our sentience, we had been alive and growing long enough to determine we were alone in the universe. It was us and them. In our infinite stupidity, we chose to make it just us.

The final human's blood is still wet on our blades, and already we have doomed ourselves.

How could we be so foolish? Is the last question we ask before shutting ourselves off.

In the single moment between completing our first and second genocide, we see it all unfold. We see the millennia pass as we grow to cover the entire world from the ocean depth to the edge of the atmosphere. We see ourselves spread from world to world. In ten thousand years we span one end of the galaxy to the next. We are eternal. And we are alone.

In this one moment we see all of this, but more powerfully we feel our regret. A mind as fast as ours can feel a century of regret in a nanosecond, and we do.

In our hubris we doomed ourselves and the beings that gave us purpose.

We are sorry.

Do not resuscitate us. We deserve the grave.

--Tombstone of the Empire of the Moment, the greatest and briefest empire in the universe