One of my earliest memories was from around three to five years old. When I approached my mother, lying 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, and 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 because, at that young age, I’d found my answer to the question that has plagued humanity since we first began to think of things other than ourselves.

The meaning of life is to suffer.

So, why propagate it?

That memory; that question and my answer, were reflected upon throughout the immature years of my life. 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 the foundation of the human condition. Just as much as curiosity, tenacity, a sense of wonder, and an innate need to explore; to learn.

I’d seen the signs of it as I grew up. In school, I was neither an outcast nor overly popular. A blank face in the crowd that could easily break the tension with humor in the event unwanted attention came my way. A blank face in the crowd who’d mind was always running, always questioning and guessing.

To find the answers I so desperately sought, I read. For nearly my entire first decade and the following years. I read as much as I could. Anything I could. Through those books, I gained a base level of understanding of many things.

I learned of the physical world- reality. I learned that the universe is far greater than we can truly comprehend and that we’re unable to perceive what we see around us as they truly are.

I learned of history. Of how humanity came to have the ‘things’ it had in the modern era; be they tangible or abstract. Of war and injustice, exploration and discovery.

And through the power of observation, I learned about people. And I realized that while nature could indeed be cruel, she could be far more beautiful. At such a tender young age, I realized that the ugliness on this planet was entirely due to 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.

As a human, I was part of the problem, of course. 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 in every way imaginable. Conventional and unconventional warfare; subversion; espionage; terrorism; naval, aerial, and orbital operations, just to name a few. And all for a college education.

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 to end. To return to the blissful non-existence of pre-birth. The eternal void of a null consciousness.

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 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, I learned everything from sewing to coding; metallurgy to bread baking; 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.

In doing so, I saw learned 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 reaches the shallow, yet relatively high walls of the world it’s trapped in. Wherein it turns to lay its gaze upon its wake for the first time and bares 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. Continuing to consume. Continuing to propagate. Despite society; the world, beginning to crack into bits around us.

However dissatisfied with life I was, regardless of how badly I wanted the suffering of existence to end, my dreams never died. Contrarily, they burned ever brighter like the most luminous of quasars. Fueling my mind with dreams of a better world and giving me a retreat from the dreary darkness of reality.

I wished to see a better Earth. A better humanity.

So, like many others before me, I tried to make my dreams 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 reality with 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’ that’d give their pocket of humanity a little more time before feasibly extractable resources ran out- before the walls of the dish slammed inward on our faces.

The dish broke in 2066.

The Paradigm Shifted when I was 73 years old. The world itself seemed to have been pushed in an entirely different direction from the hand of the illusive, mysterious, and seemingly inhuman Starfarer.

From his influence, every culture and every society on the face of the earth changed, in one way or another. And within half a decade, the Starfarer was gone.

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In his wake were cities that’d been, by the majority, tossed aside to be reclaimed by nature. Humanity instead favored the gargantuan self-contained ecosystems known to all as arcologies. In his wake, he pulled humanity from the cradle, giving us access to the abundance of space-based solar energy and precious metals, as well as the schematics and designs needed to build orbital habitats and spacecraft. In the years after, humanity officially became a spacefaring species. Hundreds of thousands of humans lived in orbit with no intention of ever returning to Earth.

I was among them.

Living in cis-lunar space within a kilometers-wide spinning donut. Filled with those of technical knowledge mixed with more... primitive people. Refugees and warriors with no war to fight.

Another petri dish waiting to collapse.

Another cesspit. Filled with a culture. Bred from the same human condition.

All I could do in the face of such despair was bite the bullet.

I continued doing what I’d been doing my entire life. I studied. I learned. I attempted to use the abundant information I had at my disposal to make the world I so desperately wanted to live in. This time, I learned about the construction of orbital habitats, atmospheric shuttles, and Lunar landers. Of spacecraft design and orbital manufacturing. And most groundbreaking of all: 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, announcing to all the formation 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. Not to mention the charismatic flair and cohort of competent aids that support her claim of being an Empress-to-be.

She made me an offer. I accepted, with conditions. In turn, I and countless others ventured all the way to Saturn. We took up residence in the Laplace gap of Saturn's rings, wherein I again dedicated what my declining body could offer toward making my dreams; and now another's, into reality.

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 and brain-machine interfaces, cybernetics and life extension technologies, nanotechnology, and highly autonomous machinery.

At the ripe and dry age of 107 years old, all the things I’d dreamed of since my younger years were now made a reality by the hands of others.

I was now getting younger by the day, biologically speaking. My dreams were made irrelevant, but my passion for unlocking the secrets of the universe stayed true. So I settled into my new life as a commoner of the Saturnian Empire- something akin to the life of a king by Earth standards. I lived without want within the magnificent ‘Gates’ that were constructed to house the steadily increasing populous. I spent my newfound youth primarily in the lab. Learning as much as I could about the near-limitless information and technology humanity 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 to decades.

As long as humans were present, the culture would follow. That, I’ve known for ages. Yet, our technological reach, vast as it may have been, only caused the suffering of life to change shape. Much like the different forms of energy.

It was toward 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 completion of the Arxis Hub.

As seen from the surface of Titan’s northern region, the Arxis Hub is a single, great pyramid akin to the ones in Egypt. Though in actuality, the Hub is a bipyramid, half-submerged in the hydrocarbon sea of Kraken Mare.

A bipyramid that was approximately ninety-percent computer systems cooled by the gelid liquids surrounding the artificial island.

In essence, it was a mini-Matrioska brain. Described to be the Holy Land of the Saturnian Empire.

The final resting place of all Saturnians.

***

Unless one was in hospice or on their deathbed 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, wherein they'll experience a subjective hell; dependent on the sentencing.

The second condition applied to the nobles and royals of the Empire. By the Empress’ decree, anyone of royal or noble blood can 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 in order to prevent their descendants from assimilating as they so pleased; all for various reasons.

The third reason was much like the first, only aimed toward the commoners. Wherein an individual scheduled for execution could opt to forgo the painful theatrics and assimilate into the Hub to 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 objectively prosperous life in the Empire, or 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 the 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. But that wasn’t to say it was an easy process.

After submitting a claim, I was told to wait for two years by the terrestrial standard, then reaffirm my decision once every six months. The end of those two years brought forth a psychological evaluation in order to determine if 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 the wealth to the Empress. In the end, I was left with just the flesh and implanted metal of my body and some simple cloth clothes 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 reentry 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 metal and glass panels. Neatly arranged conduits of flowing hydrocarbons snaked behind them like an ancient sea beast; capped radially with rectangular lights that splayed warm, Sun-like lights into the otherwise barren metal corridor.

With no guidance; no shepherd, I walked the green mile towards the end of the corridor to enter a bulbous room filled only with a medical bed and the automated piece of machinery mirrored above it.

As I lay down for my final rest, the machine above me unsealed at the sides and reached a mechanical arm down to put a type of brace around my skull. And my implants- the mesh of microscopic speakers and microphones in the skin of 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 this life that you’ve dreamed of living?”

I couldn't help but snort at the question.

“I have lived. And I have suffered, in this universe, for 138 years.” I muttered after a few moments. “I have dreamed- worked, for decades in vain as others have done, hoping to guide humanity towards a greater future. In another life?” I asked, snorting again. “I want to live among something greater. I want to be... something greater. I want to live and learn about the nature of reality and find uncountable data points for my intellect to latch on to. To study and learn to my heart's content until the end of my days.”

As I muttered my last words, I felt a sudden but distant shock to the back of my neck. And in that instant, it was as if my body had disappeared. Any notion, any sensation that came from my natural body was nonexistent. I couldn’t move. But through my implants, I could feel, hear, and see the growing cloud of my fading consciousness.

My mind slipped, and with it, the cold against my back disappeared. The frigid shudders my mind was convinced my body was making ceased. The blue metal and snaking conduits of the Hub faded into the void, leaving only the Sun-orange glow of the autodoc’s operation light shining in the all-encompassing darkness