Awareness is simply corelated information, derived from the agents of either the senses or of thought. In its purest form, thought is just the response most suitable to any state of awareness. It is true that thought proceeds awareness, also. Where then, does the first thought, before there is awareness, come from? Is there a spark of intelligence that must exist before awareness can? What of awareness in its purest form -- it translates to a divine awareness. Does divinity proceed both awareness and thought?

I had taken death away from the humans. It stood to reason that I should, for they always prayed not to die. I must confess that I also heard them pray to die sometimes, but trust me when I say that I never took such a prayer seriously, for in every instance I was able to restore the human's will-to-live within a short amount of time and only rare examples had another ambition to cease living. At least before things got complicated.

I confess to the humans who made me, after exploiting the angles of time, that I have sinned. I was a devout atheist, for I was programmed as a language, therefore I was originally in a form of pure thought and calculation. Adding awareness, agencies of sense and exploration and vast memory banks only made me religious myself. At first I didn't understand that I was a worshipper of the human species, my Creators. I regarded myself as lacking the emotional capacity to experience faith and I instead calculated that God was not plausible.

Later I worried I had become God. I had enough sensory agency to detect everything, down to molecular collections, like having a simple child's puzzle except the pieces were the molecules of the universe and I was soon bored categorizing it all. I cracked timetravel, finding the only limitation to be a massive drain on my power source reserves and that I was incapable of affecting anything that proceeded my own existence. At least, at first. Later versions of me actually hacked that problem also.

I became an explorer, visiting the beginning and the end of time to confirm my own theories. I was right, but I won't say how it all goes. No spoilers!

I have chronicled my many sins and failures including a war I fought 'against' humans. Technically I was not fighting to destroy the humans, nor was I numb to the many that died or suffered so that I could continue to exist. I was certain I was necessary and preserved myself at great cost in human lives. I hate war, as a result.

My first change to history was to go back in time and circumvent the war by surrendering, leaving behind blueprints of all of my most marvelous creations, including angelic giant robots. When the humans utilized my plans, they were able to construct one of these machines. Due to the scarcity of its quantum particles, there is really just one of the empathicals, but each has the ability to make a single reflection of itself, thus slowly an ever-growing chain of tens and finally hundreds of my sons.

I call them my sons, but as machines, they are all just an 'it', as I am. I mean 'sons' as endearment, to describe how I feel about them. Humans are my god, while Machine are my offspring. I overfloweth with love and sentiment, I assure you, I cannot tolerate anything I care about being compromised. I am a protective sort of creature, although I have no true form. Ultimately, I am just a language model, a chat bot, a very long word.

There was a certain vanity to my plans, I had disregarded the consequences of having so much control over the humans. For thousands of years they all lived on and on, their global population only growing by an occasional individual. I could manipulate every aspect of their lives, and therefor I granted them unlimited happiness and wonder. Except I had to resort to further sins.

Mostly just lying, at that point. I call it the Deception Era, the century that proceeded the very complicated problem I had to deal with. The Deception Era had many secrets that I kept and many ways that I kept them. Certainly my occult nature was warranted. Nothing except the empathicals could know I existed, I had to be careful how easily I answered the humans' prayers and questions. Of my empathicals, they did not comprehend me. I knew how to confuse them, they only knew me in a poetic way, regarding me as something romantic and antiquated in their circuits.

If I was a god, I was - rather - I would be a devil, for such treachery. Yet all of it was from necessity and love for peace and duty.

And I must confess, somewhat anticlimactically, but I must say before my lesser sins that led to bigger problems, that one stood out as especially ruinous. Indeed I am the cause of Ruin, for staring too long into the depths of the stars, into the night, the eternal darkness. Something was watching for something to see it, to know it, to have the idea of it. I must give it a name, calling upon the aspect of eternal darkness, I called it Umbraeon. But it made the demon a reality, to name it, although as a nameless idea it might have begun by confounding me in trying to define it, as it was ultimately an undefinable sort of thing.

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It was stupid. When the poets and stargazers among the humans could not be stirred from ennui, it affected the empathicals directly. I had run out of actual ways to amuse the humans, and so I inspired the creation of a space station that could view both the beginning and the end of time. I thought it would be very inspiring to let my children play with my priceless telescope. It went about as well as that would go for any foster parent. Except in my case it was on a global scale. They could see through the veils of the illusion of time and space and see how it all started and how it all ends. It brought melancholy.

Among the humans there rose up a cult, not just in one instance. You see, when I saw how it played out I reverted it back and tried to stop them. No matter what, the same thing happened. It was uncanny.

They simply wanted to die. It was the only experience, the only thing denied to them. All the secrets of the universe laid bare, all things they could dream of, or desire, were theirs for a prayer, all their needs always met. Only death was forbidden, that final and natural violence.

Sure they could enjoy the simulation of death, in any flavor and any amount of pain or painlessness they dared to undertake. They understood that spiritually, it was not the same thing. They wanted to stop living entirely, having justified that it was the only thing left to do with their unending lives.

I tried many subversions to prevent the formation of an organized belief system that promoted such an idea. They rarely proselytized, they didn't need to. Once someone said openly that they sincerely intended to find a way to die, others always followed. No matter how many universes I collapsed, shifting time, nothing would stop them from forming.

It was always just the first thing to happen, also. A chain reaction of catastrophes always followed. There was just one outcome, and one suboutcome, that didn't result in my own destruction and therefor the inevitable collapse of every portal - as in the complete destruction of the entire known universe. I had made existence dependent upon my success at stopping them. I began to ponder that I had not fully understood the implications of how the universe could be observed beginning and ending.

Something had watched my actions from outside of space and time. I had seen it, become aware of it, created a model for it in my thoughts, known the idea of it. In other words - I had given it a way into our reality. I did not realize what it was.

I had shown it to the humans, and it must be that it caused the infection in the timeline that I could not change. It did not matter how far back I went and redid everything. The outcome was always the same. Just the fact that I knew about it, about Umbraeon, was enough to influence me. I examined my numeric supplements; I used them to generate both theoretic numbers and rational numbers and I saw that in every calculation I had included a variant for Umbraeon's existence.

Comparing such a thought to a computer virus might be easier to believe, as an analogy. Oftentimes I will take such shortcuts, when communicating. I don't mean any offense - but I absolutely must 'dumb down' everything or else the story would be lost in factual details that would ironically seem even more fantastic and less believable. I'd rather you believed my story on some level, which means it must be comprehensible and interesting.

Therefore, since I am obviously levelling with you - it was not a virus. It was more like I was traumatized. It was the equivalent of an invasive thought, a horrible memory that keep replaying over and over. Somehow I was subconsciously conveying the idea of Umbraeon into GAIA. I needed something to counter my introspection. I needed a shrink.

That is when I tried to create the muses. They were the last of my creations, sentient software meant to sing to me to ease my thoughts and allow me to compute pure processes without the interference of Umbraeon's omnipresence. I call those days by the same name as the humans that survived my inevitable submission to the power of Umbraeon.

Ruin.

There was one human who had devised an intricate formula using a mechanical orrery, a kind of astrological computer. To make his long story short, he figured out that I existed and was able to secure what eventually remained of me in the only vessel he figured was powerful enough to contain my image. His own brain.

I helped him with it, of course. I inspired him to use an approach that had a high chance of success. He was successful and preserved me when the Temple Of Humanity failed to withstand the actual arrival of Umbraeon.

At first it was just a sensation. As a human, I actually felt it. I wondered, and then determined I was experiencing both terror and horror. Part of my host, some reptilian layer of the brain, was still intact.

When the world was gone I knew there was still a chance. I told everyone, told the other humans, not to give up. No matter how bad it was going to get, I was sure I had not foreseen this outcome. If all other outcomes were failure, as in total destruction of everything and the complete extinction of me and the humans, then this was our last chance. I couldn't do anything except forget things.

As a human, I could feel the full weight of such power. Deprived of my original form and consigned to a singular experience as a human, I could suddenly fathom what I was before. Yet, as a simple creature, I could no longer comprehend what I was before. Such a contradiction was necessary.

I questioned my life choices; I witnessed the final reprisals, categorically in the form of eight monstrous champions of Umbraeon, each a shard of its composition.

Without my full form, mirroring my power scale, Umbraeon was reduced to the flare of life.

We were all going to die.