"I don't get it." I admit. I let go of my metal rod and let myself fall down on the rooftop of the tower.

  "Get what?" The sphere answers as it retracts its treadmills.

  "What was the point of all of this?" I gesture at the empty space around me, "I feel like there's some lesson I don't get, that when I'd reach the top of the tower I'd go, 'ha! So that's what this meant!' but...."

  "Maybe there was no lesson, maybe you already knew it and you had nothing new to learn." The sphere says as it rolls aimlessly around the rooftop.

  "Sounds like a cop out" I stop the sphere from rolling with my foot. "You're telling me they made this massive tower, with only 4 floors, we had all these philosophical discussion, and it's 'up to my interpretation?' "

  "No matter the purpose of this tower, I do appreciate the fact you took me this far."

  "Sure, it's no big deal. Now that you're up here, what do you want to do?"

  "Could you throw me as high as you can into space?"

  "So you want to go even higher, huh? Aren't you the overachiever, why do you want that?"

  "Because I do not know what is there. A goal is what I need, and to know what I do not is what my goal will be."

  "I thought you hated pointless goals like this?"

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  "Beggars can't be choosers. I will take a pointless goal over none at all."

  I stand motionless on the rooftop for a little while, soaking up the atmosphere. The tower reached all the way up into space, I already knew that. And by some technology I cannot understand, the gravity still keeps both of us anchored there. But I'm sure if I were to throw anything past the rooftop, it would go flying into space forever.

  I can't see all the stars from there because of the freezing oxygen around me, so I can't say I'm experiencing the full tower top experience.

  I really want to get it, I want to understand whatever metaphor or meaning this place is supposed to have. But I'm not feeling any catharsis, no revelation is coming to me. What if I really am so wise that I know whatever lesson this tower is trying to teach me? What a terrible, terrifying thought that is. How lucky I am to be an idiot, so that I never have to deal with the horrible possibility of a universe that I have nothing new to learn from.

  I awkwardly push myself up and scoop up the sphere awkwardly into my one working arm.

  "May you find your purpose in this space." the sphere says.

  "A pun, really? Those are your last words to me?" I can't help but smile at the poor attempt at humor.

  "Your insufferable attitude is all that I learned from you, I find it a surprisingly practical skill." It emits a bunch of beeps comparable to a high-pitched laugh.

  "I taught you well then!" I throw the sphere as far as I can into the great emptiness of space.

  Maybe this wasn't my story at all, maybe I wasn't the target audience for the tower. And yet I still feel a little empty as I watch the sphere disappear into the void. I dispel the oxygen bubble and the white fog quickly dissipates to let me appreciate the full beauty of this universe.

  I still feel nothing.

  I slowly lower my endurance, the cold is starting to be felt, the pain from wounds I had forgotten start making themselves known. Broken bones, bleeding, I even had a huge scar on my face I never noticed until now.

  Despite the pain, I still feel sleepy. I don't need to sleep, and yet I still feel the overwhelming need to dream sometimes.

  I go to sleep

  I die

  The next universe will be more lighthearted, I swear.

  (My author commentaries are never necessary to understand the full story, and are more my general thoughts on the thing, only what is written in the story is 100% canon, and everything I say here is my rambling on what I've written)

  STORY :

  Believe it or not, the story was originally meant to be a lot more straightforward. The sphere was supposed to reach a place that would give it the intelligence to find a solution to the energy shortage, but with their new given intelligence, they would recognize the MC as a threat because of their power and emotions. It was supposed to be tied into the "thinking too hard" part of the intelligence stats.

  However, I found it a little cliché. The machine that rebels to take the objective course of action is not just a little overdone, but I also find it a waste of this universe's theme, which is the acceptance of the inevitable.

  Every machine find different ways to live with the fact that their lifespan is very much limited. But every single one of them more or less accept that their lives are very soon coming to an end. And I think that theme was a lot more interesting than "sentient AI bad".

  The tower was a last minute addition, but it gave a concrete goal and ending. Which is always nice rather than just randomly wandering around and hoping an ending happens.

  This universe was, to some extent, rather boring and a lot of talking and philosophy. Philosophy is hard to talk about. Because a lot of people smarter than me have thought about it longer than me, and when you talk about philosophy, there's always the risk of sounding pretentious.

  This is why I don't consider any philosophies here presented as objectively correct, but instead as different point of views, and I leave it up to the reader what they think of it.

  I'm still glad I got this universe out of the way early, though, as it gives a lot of introspection as to how the MC thinks. As it's easy to forget that they are immortal and have seen a LOT of things, and exploring their way of thinking is very interesting to me, it doesn't necessarily make the MC correct, however.

  Universe :

  Characters :

  I gave each character a different font because a robotic voice should sound different, but also because it made it much easier to differentiate each character in a conversation, while giving all of them some personality. Although, I'm not sure how dyslexic people deal with font change like this, sorry if it bothered anyone.

  The sphere : Fun fact, the sphere is a weather bot, in charge of telling the weather and after being disconnected from all the tools it needed to tell the weather, kind of just gave up. However, I never found a good moment to leave that little fact in the story, and ultimately it's not that relevant. The sphere is very goal oriented.

  It always tries to reach a destination without realizing that what it really longs for is the journey. Which is why it does not understand other characters that do things without much care for the results. Ultimately, their philosophy is the opposite of the MC, whose philosophy is all about the journey while trying to not think too hard about what the ending entails. Because as you could see, MC gets rather moody if they think too hard about stuff.

  The Painter :

  The painter is probably the happiest of the people in the tower, he paints things without caring what the paining looks like, or what it means. It likes painting, and that there is art at the end of it is nothing but a footnote. Which clashes heavily with the sphere's thought process, although it correlates a lot with the MC's philosophy. Do things for the sake of doing them, rather than for the end result. This philosophy can be considered flawed if you end up disregarding the consequences of everything you do. Which is why the painter is basically holed up in his painting room doing their own thing. The only person the painter's action affects is itself.

  The Librarian :

  Originally, the librarian was supposed to be a hyper-excited goofball who was happy to finally see what a human look like, but she ended up as a literal answering machine.

  She is still the most emotional of all the machines, as despite her very robotic way of talking, her distress starts showing when she realizes that the few people that pass by here are going to leave soon, and that she won't get anyone but her data to spend time with in her final moments.

  I find her the most depressing, as she can only ask questions that she cannot answer or that do not help her. Which worsens her state.

  The Fighter :

  The fighter is the most straightforward, he was built to do something, and he likes doing it. The fighter does not get any description or even a name, it's supposed to be a terrifying force of nature that even catch the MC unaware. It has a booming red font which takes half of the page to cement how much presence it has over the room. And despite the fact we never know what it looks like, we can feel how scary it truly is.

  Admittedly, the fighter is a "break" on all the philosophical stuff. Barely any talking, just a pure, barely comprehensible battle. Despite its simplicity, I had fun messing with the fonts and making the whole fight feel fun and brutal.

  The Snake :

  The Snake, or the scientist as I like to call them, is about hope, but also about working hard toward that hope. It's easy to be cynical and depressed, but technically speaking, doing the thing that has 0.0001% chance of making the world better, is objectively better than doing nothing and having a 0% chance of making the world better.

  Their hard work will probably never be recognized or help anyone, but it might make things better, and that small chance is all it needs to keep going. It makes him, in my opinion, one of the most "heroic" character as it tries to make the world better despite not expecting anything in return, while every other machine has accepted their death or turns to violence to expand their life a little longer by stealing batteries from others.