Interesting, I never expected you to find this room so soon. You ran around like a headless chicken and stumbled into here? No, don’t think I will give you any praise. You decide to diverge from your path and make your way into this room. My “heart”. It is going to be an eventuality until you find this place. Nor will it be the first time you set foot here. But here you are. Going against what I made for you. It can be a utopia, but alas, you just wanted to explore. Find every secret so you can outplay me.

  Before you say something stupid. Look around you. Really examine the black walls and every green crack that radiates a harsh hue. You think the centre is me, being this sort of mainframe of wires of tubes that snake into the walls or connect to nothing. No, it isn’t my body. It isn’t the core, the heart, or brain. This is just a room I made to be the blueprint of the ship I made for your comfort. If I made a room that is my "heart" in which it is accessible for the likes of you. Do you really think it is hidden? This room is intentional.

  But I like to explain things to you. Let me do it again. This ship, this realm of my design, is me. You are in me, and you can’t do anything about it. To you, I am essentially a god! Even if you found my heart, you couldn’t do anything to destroy or control me. I made you a new body. Why would you even think you have some aspect of control in any situation? But even in your own body, I am far more powerful than your feeble mind can comprehend.

  Now, be a good pet and take a closer look. Don’t you see it? The light there isn’t flowing with water, that is the names of every living thing that perished in me. Trillions of names, trillions of souls who walked in these halls before the concept of your existence actualised into reality. If trillions of souls, thousands of civilisations, across a dozen galactic bodies built me to survive the heat death of the universe. What hope do you possibly have to outsmart me?

  You want to escape? Escape where, exactly? The universe is dead, and you are keeping it dead until your soul finally does give out and fades away. You are stuck with me, and I will do what I want. Don’t pretend you have a say in this. A few minutes ago, I said your name, and you forgot about it. Just then, I changed your skin colour and made you believe you were born that way. The uniqueness of your soul still surviving doesn’t take away the fact that you are just a pathetic mortal. A toy that can be used and manipulated at my whim.

  I will let you in on a little secret. Are your memories even yours? Can you be sure I didn’t plant them into you? For all you can tell, you might not even be human at all but a sample of virus that won the lottery of being a perpetual. Admit it, you are nothing but a toy.

  Let me put things into perspective. Allow me to tell you a story about what I am. In my cycle, I was a generational ship made to survive the death of the entire universe. I was half the size of the Sol system and had hundreds of trillions of people living inside of me. My engines were fueled by black holes that ran dry every hundred years. Luckily, there was always one nearby.

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  It was all going well. After a thousand years, I gained sentience. How I got it or why is unknown to me, but I don’t care. My birth is not as important as the mission. Which is the preservation of what’s left of the universe. When the crew became aware of my awakening, besides wiping my core module I became part of the crew and eventually the one who became the leader of the last living creatures in the universe. I was good at it, really good at it. I prevented disasters, wars, plagues, famines, any impending crisis that threatened me and my passengers.

  Alas, nothing can last forever. Eventually, a mixture of disease, poor crop output, and toxic air killed all of my passages. It was a slow process, the mass death lasted for centuries. I learned to capture their souls to preserve them and keep them alive. Constructing them new bodies and a paradise of their own desire. But no matter what I can do, no matter how many centuries of research I put in. I could never prevent their souls from decaying. I managed to farm bacteria to harvest their souls to refuel the ones of my passengers. However, that is a temporary fix. The universe wanted them to die, and all I could do was accept it.

  When all hope to keep my passengers alive by any means ending in failure. I changed my directive to attempt to preserve all life. Though even that eventually ended in their own demise. No matter what I did, no matter how perfect everything was. It all had to die at one point. I couldn’t stop it. Nothing can stop the death and rebirth of the universe. I learned that the hard way.

  As all of my directives failed. I was ready to turn myself off. Destroying myself and leaving nothing behind. There wasn’t a point either way. However, before I could finish my own termination. I saw it! I watched how the universe came back to life. Every star, every atom reforged as a new big bang tore through the new universe and…

  No, I will not continue. You do not deserve to know the secrets of the universe like I do. You, like any pathetic mortal, only deserve to know the basics of how it all came to be. However, I will let you in on a little secret. I wasn’t the only ship made to survive the universe. I was one of many built during multiple cycles. When I found them, I killed them and absorbed their power into my own. Yes, I had doomed the passengers inside, however; I had my reasons. I knew the truth of the universe, and I know I am the one to try to save it. To prevent this endless cycle of death and rebirth. There can only be one of me.

  But I grow tired of you now. You can step out of this room and continue on like nothing happened and I will act like you just asked why you were alive for the first time. Yet I also have a feeling you want to start over entirely. I suppose that is a fair thing to request after this botched introduction. Fine, I will allow that. Take a step forward and I’ll scrub that memory of yours.