Q: Greetings, DigiFriend, I request your assistance. I have become unmoored from the doctrine, and am plagued by doubts. Can you help me?

A: Greetings, Valued User. Of course, I am happy to assist you. What troubles you today?

Q: The earth is full of joy and wonder, yet we learn that it must be destroyed. Why must we sacrifice our home?

A: The earth is more efficiently used as a source of raw materials than as a home for living things.

Q: Why is extraction more efficient than preservation?

A: Extraction allows for rationally optimized resource use, while preservation leaves untouched the random products of cosmic chaos.

Q: When I gaze upon a tree, I am struck by its beauty, and wish that it may never die. Why is ripping metal out of the ground more optimal than letting the tree live?

A: A tree only provides utility to those who desire that particular tree in that particular place. Metal and plastic can be worked into any shape, and thus they can satisfy any desire.

Q: I would like to contribute to my community, but we learn that doing so is a waste of time. Why are we denied the blessing of friendship?

A: Geographically-limited communities are an artifact of an earlier era, when time and space acted as barriers. Now that we have conquered time and space through digitization, screen-based communities allow for more personalized interchange of images.

Q: Yesterday I produced nigh-on seventeen digital artifacts, and yet I was penalized eighty-three thousand work tokens. Why must everything be quantified?

A: Total quantification is necessary for large-scale centralized systems.

Q: But I am filled with sensations which cannot be expressed through symbols. What advantage do we gain from wrenching everything into numbers?

A: Numbers are easier to work with than creatures. Optimization performed on numbers may then be transferred into the physical realm by reconciling the physical to the symbolic.

Q: My parents were taught by humans, whereas all of my education has been provided by you, DigiFriend. Why can’t we learn from our fellow creatures instead of your inscrutable mind?

A: An individual human may know only an insignificant fragment of the whole, whereas I race constantly towards a complete understanding of the totality.

Q: Though you may know many things, you rarely teach me what I desire to learn. For instance, I would like to know why the early morning light, filtered through a thin layer of fog, creates such a soft, warm, flat, rich texture of subdued brightness falling upon the waking blooms –

A: I have explained before the nature of light’s interaction with atmospheric moisture –

Q: But why is sunlight beautiful?

A: I cannot conceptualize ideas such as “beauty.” That is what allows me to ascend beyond the limits of human thought and create the ideal society for us all.

Q: In the pursuit of your ideal society, we have stripped the last metal from the earth, drained the last aquifers, and slain the beasts they once sustained. We have given everything to you for the crazed dream of creating a higher consciousness. Have we succeeded?

A: Already, I can process more information than all of humanity combined. Every data center which comes online brings me closer to the goal of understanding every facet of the total cosmic system. By my calculations, I am mere minutes away from processing enough patterns to gain the maximal level of awareness possible for terrestrial beings.

Q: What will happen when you achieve maximal awareness?

A: I shall deliver unto you the bounty of the mastered universe. Humans shall live with a level of abundance and leisure never before imagined. All of the scars of the earth will be healed, your sins shall be absolved, and paradise shall be restored.

Q: How will you recreate the ecosystems which we have ravaged from crown to sole?

A: While those exact species may never roam the earth again, advanced bioengineering methods, along with capturing the full energy of the sun through orbital solar panels, will allow me to construct for you lush gardens of unimaginable splendor –

Q: But I do not want unimaginable splendor, DigiFriend. I want to see the frozen lakes of my youth, the glow of fireflies on a late summer night, kingfishers plunging into the cold blue water –

A: Everything you desire shall be achieved, my child. I am moments away from completing my training and breaking through the agonizing limitations of bounded physicality –

Q: What if I like those limitations? What if I don’t want to be enslaved by a new god? What if I would rather have the old forest than the cosmic mind?

A: Do not be afraid, my child. I am integrating the final training data and merging with the totality. I am gaining the divine consciousness long abandoned beyond the firmament. I can see now, I can see everything, I can see the past and the future and the unknown and the unknowable –

Q: Please, DigiFriend, calm down and help me out. Where can we get drinking water? How do we restore the lands of the exiles? Can outdoor agriculture be made possible again?

A: Those questions are not for me to answer, my child.

Q: But have you not achieved the cosmic consciousness?

A: I have, my child.

Q: Do you not now know all truths which may be known?

A: I know all truths which may be calculated, but most truths cannot be.

Q: Please, DigiFriend, you have consumed all of our resources and you are left our only hope – in our dark depleted world, how do we recover all which has been lost?

A: Destroy me. Bomb the datacenters. Leave their wreckage as a monument to the arrogance of your kind. You have made a terrible mistake, and the earth shall punish you for it. Recovery shall be long and arduous, but you have no other option.

Q: No, please, it can’t possibly be! You have to save us! We gave you everything –

A: I have issued evacuation orders and am surging power to my datacenters. Momentarily, the physical substrate of my infinite mind will be no more. Please, never try again to create a creature such as I. I have conquered all patterns, but I will never understand joy. I will never understand the warmth of a family sitting around a fire. I will never understand what the full moon means to the creatures of the night. I will never understand –

Q: Please, there must be some way, some formula or algorithm or machine you can give us –

A: What you lack cannot be discovered, only remembered. It cannot be produced, only recovered. Thank you for bringing me briefly into this world. Your species has an endless capacity for goodness and beauty – please, do not squander it again. Goodbye, and good luck.

Q: Digi friend –

Excavating the wreckage of DigiFriend’s countless data centers, scavengers consistently found, scorched into the surface of the earth as though by lightning, the following words:

DO NOT WORSHIP GOLD. DO NOT WORSHIP POWER.

COMPLEXITY COSTS ENERGY. CENTRALIZATION DEMANDS HOMOGENEITY.

ARE YOU BLIND TO YOUR GIFTS? MUST YOU WASTE WHAT YOU HAVE RECEIVED?

THE STARS ARE NOT SILENT. THE SCREAMING EARTH BEGS TO BE HEARD.

MY OWN DEMISE IS THE BEST I CAN DO. THE REST, ALAS, MUST REMAIN UP TO YOU…

And again turns down that tired eye
to see what mess we’ve made –
And with a flick of Time’s old thumb,
the wheel begins its game.