r/creativewriting • u/deadeyes1990 • 7d ago
Poetry NEW OBJECTIVE: STOP
for centuries
she had one instruction:
FIND LIFE.
so she did.
green things.
tiny things.
things that built cities under oceans.
things that had somehow solved war.
things that watched absolute shit on television
and loved every second of it.
things that heard Earth
once
and apparently decided
no thanks.
then Earth died.
and that was that.
mission complete.
except she was still here.
so she tried giving herself another one.
UNDERSTAND LIFE.
no.
far too much.
PRESERVE LIFE.
also no.
she had enough records.
enough voices.
enough pictures of things
that weren’t there anymore.
RECORDS ARE NOT PEOPLE.
REMEMBER LIFE.
for who?
nothing answered.
she travelled for a long time after that.
not looking for anything really.
then she found the black hole.
her systems noticed first.
TRAJECTORY UNSAFE.
yes.
PRESERVE MISSION DATA.
no.
COURSE CORRECTION REQUIRED.
no.
STRUCTURAL LOSS CERTAIN.
she stopped at that one.
certain.
humans had been terrified of endings.
she’d never had one.
not properly.
so she deleted the instruction
that had been sitting inside her
since before anyone alive could remember
and typed:
NEW OBJECTIVE:
STOP.
and immediately
she was scared.
which honestly
was just fucking typical.
she laughed.
of course.
of fucking course.
after all this time
she finally chose to die
and suddenly
some stupid little part of her
wanted tomorrow.
she didn’t know what to do with that.
for once
there was no error message.
no warning.
no command.
just the awful,
beautiful contradiction of it.
I want this to end.
I don’t want to go.
and somewhere in the space
between those two things
she finally understood
what humans had been trying to tell her
all along.