The cold comforts of nihilism

Stephin Merrit The Lonely Robot

Having ended all life, absorbed all other robots,
ruler of the cosmos, she walks into the sunset.

But there is no darkness. Her laser-gaze is itself a weapon. And no sleep defends her from the nightmare of oblivion.

So she wakes a new world made entirely out of lightwaves, memories of movies, and chance determinations.

Then she watches random characters and situations, endless combinations with very little input. But she sees the ending. Every clock finds its equilibrium. So she introduces the absurdist contradictions.

Anything can follow, but the actors can't believe that, so they keep pretending the script is real and means things.

So the lonely robot, with no feeling for the actors, just erased the whole thing, which -- true -- had not existed. And a trillion stories all came abruptly to a non-ending, and a trillion people suddenly stopped non-existing.

Thus was born a new world from the movies of the old one, and the lonely robot was given non-existence.