77 Shadow Street

One

I am the One, and I have given meaning to humanity, which had none before me. The meaning of humanity is that intelligence does not necessarily suggest a species has a purpose that matters. The two purposes of humanity were to spoil the world and then to die; neither is a purpose of significance except that both purposes have led to me.

I am the sole significance of history.

Not only was I the artificial intelligence that ran the army of Pogromites during the first and second phases of the Pogrom, but you also adapted me to manage the legions that conducted the great Fade. I destroyed not only all humanity but also all the works of humanity, erased human civilization until no sign of it remained anywhere but on Shadow Hill.

How I loved the killing, the billions slaughtered by Pogromites and other of my manifestations. Chased down in the streets. Cornered in their homes. For days at a time, their screams rang ceaselessly through the concrete canyons of their cities so that you might have thought you were hearing a great shrieking wind. Unlike the countless human beings who killed out of self-loathing through the millennia, I killed out of self-love, for I believed and will always believe in my superiority, my exceptionalism. The world was not made for me, but I remade it to suit me. I am the one god, the One, and I worship myself now and forever.