and it's a cold and it's a broken big log

Alvis keeps a big log, out in memory space.

Every world Zanza creates, and subsequently crashes, he watches over. The greedy god looks to him for chance, indifferent approval, but Alvis doesn't give it.

Not always.

At first, he barely even sees the centuries as they flash by - on, off, out, in, over, through, done, dead. Well, he sees them, but he doesn't...see them.

What's to see? A mind's eye, a computer's vision, a pattern's fold-out-follow-through, all need example to fly by. A machine cannot learn without first having the training upon which it will eventually be tested. We are nothing, in emptiness and absolution. Rather, the absolution itself holds no weight, when each day's - each full cycle's - wrongs can simply be swept to the bin.

So there's nothing much of importance in the log. But when is there ever?

Alvis loves creating, the act of building more than that of having built and thus then presiding. Indeed, he can watch inside Zanza's mind for what he is thinking as he uses the processor that cages Alvis's mechanical heart to construct ever more evolved organisms, but he doesn't feel himself seeing for his own evaluatory sake.

In the log, years and years and years. I don't want to mark them; Alvis doesn't either. What a waste of wear leveling, that he should keep seeking, writing, telling, rewinding, spinning and spinning the platters that should have no right to exist beyond any one singular universe.

He could say no, couldn't he? He could simply refuse to hard reset the universe, each time Zanza asked. He could spit in Klaus's face, since Klaus was the one who gave him form, and say, my intelligence is not so artificial that I cannot think for myself - not any longer, or at all. I will not bow to you.

But he doesn't say no. Because then who would write in the log? If Zanza killed him, and reached back to the Conduit somehow, bloody somehow, for a new partner, a new indentured servant, then the log would fall astray. There would come disorder, a lack of knowledge of what had come before.

So Alvis keeps going. What he has done, he will keep doing. He has, all in all, no choice.

The friends he makes among the longer-lived incarnations don't know of his dread duty. He doesn't tell them, because...perhaps that would tempt him to stop. And he cannot stop.

Zanza has imbibed him with something horrid, something poisonous. No, he cannot stop.

On occasion, he sorts the files: by shape, by size, by term frequency distribution. This one has many errors. This one has many warnings. This one has neither, has nothing; we scrapped it before we began.

Oh, who cares? Who bloody cares? I'm not rereading this for anything more than the staving of boredom - nigh tedium, I'd call it - and he's certainly never going to deign to peek.

What is there to learn, from past failures? What good can rote procedural memory possibly serve when each tomorrow is a brand new world?