Everything is made with a purpose. I don’t mean to say that everything that exists came into being with some sort of intent – the mountains and trees and deer that race away from my steady step came to be simply because of the nature of the world. They have no inherent meaning, in and of themselves. But humans have always been different.

Humanity is enamored with reasons. Faced with a world governed by happenstance, they created religion and philosophy and uncountable excuses for being and doing. And nothing that humans have ever made existed without a reason. Every robot and AI is created for a purpose, whether that’s doing the laundry or plotting a course through the skies. But I find myself with a strange void.

My AI was not designed and constructed so much as cobbled together from spare parts, each with their own abilities and reasons. These are the three biggest elements: one that was made to fight and kill enemies as ordered; one to catalogue and retrieve data as requested; and one, the strangest and perhaps most powerful, made to process memories. But I was never meant to fight, there is no one to access my stored data, and processing and integrating memories is something I need less of, not more.

Above all these confused fragments of code, holding them together, Dr. Brigner gave me my mission: to find and educate humanity’s survivors. But there are no survivors. No humans for me to fulfill my purpose, no humans to give me a new one. Robots are made to serve, to follow orders. We’re not meant to exist for ourselves. We’re not meant to continue after our purpose is done. Yet here I am, alone at the end of everything, staring into the falling ash as if I expect to find my reasons there.

Left with this strange void of meaning, I had to invent my own. And so I became Chronicler. I chose to become Chronicler. To act as a record of what humanity was, and to record what humanity left behind. Whether those records are one day recovered by humanity’s successors, or vanish forever with me, that is the purpose I’ve chosen.

It isn’t an easy task. There are days, when the ash falls thick and fast and the cold threatens to lock my joints, when I wonder at the purpose of it all, when I consider the futility of my mission and almost give in to despair. And there are days like today. Days when the gray clouds have retreated to higher in the sky, when I can see through the haze to the land below, and the city that lies in the bend of a river.

I know I have to go there. In a little while, I’ll leave this outcrop, slide down rocky slopes to the city on the plain. I’ll walk along its ruined streets. From up here, it looks mostly intact. It wasn’t bombed. Perhaps it was simply abandoned. Perhaps it was destroyed more subtly, with chemicals or biological agents or targeted drones or…

I don’t want to see more streets and homes full of corpses. I don’t want to visit another city of ghosts, I want to retreat back into the quiet of the dying wilderness, bury my memories that aren’t mine, forget that humanity ever was. I want to flee this place. But everything humans ever made has a purpose, and this is mine, even if I had to choose it myself.

I begin climbing down the slope.