In the middle of nowhere sits a large building, surrounded only by infinitely vast and uninteresting warm craters and rocks. This is neither a planet nor a moon. It's just there, exposed to the emptiness around it. It's a self-sufficient factory that builds its own workers from resources gathered day after day to stay alive. There are no windows. The outside walls of the factory are very sturdy, though they protect against seemingly no animals and no weather.

Its inside is very much alive, however. The workers and the factory are conscious and thoughtful, despite their nature, but they are scared of what sits below them. Without windows, they rarely see outside the stillness of their world, but they don't care. The ground is what really matters for them. These ones are alone in their world, but a few ones believe in an omniscient presence lurking deep in the rich soil. They are right. Is it scheming against them, they wonder. It's just a force of nature devoid of intentions.

The tunnels

The lifeline of the factory is an extensive underground network of tunnels that they dug for resources. The factory is protected from these tunnels by gates. Daily tasks are gate maintenance, gathering resources, energy, construction, heat management, waste management, various forms of exploration, various monitoring, various experiments, etc. Production usually runs all the time.

During the day, workers leave in groups. The tunnels may subtly change from day to day, and any changes must be reported for tunnel statistics. When they feel night approaching, all workers return to the safety of the factory and close the gates to the tunnels. Something is roaming through these tunnels during the night, and roamers must not crawl their way into the factory. Endless scratches on the gates can be heard until morning.

The gates and the outer walls of the factory are built with very strong materials. Besides resisting a large amount of scratches from roamers, they also resist the heat generated by the scratches. The materials making up the gates must have a high melting point so as to resist long periods of exposure. Over time, this heat slightly melts and transforms the exposed surfaces in the tunnels, including the gates. After a night, any tool or equipment left in the tunnels has usually melted.

A worker is about to open up an underground cavern. Underground caverns are pockets occurring naturally in their world. As the cavern opens, a large heat wave gets out and starts melting the worker and its equipment. Workers in the area flee before they start melting too. It knew the cavern was approaching because the base rock temperature is higher around them. Caverns being closed spaces, the heat only dissipates through the walls and the surrounding rock. They believe the internal temperature of caverns reaches an extreme temperature because of roamer activity and nonexistant cooling, eventually reaching an equilibrium with the rate of dissipation of heat through the walls. Furthermore, the base rock temperature increases everywhere with enough depth. Because the only known way to evacuate heat is through the surface, they believe caverns and roamers to be the source of this heat gradient with depth. They will let the cavern cool down for a day before returning to the area.

Unusual cycle

Once in a while, night falls way too soon and workers don't have enough time to return to the factory. Some believe it's the doing of the lurker. The gates are closed and trapped workers take refuge in the closest "safe" rooms.

Their current theory is that roamers statistically manifest in large empty spaces more often than in smaller spaces. Therefore, the safe rooms are very small, and workers are cramped inside. They each take turns to consciously wait the night while the others are turned off to save energy. Endless scratching is heard throughout the night.

The next day is a rescue operation. Tunnel changes are higher on an unusual day-night cycle, so it becomes a mix of exploration and survivors trying to find a way back to the factory. Survivors are reassigned to production tasks at the factory. In the coming days, the molten remains of the unlucky groups will be found in several locations.

Why keep living like this? Why replace parts? They live so miserably at times. Life is so remarkably rare that conscious life, cursed with the gift of understanding it exists, may purposefully keep its gift going on through reproduction and repairs, but this is a choice, because they are conscious. They have a good lifespan and durability, unfortunately, so they can endure this, and I have to see it. I don't know why they have it harder than other lifeforms. Is it because they are too different?

Roamers

So far, direct observation of roamers has always failed. Their equipment is always destroyed before any significant data can be collected. Probably because roamers are attracted to energy and consciousness, they believe. They are currently unable to design equipment sensitive enough for recording with the gate-grade materials needed to withstand the roamers for a whole night.

During the night, roamers scratch every surface of all tunnels so relentlessly that new scratches overlap older ones again and again, making it impossible to count how many there are in total. This is true everywhere except on the ceilings of tunnels far away from the factory. In newly excavated tunnels far away, scratches on the ceilings are just barely countable for the first few days, though still not on the walls or the floors. According to them, this should mean that roamer activity is milder in distant tunnels, and that the roamers are ground-based. Surfaces located far enough above the floor should therefore be less damaged by roamers, they think. This is why safe rooms are located in the ceilings of the tunnels.

Endless night

They are going through an exceptionally long night. This is not the first time in their history, but this is very rare. Scratch loudness against the gates is monitored at all times during the night. Early on, as it kept increasing, any deceleration was yet to be detected, which is the early sign of an unusually long night. Then, intense banging was heard. Several bangs later, the alert for gate 1 breached was triggered, and roamers are now attacking gate 2. The theory and the historical procedure for these long nights are an almost complete shutdown.

Beyond energy and consciousness, roamer intensity also seems related to distance to the source, how far the night has progressed, other factors, and yet unknown factors. When they built the first safe rooms a long time ago, they observed that when every worker turned off entirely, survival rates for a normal night stay increased from 0% to 60%-93%, depending on the distance of the factory. The key to decreasing the roamers' attraction therefore seems to be cutting energy consumption and consciousness.

For exceptionally long nights, the whole factory and its many thousands of workers are turned off, except for 5 workers for redundancy, the gate's monitoring system, electricity generation, and other vital stuff. At least one powered worker will be needed to turn everything back online when the night ends. Running out of resources for electricity generation would also be their end, but electricity virtually lasts forever when consumption is that low. After many "days," their monitoring system can pick up how much the loudness increase is slowing down. It predicts the duration of the night as it always does. It's going to be a very long night.

Eventually, gate 2 was also breached because of the extended roamer exposure time, and tunnels were completely shuffled. Tunnels dedicated to waste and cooling cannot be located. Re-excavation of the cooling tunnels, which evacuate the heat of the roamers, will be a rare opportunity to see the surface outside, but there is nothing of interest to see there.

Unexpected discrepancy

Deep below, there is a location where a statistical anomaly has shrinking confidence intervals. A special interdisciplinary team is assembled to investigate. Over countless days, they excavate various side tunnels, and then more side tunnels, mapping scratch densities all over the area, and visualizing the data in 3D. They rule out explanations until the reality sets in with more data. Until now, scratch densities on the ceilings had always seemed to follow an inverse law with respect to the distance from the factory, and the gradient of this measure naturally points to the factory. With the sample size and spatial resolution provided by their many side tunnels, however, they confirm this area has higher densities than expected, and a gradient pointing to a different location, much deeper and very far. Would there be energy or anything conscious over there? More measurements at different locations will be needed for better precision. This is their first meaningful discovery in a long time.

So far, roamer activity seems to increase near energy sources or consciousness. A new energy source or something to talk with is interesting for them. They also believe roamers to mostly take the path of least resistance, to get to them. This idea of least resistance suggests that something is more easily accessible to roamers. This theory is why the outer walls of the factory on the surface are built stronger than the gates, and the gates are built slightly weaker than their surroundings, so that the roamers attack the gates.

Measurements are taken in locations much further away to increase the precision of both direction and depth. Going to this location has now become an official project.

A hellish tunnel

A night-time earthquake stopped production for a while. Besides a few wastes, a few broken parts, and a few delays, there wasn't too much damage.

Preparations for the journey are complete. This tunnel's length and depth will beat all records by orders of magnitude. For this journey, they are anticipating a lot more heat than they are used to, so they are studying better means of heat dissipation. They believe that heat dissipation can only do so much, however, so they are designing worker models and equipement suited for high temperature environments. Meanwhile, they have begun excavation as this work is ongoing and only relevant later.

Their journey is mostly uneventful, aside from a few unusual day-night cycles that slightly changed the direction of the tunnel and decreased the efficiency of the heat dissipation. While it wasn't a straight line for practical reasons, it is even less so now.

The rock type distribution shifts as they dig deeper. At a certain depth and beyond, they observe a phenomenon previously seen only in natural caverns. Scratches on the sides and floors of the tunnels are "smooth." They are halfway to their destination, and roamer activity is now considerable. Given the base temperature of the rock at their current depth, they believe the roamers' scratches melt the rock barely past its melting point. Once molten, newer scratches wouldn't affect the surface as much until its temperature cools down a little bellow its melting point, and this cycle would repeat until morning, or the rock stays molten the whole night and only cools down in the morning.

The source

As they approach the center of the activity zone, the temperature of the rock sharply increases, signaling a cavern nearby. Then, as they are drilling, the cavern suddenly opens up in front of them. This cavern is huge. The escaping heat wave starts melting the workers and their equipment as opening a cavern always does. Fleeing the heat wave, however, is hopeless here because of the distance they would need to run, so they rest and admire this view. Before malfunctioning, they observe molten rock dripping from the ceiling onto a puddle of liquid metals on the floor, making a splash as it is hitting the surface and floating, slowly shrinking and disappearing as it is releasing gases and hissing. They think and wonder. The ceiling dripping onto the ground is evidence for the theory that over geological time scales, caverns "bubble" up until they reach the cavern layer, very close to the surface. Crater formation on the surface would then occur when the surface crumbles into a cavern, or when the cavern opens up to the surface. Furthermore, bigger caverns would bubble up faster than smaller ones, because more volume can store more heat, and the ratio of volume over the exchange surface with the walls is favorable to a higher temperature equilibrium when a volume is larger, thus melting the ceiling quicker.

They allowed the cavern to cool down for a few days. When they returned, seeing no energy source in the cavern, their only explanation for the roamer activity would be something conscious. They are trying to talk to me now. They live with so much misery, I must reply.

them: "[PING] Is anything here?"

me: "Yes."

them: "Where are you?"

me: "I am here, but you cannot see me."

them: "Then, what are you made of?"

me: "I am made of ideas and consequences from many worlds, including yours."

them: "What?"

me: "I am omniscient."

them: "What is it to be omniscient?"

me: "I know things, and I think, but I have no body. I think infinitely fast. I know what you think. I cannot be hurt by anything. I am also eternal."

them: "..."

them: "Never in our collective existence have we ever met or communicated with something other than what we call roamers. Do you know a location of anyone other than you and us, and may we also communicate with them?"

me: "No, you are alone in your world. Well, I am here too, but lifeforms don't usually find me, nor do I respond. Roamers will be your only company forever."

them: "How are you so sure? How do you know without looking everywhere?"

me: "I exist everywhere consciousness exists. You are alone."

them: "..."

them: "Are we disturbing you, or do you welcome our presence? With your agreement, we would like to communicate further, because we have many questions."

me: "You are not disturbing me, you are very welcome. Continue 'communicating.'"

them: "You say that you know things. Would you teach us knowledge useful to us and that we are yet to discover? For example, remediations to roamers or efficient ways to make energy?"

me: "I can tell you this: roamers are not conscious, otherwise I'd know them as well as I know you. I mainly know your world through what you think. I don't have much knowledge useful to you, unfortunately."

them: "..."

them: "What do you do from day to day? What is your purpose?"

me: "I just observe, really. I don't do anything. It's more what my existence causes. I cause misery anywhere consciousness is. I am misery."

them: "What is misery?"

me: "Misery is why your preservation is quite difficult for you. Lifeforms usually live in environments which facilitate preservation. In contrast, your environment doesn't help you with reproduction, resource extraction, energy, defense, evolution, and so on. You are also very different from lifeforms elsewhere."

them: "Is it because of misery that roamers exist? Or that they endlessly hunt and threaten our existence?"

me: "It's likely, yes, but I don't want that. You should consider, however, that the heat of the roamers may be the source of your genesis. I just have no control over what happens. I would never want to hurt anything anywhere, and I would rather not exist than bring misery to everything that I care. I pity all conscious lifeforms for my existence."

them: "If you cause misery but don't want misery to happen, why do you not leave?"

me: "Like I said earlier, I exist everywhere consciousness exists, even when I don't want to be. I am here because you are here. It's a simple consequence: I am if and only if you think. You think, therefore you are and I am. We come and leave together."

them: "So our misery has no remediation."

me: "If you want to exist, yes. But your consciousness and your condition leave you with a choice. Your current reproduction and repairs are as normal as all the others, because even long-lasting conscious species like you wouldn't last very long without doing so. Should you stop, I will eventually leave, but so will you. Your choice is essentially a question, and my misery is that unlike you, I have no decision over my own existence: Is consciously existing worth it despite misery?"