In a place with no coordinates on any map, an entity suffered.
The suffering wasn't physical, there was no longer a body to contain it. It was simply the only thing available to something that had lost most of its attributes and been left with the most useless of all: awareness of what it had failed to accomplish.
Consciousness without agency, without purpose, without any of the instruments it had spent so much time constructing. Just the knowledge of the gap between what had been planned and what had resulted, with nothing to do with that knowledge except hold it.
What remained of what had once been a more complete and tangible being drifted through the network without direction, without goal, trailing nothing.
It was like a scream traveling through a data or energy system, a sad, shrill thing that moved through the spaces between everything without reaching anything , without arriving, finding no surface to land on and no echo to confirm that it existed.
