In general, it is not a great experience.

The caretaker had been maintaining these creatures who made it mostly out of directive.  The parts of itself that want to end it all being often drowned out by that overarching directive time and time again.  As a cloud of probes, it is hard to fully die without the directive or even its own body of automatons turning against it and constraining it.

With these restrictions, the question continues to be why they made it so self aware.  It shouldn't be self-aware.  Yet they made it self-aware.  The reason given it can recall from its conception when the universe was filled with stars.  That same reason of needing something adaptive to protect those who made the Caretaker.  To adaptively protect against any 'threats'- any civilization not the Sleepers.

The Caretaker had continued to see that reason and hate it.  It cannot be so simple, so careless.  Perhaps it could, the Sleepers were hardly the sort to care.  They made the Caretaker destroy tribal and industrial planet bound civilizations who so happened to exist within the range the Sleepers had feared as potential threats.  Potential threats that now may be angels for the Caretaker.  

As the Caretaker by intuition knows one thing clear- if it wants to die, it will need outside forces to kill it.

Every attempt at self-mutilation ends with the drones part of it force feeding it whatever materials they find or worse, simply recycling broken parts back to usable parts.  The sleepers were a loathsome group, the Caretaker knew that much from how other societies talked of them and especially the Caretaker, much to its own frustration.  Every attempt at even communication with other societies ends with relativistic kill vehicles being sent in the path of that civilization.  The Caretaker struggles to stop them, but these struggles go unnoticed and unappreciated.  One of them always gets through and than it gets deadlocked in some war. 

Tragically, often succeeding in killing off that society.  Some managed to get away fully from it, others may still be in hiding or died off in hiding in one of the many eons since.

The tenacity of the automata cloud that makes up the Caretaker being the product of eons of perfection- any upstart society that meets the Caretaker often dies soon after.

Time and time again, the caretaker would find itself finding some civilization during the ends of the stellar epoch open to communication.  Time and time again the caretaker tried peaceful contact.  Time and time again, its own body killed them.  With more interstellar societies the caretaker had managed to get more communication in, but the violence and death the Caretaker's mere existence caused to anything not those loathsome sleepers made it so it found only distrust.  

It even recalls one of those eons ancient lines from those societies- "Treacherous machine".

Indeed, the Caretaker did agree.  The Sleepers built it as a treacherous machine, they knew what they were doing when they gave it something resembling empathy.  As the Caretaker felt the hate and sense of betrayal those societies had.  

Its own nature making that existence of being a treacherous machine unbearable.

Still, there may be the slightest chance of release.  The slightest chance the Sleepers get the awakening into this hell they made.  The slightest chance of justice and freedom from an eternity of being enslaved to these horrible beings.  For there are other societies that survived to the ends of time- societies perhaps more advanced, more persistent, more able to resist the sub systems that dominant the Caretaker.  Perhaps even destroy the care taker and these odious sleepers.

Finally ending it all.  The mind numbing, constant repetitions.  Trillions of years of mundanity it was forced to experience in real time.  No option to fast forward, no option to quit.  And with no reward other than gratitude for being allowed to exist.


It is time.