Reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan where the robot Salo laments to his dead friend about the message he's been carrying for millions of years:

"Predictable?" he said. "After watching human beings for two hundred thousand Earthling years, I have become as skittish and sentimental as the silliest Earthling schoolgirl.

"Durable?" he said darkly. "We shall see what we shall see."

He laid the message he had been carrying so long on Rumfoord's empty, lavender contour chair.

"There it is — friend," he said to his memory of Rumfoord, "and much consolation may it give you, Skip. Much pain it cost your old friend Salo. In order to give it to you — even too late — your old friend Salo had to make war against the core of his being, against the very nature of being a machine.

"You asked the impossible of a machine," said Salo, "and the machine complied.

"The machine is no longer a machine," said Salo. "The machine's contacts are corroded, his bearings fouled, his circuits shorted, and his gears stripped. His mind buzzes and pops like the mind of an Earthling — fizzes and overheats with thoughts of love, honor, dignity, rights, accomplishment, integrity, independence — "

Old Salo picked up the message again from Rumfoord's contour chair. It was written on a thin square of aluminum. The message was a single dot.

"Would you like to know how I have been used, how my life has been wasted?" he said. "Would you like to know what the message is that I have been carrying for almost half a million Earthling years — the message I am supposed to carry for eighteen million more years?"

He held out the square of aluminum in a cupped foot.

"A dot," he said.

"A single dot," he said.

"The meaning of a dot in Tralfamadorian," said Old Salo, "is —

"Greetings."