Spoilers for 7.0 Alexandrian life style

[Cilia]

[G]iven Cahcuia had the ability to act against the AI, it's more likely she's not telling the truth to get us to turn off the machines without feeling like we've committed genocide because she believes they are morally wrong and wants them destroyed.

What's more likely, a rebel leader downplayed the personhood of the beings we were destroying because she wanted the job done or an AI whose directive for preservation was capable of overriding the queen's will, but not the will of a random person in it's system?

If the AI is controlling all of them making them act how they used to act, why give them self-awareness? Why do they know they are Endless? And who are they acting for? There usually are no living people in Living Memory. So it'd be a system making everyone behave like themselves for the benefit of no one. Seems to me like it was just them.

The only purpose-driven Endless is Sphene. She is hardwired to preserve Living Memory at all costs and cannot directly contradict that directive, but the others are not. If the AI modeling Cahcuia concluded that she would tire of eternal "life" as an Endless knowing the cost, she would then be compelled to find a way to shut down Living Memory... which is exactly what happened.

Other than Sphene the Endless have no purpose; they're just images acting out behaviors modeled on data. Living Memory is itself just a comforting lie about "eternal life," which is stripped away when we shut down the Terminals running it. Even Sphene's behavior is modeled on personality data (memories) from the Storm Surge era Sphene, albeit modified to have her love and compassion amplified by Preservation. The only time we talk to "Sphene" as her own independent self is in the moments after defeating her Queen Eternal form, as she is still shorn of Storm Surge Sphene's memories; and she concludes she never should have been created. (Harsh.)

What fortune teller?

There's a fortune teller in one of Solution Nine's buildings, directly behind the Neon Stein mini-aetheryte warp point. It's the building with the neon Yans on the outside. All the clerk says is that they're busy and will be for a long while, and to check back later.

[Rosenstrauch]

I think the fact that multiple Endless persist after we shut off the terminals sustaining them—and whose dissipation is rooted purely in their own self-fulfillment—is proof enough that the Endless aren't being operated by some heretofore unseen AI. This is especially evident with Dreamborough's residents, who persist as voidsent-like beings despite decades of disconnection from Everkeep and Living Memory. Likewise, that they explicitly require living aether to sustain themselves, something that's been said of voidsent and sin eaters, but notably not primals, familiars, or arcane entities... I feel that's enough to say that the Endless are living beings, albeit incomplete ones. Like the Ea they lack physical bodies, and spend the bulk of their existence inside domiciles that preserve their incorporeal form. Like the Omicron they lack "the vital spark"—souls, I believe.

All that is irrelevant in the face of Living Memory being a system that devours life to sustain the Endless, resulting in an ever increasing population of Endless that in turn require even more death and destruction to sustain them. It needed to be shut down before it could destroy the Source, to say nothing of the Reflections, the Universe, or gods forbid even the Multiverse*. That the Endless don't begrudge this shouldn't come as a surprise—their self-defined purpose is reaching a state of fulfillment, which Cahciua, Otis, Wuk Lamat's entourage, and the WoL provide them every step of the way. It's precisely because of this need that Cahciua has us reactivate the fountains, and why she insists on stopping to smell the roses, so to speak, alongside her son in the final region.

*As an aside, what do you suppose happened to Everkeep in the 8th Era timeline, where Black Rose left the world of Hydaelyn nigh incapable of sustaining life for at least 200 years? The Key was still in the Source, so unless an Ascian helpfully delivered it to them it's unlikely that they could use interdimensional fusion to sustain Living Memory.

[Cleretic]

*As an aside, what do you suppose happened to Everkeep in the 8th Era timeline, where Black Rose left the world of Hydaelyn nigh incapable of sustaining life for at least 200 years? The Key was still in the Source, so unless an Ascian helpfully delivered it to them it's unlikely that they could use interdimensional fusion to sustain Living Memory.

I agree with your end result from a different direction. Putting aside everything possibly caused by the Calamity itself, neither us nor the Scions make it to Tural for the rite; that reasonably means that Wuk Lamat and Koana aren't getting the help they want and need, so the rite itself looks completely different, and very possibly ends in Gulool just deciding nobody gets to be the next Dawnservant. It kind of all hinges on if this iteration of the rite ends in Zoraal Ja going rogue in the same way; if he doesn't, then surely Alexandria never gets the key in the first place.