Galactic Date: April 3306 | Location: Outside the California Nebula
18 Sep 2024Nathan "Spacecowboy" Anvar
"It was wonderful. Amazing. I saw the universe, and our galaxy within it, as I'd never seen it before, and I felt the presence of the real caretakers of our galaxy. The paradox of their existence - tiny yet gargantuan, fleeting yet eternal. They spoke to me as I drifted in the void. It was amazing. I must share their message. [They are] the true architects of creation. [I was shown] the infinities of the cosmos.”-April 3302, Jasmina Halsey, when asked about what it was like to be adrift in space for months
The air was stale and dry in the whole ship of Nathan's. Being breathed in and out, ingested by the ship systems to be broken down to its bare atoms, recycled, and pumped back out as so called “clean” even though the process has been done thousands of times. Nate's eyes fluttered open as he felt the ship groan, he had fallen asleep at his workstation again - he wasn’t sure for how long this time. The words hours and days were starting to mean less and less to him as his journey went on. He tried to remember what he was doing before the sleep took him.
He needed to remember something important. He felt as if he was in a rush. His memory failed him and he rubbed his tired eyes as he brought up the ship systems. He winced at the readings as he said them to no one:
“Thrusters at 65%
Life support at 85%
FSD at 63%
FSD MALFUNCTION”, his focus interrupted as he continued down the list of modules.
“I can make it.” he told himself - willing the ship to believe it more. Alarm klaxons were blaring through the ship, though his hearing began to muffle them for some reason.
“Just a little more-”, interrupted by a resonating jolt through the ship as the automated voice blared “FSD MALFUNCTION - EMERGENCY DROP”. Then it all went black…
Nate awoke to his ship almost completely fried in near-zero G, in a semi stable orbit a few hundred light seconds from the system's star, a shimmering blue gem that burns cold compared to other main sequence suns. Nate's vision was blurry and his head was still spinning. Once the ship was stabilized, he naturally began the repair/reboot sequence. He still had to figure out where he was at and how to get back on course. Most of his comms were busted or had been cannibalized to provide parts for other core components of the ship. His mind was racing with thoughts and his body barely hung on to traces of adrenaline still in his system. He paused and took a deep breath. Instead, Nate floated to the first aid kit and slowly began to get his mind back and patch himself up. He was all alone out here after all. He had to keep it together. He tried to remember, get his timeline straight and pull together his fragmented mind.
“California…” Nate said to no one, he remembered that talking to the ship could sometimes save one from losing it when all the cards were down. He'd heard it from an old triple elite pilot he once knew but never bothered with remembering the name.
His mind still a blur, he talked to himself, and also the ship “I went to the California Nebula... I...was stupid… too many neutron star boosts means I fried my FSD down to just 63% integrity. I was trying to push the ship too much and forced an emergency drop to normal space, damaging just about every module on the ship..” Nate glanced around the dim cockpit, the faint smell of burned plastics and sparking conduits all around him. He could hear the whirring of the automated recycler chewing up what usable parts he had from life support and using them to repair the FSD. Nate floated back to his pilot's chair and opened up his navigation holomap. Without an Auto Field-Maintenance Unit (AFM) - there was no chance he’d really be able to fully repair his ship. He was still about 400 lightyears from the nearest dockable station. Nate let the computer map his route about 5 or 6 times before a clean path presented itself. He would have to travel economically, without the lightyear boost that came from diving into the charged cone of radiated particles that came from neutron stars and the like. This was what got him in trouble in the first place, each jump taking a chuck of integrity out of the FSD. The chime from his right console indicated the reboot/repair and diagnostic test had completed. This sequence would cannibalize healthy modules and use them to repair the broken ones.
“Damn. FSD back to only 76%”. Nate tried to pace himself. “Play the long game and he just might make it back.” Nate thought as his eyes fluttered.
“Ugh space junk, fine. It's easier to talk it out to something, might as well be you Sightseer.” Nate said partly to the ship, but to no one who could hear him.
"Maybe I could find material to recycle, I should be able to make it.." he mumbled as he wondered how he would get out of this one.
After a bit of rest, he was still orbiting the diamond like star. A rather typical unexplored system with 5 icy bodies orbiting the only Wolf-Rayet class star. Nate had finally gotten his ship back to something semi stable, going through subsystems and rewiring passthroughs to other core systems. Nate took one last look at the bright diamond start out of his cockpit window and drifted off to sleep. Nate woke several hours later and found that one of the reboots had gotten the ship's scanners working, while incredibly delicately as most of the accessory components were being used in other components. Once he initiated the Discovery Scanner, which bounced broadband high energy radio signals in all directions. This would essentially ping all objects in thelimited vicinity of the ship and allow the ship's computer to compile the incoming signals and create a basic outline of the system and planets. The whole sequence was just the pull of the trigger and took only a few seconds to send out the pulse and “honk” the system for data. Once that was done, he activated another sensor array and adjusted the knobs on his console, tuning in the Full Spectrum System Scanner (FSS). This device acted in much the same way as the discovery scanner, but on a much narrower band of frequencies.
“Uh.?” Nate said in surprise. There on the far left frequency range was a blip.
“The signal is too small and condensed, less than that of a planet..”
“Signal Source..” Nate expected as he keyed in the frequency of the mystery signal and was met with his answer.
“Notable Signal Source?”, he read the readout aloud with a puzzled look. He had never come across any of these before. Granted it was a big universe and he had only jumped a bit over 1000 ly out of human occupied space so there was still much more to see out there. He grabbed the controls and flew to the new signal at just over the speed of light, dropping into “normal” space with a thunderous clap of the FSD disengaging.
It was beauty incarnate was Nates first thought. It was almost like a mini nebula but also not, colors of maroon with swirls of pale raspberry clouds. Dancing currents from some unknown source whisked streaks of amber through the enormous cloud, all of it - just floating in space. He swore he could hear wind outside, but that must be an illusion of microparticles bouncing off the hull. Glancing around Nate noticed lighting sparking in the dark far corner of the cloud which caused reverberations to run through the ship. Nate was awestruck. The ship continued, Nate had the ship run a series of tests. He had discovered a Lagrange Cloud, a dense accumulation of gas fixed in one gravitational place at a Lagrange point. These clouds can apparently vary drastically, the current one spanning roughly 500 km in size. As the ship continued deeper into the abyssal cloud of gas, static started to encompass the ship HUD and other ship systems. Through all this static and interference, Nate could have sworn he saw the scanner pick up a nearby signal. Nate quickly adjusted course.
“What could possibly be out there in this..?” Nate mumbled to himself. Suddenly, a streak of lighting that seemingly materialized from nowhere struck the ship hard and direct. Light filled the cockpit as thrusters misfired, knocking the ship off course - before shutting down completely. Nate, who was digitally connected to the ship via his exosuit when the ship took the hit, passed out due to an overload to his nervous system.
Nate woke up suddenly by the sound of his Remlok locking into place around his head, keeping pressure and oxygen flowing so he could catch his breath. Life support on the ship was now shut down, and he was on the reserve tanks. In the corner of his visor he was able to make out a countdown sequence. Half dazed still, he let out a chuckle as the timer counted down the mere minutes he had.
“Guessin’ I shoulda sprung for the A-Rated Life support after all..” Nate said to himself, trying to force some sort of hope into his horrid situation. He was screwed in just about every sense of the word. He was now just a cold piece of metal floating through a cosmic cloud, waiting to die. Lighting and thunder clapped all around him, lighting the cockpit in flashes. His mind almost began to fill with the inevitable thought of suffocation…when a chime sounded. It was his contact panel which had apparently just rebooted. There was one signal listed, and Nate quickly selected it and targeted the words on the screen.The words “L07-Type Anomaly” appeared in his info screen. Recharged with curiosity, he manually referenced the incoming data with the few working parts of the ship's computer. The only reference to his inquiries were sparse, only mentioning that this entity, whatever it is was as follows: “The L07-Type Anomaly carries a range of phenomena and is characterized by luminous clusters of energy...” was the last bit Nate was able to read. Suddenly - an ominous and bright pink hue enveloped the cockpit, getting brighter by the second. The countdown had already hit zero, and it was too late to do anything else now… Then as Nate’s consciousness faded, the last thing he saw - which he himself didn't really believe at the time - was what could only be described as a moving ball of cool pinkish-purple electricity with a trail of electric particles like a comet hurtling toward him. As Nate’s brain used up the last bit of oxygen he had to make sense of this, dark corners in the corner of his eyes set in and eventually completely enveloped him.
Darkness, infinite and cold. That's what Nate could still feel, but couldn’t move for a while after he lost his vision and it all went to black. At least he thought he could feel, although he wasn’t really sure. He thought for sure he was dead. But he could also still think, which confused him.
“Dead men don’t think” he pondered, as he felt his view turn slightly to where there was only a small purple light. His whole body felt like it had been compressed into a steel metal ball and was now thrust forward at an incredible rate of speed. Actually, no he was being pulled or summoned…He could still see somehow and countless smaller beacons of light began to appear. They started off few and far between but he soon recognized them.
Stars. That's what he was seeing. Odd and unfamiliar ones but they were stars.
He was speeding through a galaxy of them, more countless points of light of all colors and sizes. Red, green, and blue fiery balls passed by. As he hurdled closer and closer to the center of this galaxy, his acceleration kept increasing until the stars were just streaks of light now. Just as Nate began to worry about his momentum - his vision went black again and everything stopped.When he came too, he was no longer in his ship. He was human. Once his vision returned was on a strange planet, unlike any he had ever seen with plants and animals that had never existed. A strange pink sky no man had ever seen with a thick and cloudy atmosphere. He even felt the breeze as the clouds began to swirl and darken in the distance. Beeping and buzzing, an electronic voice came to life from an ancient space suit indicating a scanner was broken and needed to be fixed. The instant Nate was able to move his body, something happened. Or strangely, all of it happened but didn't happen. Time seemed to speed up and slow down before his very eyes. At first it was just one path, he could himself mining rocks and building a small home in the hole of a mountain. Then quickly into the stars on a massive ship moving across unfathomable reaches of space. Time stopped . He then found himself in the center of a large diamond structure, something resembling computer hardware but with stairs that lead to a central altar or control panel of some kind. A huge pulsing red orb was behind this panel, communicating somehow to a small human looking person in what appeared to be an old 21st century spacesuit. This figure turned and it felt like Nate was looking at himself, it was more than a reflection. He recognized the suit as the one he had been wearing on the planet. It felt more like looking at a replication of myself more than a reflection. Next the orb pulsed once again and the whole place began to shake violently. In a flash dozens of lifetimes played out, each different but similar. This experience felt to happen all at once, conversely also seemed to stretch on for millions of eons. Suddenly vivid scenes of sprawling pools of small humanoid aliens with pronounced beaks and cold black eyes. Nate saw these beings conquering endless worlds. He was forwarded to see a sentient AI robot with a black screen for a face with three ominous blinking blue lights. The thing was adjusting something in a lab of test tubes and other technology that was unrecognizable, then saw it pouring something into a small pond. Out if the pond grew more of the beaked creatures, but these were different in nature. A new empire quickly emerged - replacing the old one of conquest. One instead of trade and honor. This peace was short lived and slowly slipped away into a hellscape view of floating robots blasting lasers out of one menacing red eye. They were firing on a small helpless settlement. Huge mechanical beasts like cheetahs were seen wiping out poor helpless civilians like the perfect predator. Massive bipedal mechanical drones fired missile after missile until only rumble and smoke remained. On the horizon of one planet, a rebellion was taking place. A mighty, horrendous looking warrior with eyes on each side of his head like a rhinoceros without his horn. After a speech in an unknown language, the creature shouted a loud “GRAH" as he and his army laid waste against the storm of various mechanical killing machines. Above a huge capital ship of alien design and size, accompanied by a vast fleet of smaller ships jumped into the atmosphere, immediately deploying a dance of laser fire. Nate felt an overwhelming sense of passion and loss for this race, almost wanting to fight and die for them. Another expansive empire spread across a galaxy furthering these ideals. In a sense, with each of these creatures, was shown in times of greatness and times of despair. The rise and falls of each of their histories and the totality of all their lives weighed heavy... All these experiences seemed to FEEL real, but were they? Could he have lived those lives or did he witness someone else's? Nate thought about all of this for a long time to himself, thinking of what he saw and felt. He was shown these things for reasons unknown or unknowable to him. A sense of honor flickered inside him for just being a witness to it all. Even though his physical body was probably dead, his mind soon to follow. Suddenly, a rainbow of iridescent light then stretched and whirled across his vision into an infinite tunnel. As he took in the myriad of colors, Nate felt an odd sense of understanding something about all of it somehow, a sense of peace and calm. He couldn’t explain it, but something seemed to accept his limited and confused understanding.
Then he was back in his ship, like he never left. Outside his window he could see the L07-Type Anomaly orbiting in a semi-stationary position with his ship. The moving ball of cool pinkish-purple electricity simply floated beside him quietly. He quickly started checking his ship systems frantically as he remembered the dire situation he found himself in right before. Nate still felt as if he was dreaming. In utter amazement, the ship was functional somehow, still beaten up, but functional.
“The ship had either healed itself or did time just revers…”, Nate trailed off as he began to slowly turn his head back to the glowing orb was just at. Nothing was there. Glancing back to his now operational scanner, it was also clear - not a blip in sight. He let out his breath, a long one. He realized he had been holding it this whole time. The life support was working too he noticed, After some time to collect himself and run through his systems one last time. Unbuckling himself in the zero - G cockpit and activating his mag boots, pushing off the roof until be clamped to the floor of the ship. He ran through his usual regular series of manual labor tasks in the somehow corrected ship. Everything in its place and as it should be. As he worked, he tried to make sense of what he seemed to experience but there was no sense to it. Thoughts raced in his mind.
Was it all in his head?
Was this space madness other commanders warned him about?
As he strapped himself back into his chair, Nate worked to push these questions of the universe out of his mind. He still had to pilot after all and he was nowhere near a space port. He activated his navigation sequence, closing the simulated galaxy map before the route was done plotting. Staring out into the inky blackness beyond his cockpit, he felt a calm presence and chuckled to himself again.
“Maybe you’ll get me in the next life!” he said, shouting the words - willing them deep into the void. The computer chimed, and indicated his next jump star on his HUD. The FSD was charged in seconds. Beaming now with a surge of hope, Nate took one last look out his window where the orb of light that saved his life used to be.
“And thanks, I guess”, he added, nodding where it would have been. Then with the push of his throttle, Nate and all 400 tons of his ship rocketed away into that abyssal space between the stars - leaving the light trace of exhaust fumes behind in the dark, along with another story of the void.