In the Shadow of Three
26 Dec 2024Rawnu
I came across a log today. Kasumi Goto—sharp mind, sharper insights. Reading her words felt like staring into a mirror, but one cracked and refracted, revealing shapes I hadn’t fully seen in myself. She questions everything we’re told about the Thargoid war, about Sol, about the meaning behind their actions. And stars, she’s right. We’re missing something.For years, I’ve felt it. The hum beneath hyperspace, the patterns in the void that don’t quite fit, the strange threads tying Thargoids to Guardians and now to us. My hyperspace condition has always felt like a curse, but maybe it’s more than that—an echo of something I can’t fully understand. Kasumi’s musings about Guardian AI—the “Construct,” as some call it—send a chill through me. What if the whispers and lights I see are fragments of something ancient, something neither human nor Thargoid? What if the Thargoids hear it too, and they’re trying to silence it before it’s too late, before it wakes... something far worse?
Guardian technology was humanity’s salvation—or so we were told. We mined their ruins, weaponized their artifacts, and then wondered why the Thargoids became more violent. We didn’t ask what those relics whispered to the hive mind when we turned them on. And now I wonder if our hubris hasn’t set two ancient enemies on a collision course, with us standing between them, oblivious and arrogant.
Kasumi suggests the Thargoid attack on Sol might have been a diversion with a deeper purpose. I can’t shake the thought that she’s onto something. We see Titans, devastation, and casualties, but we don’t see the Thargoids as strategists. We don’t ask what they’re trying to achieve. If they’re investigating Guardian ruins and pulling back just as suddenly as they arrive, doesn’t it suggest they’re looking for something? Or watching? I’ve seen the signals near the Titan graveyards. They hum with intention, with life—or the memory of it.
If the Guardian AI is still out there, it changes everything. The Thargoids wouldn’t see us as independent actors but as pawns of an ancient enemy. And if the AI is active, it’s manipulating us. Salvation’s death–if he's really gone for good–didn’t end the dangers of arrogance; it only made us more blind. The Proteus Wave might have been a beacon, not just to the Thargoids, but to the Construct itself—a flare in the dark, signaling an ancient predator. What fire did we light, and for whom—or what?
Kasumi’s words are more than a log—they’re a call to act. But to act differently. No more reckless incursions into Thargoid space, no more wars of attrition we barely understand. We need to step back and reframe the conflict: not as humanity’s survival against an alien threat, but as a galaxy’s fight against annihilation. The Thargoids and us—and the shadow of the Construct looming above all. It might be turning into a triangle of chaos soon. I don’t trust the Federation or the Empire to see this. They’re too preoccupied with scoring victories, with claiming glory. Kasumi sees it, though, and maybe a few others. I hope I’m one of them. If the AI has turned its gaze toward us, the Thargoids’ actions may no longer be the threat we think they are. They might be our only allies in the storm that’s coming.
If it’s the Construct we’re up against, we are faced with the biggest threat to all biological life in the galaxy. The thought makes me shudder. What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?