Captains log, date… who can tell anymore?
Everything’s changed.
We thought we knew it all. We thought we conquered this system. We thought we were safe…
What did we know? Nothing it turns out. And now we know even less.
Three days ago, all ship navigations systems failed. Measurements read as though we were flying through black ink soup. My girl, our ship, “Thea” – she’s lost, drifting without a purpose.
6 months ago we set out in search of new trade routes and rare goods. Things were going great and we’ve gone fat with goods that would make us all rich. We’d started our journey home only three weeks back when we started picking up radio signals and odd news reports from the Home-worlds. It appears one of the Scientific branches of the Trader Factions found an alien cache on Masperon and brought it back to the federated planets for investigation. We caught wind of forgotten technologies, and new untold secrets with untapped potential.
The last news report had a tally, some 213 different artifacts, data tablets, and modified/corrected theorems where discovered. Things like Night Vision implants, advanced circuitry for our structures including AI/Logic functions (doors that think?!), new cockpit designs, and more day to day improvements on life. Sounds like a great deal right? Where’s the catch?
Portals. Pandoras box. The universe biggest evil prank. News reports of discovering odd portal technologies. Some devices appeared life savers, moving people and their gear short distances. Others were even more promising allowing massive distances to be crossed in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately Some also transported poor subjects into harsh environments with deadly wildlife and worse.
And then there were what we’ve come to call the “boogy man portals” – benign looking little pads that sat dormant until video footage of spider infestations in research facilities started popping up. And then the goons came. The aliens. Seems they gave us a whopping Trojan Horse and we ate it and licked our fingers.
Fast forward to today. Last accurate reading placed us Dozens of AU away from Akua… good news is the terror is far away from here… bad news is we can’t see more than a few parsecs ahead of us, rerecording all of our explored territories. At this rate, by the time we make it back, I don’t know if there will be anyone left to make us rich.
<… pause …>
Captains log… we just ran across an ancient structure. This damnable space fog almost made us smash right into it.
It’s huge. A giant round wheel like structure… what appears to be an ancient space base with hangars and …wait… are those… teleporters?
READY THE AWAY TEAM AND ACTIVATE AI DEFENSE SYSTEMS!! We’re going to go squash some bugs and see what loot we can find… maybe we can an idea of what direction home is and get rich in the process…
…
Wish I brought my other laptop.