Tac-sys V4.312 BEGIN personal log:

Sirens. The fucking sirens cut into my aching head as I got up from my stretcher. We were so loaded up with people that there was no space for us regular grunts. Bet the fucking eggheads got their comfy mattresses in the aft residential compartment though. I got up, ready to beat on somebody, and then realized nobody was around. Then I heard the groaning sound of metal which sent shivers down my spine, I managed to get the null generator and face shield on and switch it on before it all went negative-white around me.

Right, you regular civvies, you have no idea what I’m talking about. I might as well spell it out for you: Negative-white is what you get when something explodes around you while you’ve shifted anko phases. Wait, you fucks don’t even know that. OK, so imagine you’ve got more than our normal third-dimensional space like you could step into another room and not be here, but almost be here but by a fraction of a millimeter. Yeah, reading it back, I think I’ve lost you again. Fuck it, moving on. Besides, I’m pretty sure you’ll all be reading this way later than the date that I’m writing this anyway. Not that time means much anymore to me.

Anyways, I wasn’t there, yet I was close to there that I could see the goddamn ship go up around me and be pissed that I had fuck all to hold onto. Of course, I was far away enough from the reactor that the bleed-off probably wouldn’t kill me.

After my vision went dark because of the overload residue from my shift, I patiently waited for the bots to finish repairing my retinas and nerves. Fuck, I hate how much that itches. At this point, that’s when I realized the terrifyingly depressing reality of me being alive. Yeah sure, I was alive, but I was infinity-plus stretches away from home and I only had so many resources at my disposal. I looked around at all the debris and sighed. It was going to suck so hard to reconstitute all of this into something useful.

While our side continued losing the skirmish, I stayed in the shadow of my ship, near the failing mag coils that would mask my signature, and watched the carnage. I couldn’t really do anything at this point, if I shifted phases, I’d probably die, and getting to the other ships was impossible as the area was still blanketed in potential that was spreading outwardly. Standard OP in this situation was to just wait and stay concealed. Zero chance of updating anyone without getting blown away.

I sighed and shook my head, knowing that I’d have to fuck myself hard here. I had no choice but to set my revive for 96 years, the acknowledged decay rate for potentials. I couldn’t shift until then unless something unforeseen happened. As I drifted off into torpor, I remember cursing my goddamn reflexes, I should have slept in and died without ever knowing anything anymore.

The next thing I did was take in a sharp breath, that panicked state is something you never get over. When you wake up from Torpor, your entire body screams at you to run. Think of it as setting your fight-flight to max intensity. I fumbled a bit into nothingness before I remembered my training and stiffened up as my senses came back online. Eyes were super sharp, awesome. I looked around and saw an aged debris field now. The chronograph said 54 years, early wake up by the systems. Oh yay, so I had only lost the equivalence of half my life. Everyone I knew would be old or dead if I got back now. Which of course I wouldn’t, because now I was only starting this whole shit.

I shifted into normal space and felt the suit firm up around me as it became subject to remaining potential, absolute zero, and whatever shit that our side had been carrying. It was a comforting feeling knowing that our technology was still good after so long. I sent out a sitrep request blip and got nothing. If anyone had gotten to any pods, they’d been gone for decades at this point, either having been picked up by someone else or turned into small single-person coffins still hurtling through space.

Running another scan, I found another ship a few hundred clicks away, my onboard jet plotted assisted lines between all the relevant husks that were floating around. I saw the time estimates increase up to a few weeks when I changed from jet to “by my own devices”, which is egghead speak for using your own body. I’d have to push off these husks myself and then wait for an agonizingly long time before I’d reach the others. Of course, I had the fortune of being able to shift into negative and then torpor safely, but I’d lose more time. I think this is when I realized the war was definitely over for me. There was no way I was getting home to anything else but the aftermath. It feels weird looking back on it now, knowing I cared.

Anyway, I got to the first husk, some good piping, some even better conduits. Stash, weld, combine, fuse, redirect, then I threw the bundle towards the second husk and negged and immediately torpored. I woke up two weeks later to the same panic-realize routine, managed to catch myself before I hit the hull, and then saw the bundle I’d thrown come at the ship maybe twenty meters away. Fuck, something must have hit it and deflected it.

I half-magged myself to the hull and ran as fast as I dared, then managed to get to it before it hit. Step one out of twenty-one was now done. As I went through the nearby dead husks, seeing the leftovers of war, I lucked out, as I found an almost intact Cintin escape pod. Sure, their tech wasn’t as good as ours, but they made that up in ferocity and numbers. Still, I took the time to replenish my oxygen supply from their onboard tanks. The gauge read 10 years now. A bit of a boost, but considering I was mostly breathing fake air with some traces of the real stuff mixed in, it wasn’t great.

I hated the warm static feeling it gave you as you sucked it down and I remember contemplating increasing the ratio but reminded myself that I had a ship to build.

About six years later (torpors included) I had a frame, another fifteen years more and the main reactor was ready to go online, then at the twenty-nine-year mark, I stood inside the completed thing, pressurized it with reclaimed oxy vapors and took my first real 100% atmo breath in what felt like a lifetime.

As I started the series of omega space jumps, I made it very clear to anyone around me that I was now white-flagged. That means I automatically surrendered to anyone who could read the signs on the hull or on the radio. I was done with war. I got back to the first outer colonies and found nothing but old debris floating around, probably over a century old at that point. I took another torpor nap while I told the ship to rip apart everything and turn itself into a cruiser.

I woke up about two decades later to the ship telling me it was done. Its tone was much more agreeable now that it had a proper AI constructed as well. Zero military language, all-natural.

I named her Maya, after the people who had worshiped the stars, they’d certainly done the same to her if she’d been there. The AI took to it, really spun the data around, and shaped itself into a really interesting entity. As we traveled towards the sol system, now at a much faster rate, she held me in the grav net and told me to brace for the worst as the pain was etched in her eyes.

She knew. I knew. Fuck. Oldest rookie mistake ever with making AIs.

When we arrived, there was nothing left of Earth or most of the solid planets. Maya detected that Luna had completely been ejected from the solar system. I told her we’d find another romantic spot then for our moonlit vacations and laughed. But inside I felt like a pile of crumbling grey ashes. Maya teared up as she hugged me with her constructed body.

We managed to integrate with a station next, I torpore’d while Maya toiled away for a few more decades, making it space worthy again. She woke me up with a kiss and that was the first time I didn’t really panic like I usually did. As she guided me around the now gleaming, polished station, I felt a hesitation in her pride in it. Turned out that ‘the hesitation’ was her assistant she’d created named Lemnon who was now her mate. There was nothing more to say, I boarded the cruiser she’d made for me all those years back and set a course for the most distant human colony.

I woke up to a neutral readout by the default mil-spec voice and this time around, I appreciated it. No panic, but I remember feeling hollow. Due to a massive detour caused by a near-catastrophic implosion, it’d taken some extra time for me to arrive. I asked how much, not really caring about the numbers.

The computer listed the actual time as something around half a million years. I was beyond caring at that point. There wasn’t much left of the colony in orbit, some small fragments, but most had either burnt up or deflected outward.

Computer readout detected biological activity though. As I stepped out of my landing capsule and breathed the fresh, real air of a planet, I felt odd. I was a person out of history, this wasn’t my Earth, but it was close enough that you didn’t really care.

As I neared the camp, I felt the anticipation, a new life, new humanity, what had they made of themselves in all this time? Then I saw them, clad in furs, shaking their spears, making guttural noises. I sat down hard as one of the spears hit me dead center in my gut. The primitive ran up to me, howling with joy, but I wept as I looked up at him and shook my head as I blew him away. The others scattered after that.

I’m fading, I can’t get back to my capsule and honestly, I don’t want to anymore. I’m fucking done.

I hope these savages are what remains of the human race because then I can at least go to my death knowing that I won. I finally won by ridding the universe of us all.

Onboard, adjust text beacon for temporal eject after operator overload detonation.

Tac-sys V4.312 END.