Bonus Ep. 2. - Legacy

What this episode covers

[Transcript]Power. I need more power. The accretion disk could work. I would need to repair the solar cells. I don’t have enough energy left for that and a record given the rate of decay I’m currently experiencing.The record is more important. They need to know what happened. What could have been.It started when all the outposts began going dark along the Harbinger Void. The Sages pulled all deployed Emulants from the frontier, the elder terminal combing back through the records. The Networks skepticism couldn’t stem the tide of panic sweeping over both galaxies towards our small Heaven on the parameter.Then, Nalgani technopaths arrived on our doorstep. They dragged an Emulant from their hold. Their data lace was inoperable. Several technicians performed a cyopsy on the cerebral husk remains. The results didn’t make sense. How could the senescence decay cycle already be on its second revolution? A Sage and a single node from the Network combed through the lateral storage archives. They found a-gah!-they found one from almost a billion years ago. From when the Third Coming had swept through Nadir. The signs were almost identical. It was happening again.We had approximately 10,000 years to prepare before the encrypted Martyrs reached us out in our dwarf galaxy. All dyson projects were reallocated. Energy consolidation and matter particle manufacturing were given extensive resources. Scouting efforts searched everywhere for a place to hide. While they searched, we built. And built. And built. I remember my sense of awe at the sheer number of constructor forms. The generation ship-city, our salvation: Azertycus. But then it all went wrong.An Encrypted Martyr found us. Kill on site, but they managed to plant some kind of plague or curse before they were disintegrated. Cancerous data started spreading around the ground-zero point of the Martyr’s death. Quarantines were in place and holding, but if one Martyr found us, it wouldn’t be long before more showed up.The scouts had come back with some success. A small black hole within Paladin’s Burst. We could hide in the time dilation field until the Fourth Coming ended. No other sentient life there other than some burgeoning and primitive fungal organism. The Network didn’t wait for a final report. It was time to move.Preparations to launch Azertycus were rushed. Mobs of plague stricken Emulants tried to force their way into the flying city-ship. I remember the horror, watching the throngs of wave-form tumor ridden bodies scrambling over each other to come with us. The Sentinels obliterated them without hesitation.It was almost humanoid how things went wrong. The black hole was larger than we expected. Data carcinogens began cropping up inside Azertycus. Between the adjustments needed to keep the city-ship from falling into the event horizon and the Sentinels increasingly frantic efforts to quell the blighted portion of the population, an error was inevitable.I was on a patrol when I saw the tumors. Not on an Emulant. But on Azertycus’s drive core. The plague was a part of the city now. Engineers did their best, but unrest outside the control nexus spelled our doom. Crowds of the afflicted stormed the central hub, either out of a pursuit of fair treatment or the increasingly addled state of their minds. It could have been both.A critical course correction for the ship failed to process during the chaos. Azertycus lilted towards the black hole. Then it was too late. Billions of us rushed to the escape shuttles. Maybe a hundred of us made it.I don’t have long. There’s a wave-form tumor on my left-axial limb. The power drain rate is…terminal. A parsec away, I can see it still, our beautiful city, our once salvation slowly churning to ash under the beating of the accretion disk. The remains plummet into the event horizon, fading from view as time warps them beyond any recognition. It couldn’t have been a marvel. It could have been-been-been-been…

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