Lore Appendices

Ahem… I wanted to be a little more solemn in inaugurating the first log of the study of this impressive discovery, but I've recorded this three times already, and I honestly don't care anymore.

Out with the important stuff: Luis Alejandrowic, interim research lead of the crew of the Colony Ship Sunnyhome. Or… well, what's left of it, really. We arrived in this system in date 03.10.2179 when our sensors detected a new element. To research it, we headed towards this system, however a mysterious subspace disruption separated the crew. My group is the one that was on the bridge at the moment of the incident. Under the command of captain Martin Falk, we have set up a temporary base in the system's green nebula.

In there, we've accidentally stumbled on an unprecedented find: an enormous artificial structure in a spherical shape. It appears to be inert and gravely damaged, with a giant hole in its side from which we've been able to glean a look at its hollow interior. Curiously, its walls are lined with what looks like cryogenic pods. They're empty and without power, yet appear to be far more advanced and complex than anything I've ever seen in my life. I'm sure chief researcher Yoshida would've loved to see this.

Anyway, we're going to study this machine. It likely holds many secrets that could help us figure out something about this mysterious star system.

I'll keep this log updated with any new finds but for now, Alejandrowic out.

Bonadan told me they managed to find another group of refugees. This place is more inhabited than we thought. I've already asked for any of them skilled with electronics or archaeology to be assigned to my group - this might be the most important work a human has ever done.

Anyway, back on the relevant subject: the spectrographic analysis of the dust surrounding the machine has just finished, and it seems it might be helping us shed some light on the nature of the material it's made of.

It's… something we have never seen before. It's some kind of alloy, clearly, because the spectral patterns don't match a single element, yet they don't match the pattern of any known element. If it's something completely novel and unknown, it might explain why our attempts at traditional chemical analysis have failed - and why it's seemingly impossible to break, even to get a small chip off of it. It seems like we'll have to leave material analysis for a little more, so the electromagnetic patterns will probably be next.

Progress with the machine is glacially slow. It seems like chemical and physical analysis methods will have to be phased out. There's only so many times I can hear “the readings are off the scales” before it all starts blurring together.

As expected, the dust covering the machine is a thick coat of various cosmic dust materials, as expected of something that sat inside a nebula for so long. However, aside from all the expected stuff like ice, polycyclic hydrocarbons and silicates, there's also something that wasn't expected: traces of an element unique to this system which we've dubbed Trinium.

It might be the secret behind the impossible resilience of this thing's outer shell, since there was an extremely small amount. Even titanium would've been ground to dust by all the micrometeoroid impacts and constant radiations and chemical oxidation that no doubt occurred in the abyss of time this thing has sat here.

Which prompts a really disturbing question: what the hell was capable of blowing *that* big a hole in it, then…?

IT SPOKE! Granted, in a language we don't yet understand but … Well, it did! Initially, we thought these soundwaves were only mechanical noises, of things grinding with each other, but it wasn't! IT WAS EFFING TALKING THIS WHOLE TIME! That … That changes so many things! And we even figured out how to somehow change the encoding to something clearer to the human ear. Bunch of “O” sounds, like some kind of bad lyrical music. That, or singing Tibetan monks from the old Earth, to quote one of the interns.

How can something so old, and seemingly unpowered at that, still be somewhat working? It's like these machines are … alive, somehow? Especially since it's so old. We decided to allocate most of our resources to study its language. With a bit of luck, it might be able to understand us, or even better : to give us answers.

Imagine that - we'd be talking with a machine holding data dating from far before the Symbiotes even existed. And perhaps they could give us the information we're all craving: why aren't the Symbiotes following us here?

Spoke too soon, I guess. Yesterday's enthusiasm got extinguished pretty quickly when analysis of the signal coming from the machine revealed some kind of repeating pattern in its transmission - it might be a prerecorded message of some kind, possibly by some kind of hidden transmitter we can't detect.

Or at least, that's Bukharin's opinion. Frankly, I understand his perspective - he's an engineer, a practical man who doesn't have time for this kind of flights of fancy. But there's too many things that don't add up. The repeating patterns don't make up the majority of the message, for starters. If it were prerecorded, you wouldn't expect it to be so long, and the repeating pattern would be much clearer.

I still believe it's possible to establish contact with this machine. Even if it's not some kind of true AI, it could still be able to hold a conversation of some kind. My request to get our linguists to work on this has gotten the Captain's greenlight.

Updates will follow, hopefully.

I… I saw something under the glass of the machine's cryopods. They were empty, I'm sure of that. We looked inside every one of them. Something must've changed after I tried inputting frequencies similar to the ones of the machine's transmission into the base's radio system. I got a transmission I'd never gotten before, as if this thing was actually talking. But what the hell is it saying? I really am going crazy trying to figure this out.

Maybe it's best if we stopped now before it's too late, but the captain insists - he says… says this is the solution he's been looking for, and he's willing to risk it alongside us.

This stupid hunk of metal is mocking me, I'm sure of it. It's gone back to its old predictable transmissions now. And I STILL can't figure out what they mean! I've tried new inputs but it appears to be stuck. What the fuck am I missing?

Palmer wanted to go back to check on the cryopods, to see if I'd just hallucinated something inside. What a stupid idea. Those pods are a waste of time. The key is in the transmissions. It HAS to be!

I'm sure of it now, I'm slowly becoming crazy. I did so since I learned their language, and it got worse after I taught the others.

Why ? And how ? How can words, even in a strange language, fuck with your mind this much ? The worst thing is that most people seem to still be working together even if they're acting strange, sometimes even psychotic, they're just … It's like everyone that they don't know is nothing to them anymore.

Captain Falk is even more affected than the others. The other day he asked me if we could clone him. Out of the blue, like that. What the fuck. What's happening to us ? What are we becoming?

I… I've figured it out. Klang help us all, I've figured it out. I wish I hadn't, but I did. I went back inside the cursed machine, and looked in the pod. Something was in there, something human… why, why?

I know what this thing is. What I don't know is… why? What have we done to deserve this? What unpardonable sin have we committed to be condemned to this limbo?

I looked outside. The stars are out. The nebular gases get in my suit, I tried to get a coffee. It was all green.

We're the last star in the universe. We're dead, and this must be the afterlife.

The captain gave me the order to talk to the machine again. I did. It answered.

And then… the pods opened. I saw myself staring back from those pods, times a thousand.

The log seems corrupted. All you hear is strange metallic noises and static. If you pay closer attention, you can hear what sounds like a disturbing, distorted laugh in the background at some intervals, then more metallic noises.

A new voice replaces the previous one. The familiar one of Captain Middle-Finger

Look over the horizon, what do you see?

A far away comet lights up the dark with fire of gold and blood-red. Ice seeps into your veins.

A green blot is the festering wound in the Milky Way's hollow shell. The skin of the sun. It will eat the skin of the sun, and then be born anew.

We will all be born anew. A bright sapphir'd light guides the way, like a lighthouse to the weary mariner, guiding him to perdition into the abyss of the sea. Land and water, sky and space, exchange of place.

The end of the Chain is Horizon's beginning.

Horizon's beginning…