Outpost

Salvage records:

Abandoned Legion Fortress 387. Colloquial Designation ‘Fort Stalwart’ according to Legion Records. It is uncertain how the survivor reached this station. Though the audio log claims that the survivor was working on transportation technology on behalf of the Kith-rali Navy Research and Development Corps based out of Research Station 917 aka Wolf Station.

Survivor audio log begins:

-0-

Day ????

Have you ever wondered if you were going mad? Or perhaps that you had already arrived? 

But then, I suppose if I can ask that question, then it’s already been answered, hasn’t it? One of the defining aspects of insanity is the belief that you are sane. I wonder if that’s true, or if it’s like so many other things they teach us as children. A pleasant lie that we learn to see through as we grow. 

Like the ones about magic and wishes and dreams. Lies about monsters and about beasts that pretend to be human.

There is not a person alive, nor one who has ever lived that does not remember the fear of the dark that our earliest grandfathers passed down to us. The terror of the closet door left ajar.

Ha. The closest door. What a silly thing to be scared of. Is there anything more distinct from our cave dwelling forebears? Anything more clearly a product of opulence? No.

And yet there hide all the terrors of childhood. Horrors lurk behind those shadows, or at least that’s what the frightened ape to whom our minds truly belong thinks. As children we see eyes look out at us, claws and grasping fingers stretching out to pull us from our beds into the cold, confining dark. 

In truth, growing up is an exercise in ignoring those fears. An exercise in pretending we don’t believe in them anymore. 

When really, we should never have stopped.

Growing up is learning not to see the imaginary monsters lurking in those shadows. Growing wise is learning to tell which humans hide monsters behind false, smiling, friendly, loyal faces.

I suppose I can be forgiven, here at the end of things, for all that I have done. To err is human, after all. And despite all that I might wish to the contrary, that is all I shall ever be. Only human. Doomed to spend my days pushing boulders up hills until my days are spent and there are no more hills to climb. Until I reach my final rest whereupon I can but hope for something brighter.

An end to the pain and the absurdity once and for all. Then again, if I am here with only my boulder and my hill, maybe I can find my peace in the absolute knowledge of that absurdity. Armed with that understanding, did not a wise man once say that we must imagine Sisyphus as happy? Or maybe Camus was lying, just trying to tamp down his own worries with the belief that he understood his position and reveled in that knowledge if nothing else.

Perhaps if I can imagine Sisyphus thus, I can imagine myself in the same way. Happy in the knowledge that it is all meaningless. Happy to know, at the very least, that it is absurd. Happy in being aware of myself and all that goes on around me.

Sadly, I seem to have gone beyond myself.

Madness. That was the beginning of things. Madness and monsters. Of course, there are no monsters here, none hiding in the shadows of the fort, none lingering just around the corner. There is only me.

But at least I’m in good company. It’s like the cat said to Alice, “we’re all mad here.” Comforting though that is, really, it’s only a distraction. How can we all be mad? If there is only me, then one out of one must be ‘all’ wouldn’t you agree?

Necessarily, I think you’d be forced to concede, as there is only me, that the cat must be right. Unpleasant or pleasant, that’s up to minds greater than mine to figure out. I can only exist here, one among the madmen.

But why am I the only one left? And why am I here in a rotting corpse of a fort at the edge of known space? I don’t mind telling you, that question has kept me up at night lately. Or rather, as long as I’ve been here. However long that is. You see, that’s part of my problem, the days have all blended together. Each one interchangeable with the last.  Out here, there is only me, the sun, the sand, the fort, and the knowing.

Knowing that I could have and should have done something. Anything.

There, again there you can hear the madness speaking. Can you tell the difference? Between me and it? Can’t you hear it? I certainly can. The voice that is almost me but not quite, the voices that linger at the edge of knowing what they are and what they are not. Between formed and formless. Hahaha… that was funny. But I’m not sure how.

Nothing I could have done would have made any difference. Except perhaps that I could have died. But that would not have changed the outcome in the slightest, save for adding another Kith-rali corpse to the pile. 

Very well, I’ll tell you since you didn’t bother asking. Very rude, might I add, letting me natter on as though I’m the only person here. Then again, I suppose I am, so rude or not your silence only makes sense. Within my head, maybe that’s why you can’t hear it, there are two voices. One belongs to me, and it is speaking to you now; the other also belongs to me, but that’s only because the madness belongs to me, eh?

Whispering. Whispering. It tells me that I should have died back on the station. That I had no right to survive, that escaping like I did was the wrong thing to do. But, and here we find the peculiarity of it all, this second voice does not want to die. It simply cannot process that it is alive.

Like I said, “we’re all mad here.”

Now then, I suppose I've dance around the question for long enough. The ground surrounding the bush that is my point must be thoroughly beaten by now. Perfectly flat. A good place to tell you, mysterious person listening, what happened at Wolf Station.

Wolf Station was a nearly forgotten backwater on the edge of Kith-rali space. Showing its wear through pits in the walls, and a certain sag to airducts that never seemed to top the endless list of repairs. Commander Riley kept putting in requests to Navy Command, but they never quite got around to fixing anything. The process drones in the navy central computer always seemed to ‘misplace’ our repair orders.

The war was ongoing then, might still be ongoing now, and the Empire had more on its plate then even it's unrivaled size could comfortably handle. Or at least that was what we all told ourselves, and every batch of new guards who came to do their time on the ass end of civilized space. We weren't 'forgotten' only 'misplaced.' They would remember us before the end.

I wonder if they did. If the distress call that we sent out when the enemy poured through the wormhole even made it to the Capital. When the traitor Haley opened the gates to Hell and let all its fury come boiling out. Traitor. Wherever they are, I hope they're at least as miserable as I am. At least just as mad as me. Doesn’t seem fair otherwise, for them to walk away from their own evil actions with a brain fully intact while I’m here with my two halves.

Maybe they even have their own cat. Wouldn't that be fun? Jim Cricket, I think that's his name, sitting on their shoulder and whispering to them about what they did. Telling them that we're all mad here.

Haha! Oh, but my hopes that the Tanglarese burned them alive run strong. Especially when I think I hear the wind whispering my name. Begging me to go out, leave in the dead of the night, and wander free among the shifting sands forever. I know there's madness in the wind. I know - know for an absolute fact, mind you - that the wind cannot speak. That it's all in my head.

Funny phrasing that. People used to use it to explain that something wasn't real, that all your worries only exist in your imagination. Tell me something, though: what are you supposed to do when you can feel those fictions winning? Creeping closer to control, encroaching on the sovereign space that is your mind just as the Tanglarese do to the Empire?

At the time, I was working on an experiment. Most of the crew was there, apart from the traitor and the people who were monitoring the deep space relays. Talk about boring. And useless, in the end.

Half a dozen people staring at screens that only told them the surrounding space was empty. Not even shipping traffic or pirates ventured quite that far into the black.

So many people, so many wasted work hours when the cuckoo in the nest waited. Counting the minutes, the hours, the days, or maybe longer, until the order finally came down. The order to betray their colleagues, people who called them friend.

Leaving only me.

The experiment. Yes, yes that was the important part of all of this wasn't it? The experiment, the very reason why I am where I am instead of confirmed dead in Navy reports. Apologies, the mind tends to wander as the days stretch out into... however long I've actually been here.

Hahaha... yes, the time. The time and the sand take things from you, things you've never even considered you could lose. Slowly at first, then like grains of that same sand rolling down into an avalanche of dead mountains all tumbling into the void. It gathers you up until there is nothing left but the madness. Nothing but the final voice whispering in your ear. Whispering that it is finally time.

You never consider it. Not at first. Not when the hope is still alive. But as that time, the wasted time, the waiting time, as it passes, a third voice slowly encroaches. Did I not mention this before? Strange, I could have sworn I had. Then again maybe not.

But this third voice urges you to take that leap into the void, into the sand, away from all things and all life. It urges you to die. It takes the other two voices, the one that wants to live and the one that cannot comprehend why you are still alive, and consumes them, growing stronger on their defeated hope or proven hopelessness. Grows stronger until the whispering is not whispering anymore. Until it shouts into your head, shouts so loud that you want to follow its instructions if only to make the shouting stop.

Yeah… that third voice is there waiting for you. Waiting in the endless, lonely days staring out at the shifting sand. Waiting in the echoes of a place so empty you wonder that it had ever been full. Waiting… but there’s no good in focusing on that, is there? Not when I have a story to finish.

Instantaneous transportation is, or perhaps was if the Tangalese managed to finish my experiments, expensive. Ruinously expensive, so it is only reasonable to assume that the enemy had found something else valuable in what I was doing. An effective method to make wormhole travel not only less expensive and more stable must have been at least interesting to them. My experiments were so promising as to make the effort and cost of warping that strike force onto Wolf Station worthwhile.

There might be some comfort in that. Some small comfort in knowing that, even though I’m most likely going to die here, my work will outlive me. Hell, there’s even some comfort in understanding that I was likely as not one of the things they wanted to capture. My notes and prototype are comprehensive enough, but why wouldn’t they want to take the one responsible for them too?

Hailey, I spit on their name, the traitor whose name should live in infamy for the rest of time. Let those Tangalese monsters in, opened the gates and let the barbarians ransack Wolf Station.

A monster, as I said before, pretending to be human. A real one, not one of the beasts in our childhood closets. They have neither fangs nor claws nor fur nor scales. No excuse in their nature for their crimes. It is all choices. That is what a real monster is, I'm convinced. And that is what age and wisdom teaches you to see, even if only in hindsight.

I remember the moment so clearly. The alarm claxons that none of us ever remembered hearing before, despite the monthly drills. We were so consumed with the thought that we were safe, an irrelevant backwater on a forgotten moon. We never thought the enemy would be so brazen, or so eager to waste resources as to attack us.

Listening stations exist throughout the whole of Kith-rali space. The only distinguishing feature of ours was my experiment. My hope and my dream that one day we would be able to shuck the chains of light's limited speed and connect the galaxy under our banner.

We called it 'the gate' and that was the most creative name we could think of. The power requirements were enormous, even to the mysterious aliens that had built it before crumbling to dust. But I was confident I could make it work.

All of Wolf Station had been built around this gate, using the skeleton of a greater complex that had once existed there. We could only guess that it had been an important site, though we never did come to understand why. Or what its original purpose was.

The old jokes about ritualistic purposes were thrown around in the initial anthropological reports, and the xeno-archeological studies too. Not enough material, no primary sources. All of it lost, as if it had never been. Or could we even recognize them if they were found?

Years of my life put into that enormous circle made of no element or stone we had a name for. It defied all of our measurements besides the most basic analogue tools. It was almost like the thing itself resisted our efforts. Fought against being understood.

Occasionally, I would talk to it. Everyone on the Station knew about my habit, a few joked that I was half-mad already. That I would rot away if they weren't there to force me to sustain myself. Maybe they were right. Maybe my current mental instability is proof that their teasing had a kernel of truth to it. I don't know.

Alarm claxons. Isn't that where I had left off the story? Yes.

We all stood, all of us except the poor saps we had on scopes, in what we called the 'Atrium.' Why exactly we called it that escapes me now, as do so many aspects of who I used to be. But there we stood, all of us looking on as the test slowly spun up. We thought we had enough power to finally attempt a crossing. Turning the damned thing on had been hard enough - especially since we were walking through the unknown, without even the help of knowing exactly what it did - but still we had done it. And now, the final judgement. The culmination of all my years of feverish study. When those fucking claxons blared.

One single moment. That's all we had to process what was happening. The infernal red lights, turning round and round. The constant wail of the pre-recorded siren. Then silence.

Everyone present was frozen in place, a first renaissance painting of fear and disbelief. Then a flurry of motion. People scrambling in barely organized panic before flooding out of the room to their action stations. Perhaps those stations and all the hours of mind-numbing training would have proved effective if only the enemy had not had an inside person. A cuckoo in our nest.

Sadly, I don't know exactly what happened next. All I can recall is furiously trying to terminate the experiment. I knew that the drain on the Station's power would be a detriment if our orbital defenses engaged. That much power drain might even have lost us a conventional battle. I failed, and it hardly mattered because then I heard the screams. Eustace, the marine who had been assigned to guard me, told me to hunker down and sped to the door sealing the bulkhead. His rifle rattled before the door even closed and I knew, knew the bitter taste of betrayal as the ancient writers might have said.

Working like my life depended on it - which it probably did - I hastened through the final steps of the ignition sequence and... an aperture opened.

Listener, I don't really care if you exist or not, I'm far enough removed from you that it hardly matters but, let me tell you that I have no words for the joy I felt at that moment. For a second, for one glorious instant, I forgot about the battle that was engulfing Wolf Station. I forgot about the marines who were laying down their lives. I forgot about my colleagues who might already lie dead, shot in the backs as they fled.

In that moment there was only the glory of knowing that I had been right.

Then I heard the bulkhead scream as the metal slowly failed. Looking over my shoulder from just before the shimmering veil that had fallen once the aperture opened - I don't even remember walking up to my creation - I saw the eyes of Hell. Twin red spots steadily growing until their glow overwhelmed that from my miracle of science.

Around the glow of the cutting lasers, I watched as the durasteel door slowly creased, folding in on itself. It fell in slow motion, and a swarm of enemy soldiers in matte black armour poured through, raising their weapons in unison. Behind them, standing tall and proud with a black band around their upper arm, Haley stood next to who I assumed was the officer.

Raising their hand, they pointed at me and said something that must have been a command, a clutch of soldiers surged forward to take me. Maybe they thought I would be valuable. Maybe they were really after my creation. But I would never let the enemy take me.

With eyes closed, I fell through the shimmering veil. The journey at was at once infinite and over in an instant. A slice of an eternity of freezing heat and searing cold. An epoch that lasted only the flicker of an eyelid and I was here. Where you'll find this recording if, whatever god is listening to me wills it, I will already be gone when you arrive.

It was the sound of the howling wind and biting cold of a desert night that opened my eyes. That and the feel of shifting sand beneath my head. The quickly fading heat of the day in my fingers as grains fell through them when I brought them to my face.

Alive. I could barely imagine the concept then. Even now I'm not convinced that I'm not already dead. I imagined death as a specter on a black horse, or with scythe held high, not a desert. Certainly not the abandoned fort I find myself in now.

Not far across the moonlit sand I could see it, a crumbling wall rising out of the shifting morass of long dead mountains. Salvation, or perhaps a grave. When I arrived, the walk was at once longer and not so long as I thought it would be, I found water and preserved food to feed hundreds for a year. Now there is only me.

But that was not all I found. The third voice was waiting for me, hidden behind doors long rotted away to leave only gaping, dark holes in the buildings they had once guarded. It had been waiting for me for a long time, or perhaps it had been within me my whole life, and only then felt able to emerge.

I don't know. And now I hardly think it matters.

Have you ever wondered if you were going mad? Or perhaps that you had already arrived?

But then, I suppose if I can ask that question, then it’s already been answered, hasn’t it? One of the defining aspects of insanity is the belief that you are sane. I suppose there's only one way to know for sure. And then, well I guess I'll get all my answers then. Won't I?

Survivor audio log ends.

-0-

Salvage notes:

The above is the only uncorrupted file found on the personal log device found upon rediscovery of Legion Fortress 387. No other evidence of human life was uncovered at the site. It is presumed that the person who recorded the above is dead and had been for some time before the rediscovery of this lost fort following the conclusion of the Tangalese War. However, given the uncertain nature of their arrival at and occupation of the fort, we cannot be certain that they did not find a means of escape.

Report ends.