Achilles IV

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1:00Hello, I'm Wilkins, stories all the time. Glad you are here. Let's get into it. Attention, this is the crew log of Ensign Colby Jordan, where all designated a system stagnation. Current assignment is to cargo a position vessel, Achilles, room and four, which is undergoing post flight processing and containment procedures in docking port to a station Alvescentory. Information contained in this file has not yet been vetted. Level 1 analysis of file indicates 11 security breaches committed in the creation of this file. Please set your system security at absolute while accessing this data. Remember, your safety and the company's safety are one and the same. Log number 1 August 14th, 2074. I really have no idea how to begin this since I don't normally bother with doing logs in the first place. I always felt like a point in this exercise since the ship AI keeps track of everything and the Jericho Company exacts don't care what we think is long as it doesn't impact our jobs. I had to fight dirty with the Achilles AI just to get

2:00access to the logging program. So I'll just be blunt. They are dead. Everyone else is dead, and the ship doesn't believe it. Impossible, right? I mean, surely the big wicks back on Earth created a perfect system, one that can't go wrong. We're so trusting of our machine captains that the corporate newsletters are always spouting off about the 92% mission success rate. Jericho AI has a thousand eyes and ears can take control of any ship and uses cold and practical logic to get the job done. Why even send humans on missions anymore? Accept us, system technicians, know the bitter truth. The company can't afford to fashion every ship in the fleet with a true AI, so they slap together a bunch of cognitive programs into one fancy package designed to mimic a true artificial intelligence. It does fine with handling ship functions, but it's not an intellect that can think and adapt. That's what cargo ships are sent out with a crew of six humans, and why the captain isn't mechanical, but flesh and blood. It's also why we have implants in our chest that transmit our buyer readings to the ship, because that's the only way the system knows we're alive. That little fact is rather important, because Jericho trusts it's state of

3:02the art tech far more than it trusts it employs. Our rank affects which ship systems we can access without authorization from a higher rank. The captain, of course, has full authorization, but only if the computer allows it. And little army and ensign is at the bottom of the run. I can't even make a log entry without Captain Westinghouse's approval, but if the captain is rendered dead or incapacitated, the highest ranking crew member gets control. We don't make that determination though. The computer does, because even though the system can't determine if we're alive or dead without help, it decides how to dull our control. Basically, we have a chain of command dictated by our implants. I should have control. I don't. Westinghouse and the others are dead. Their implants aren't. The expansion got them, but the computer still thinks they are alive. As a result, I'm locked out of most ship systems because I need Captain authentication to do anything. What does tags are tricky? I managed to put together a diagnostic program that forces the ship computer to go into maintenance mode for 21 minutes and 3 seconds every 24 hours. In that time, while the computer is distracted,

4:04I have the ability to enter the system and whittle away at the security firewalls and encryption. It's been 57 hours since the crew died and this log is my first success. I have to cut it short because I'm almost out of time. I'm going for the communication system next. I'll transmit a distress call in this log and hope someone intersects it in time because the ship is on its way to Upper Centauri station and it cannot be allowed to dock. Repeat, do not allow the ship to dock under any circumstances. Log 2 August 18th, 2074. Free days attempt to send out the signal. Three wasted days. The expansion ate the comms array. I'm a tad demoralized right now, so I'm going to waste today's access time with another log entry. Even if I can't transmit any date off ship, I can at least keep a record of what happened here in case the ship survives, but I don't. Though honestly, it'll be better if the ship doesn't survive either. I'm not ready to go that direction yet. We still have two months before killings for arrives at the station. I have time. I suppose I should talk about the others. Florin, Mads, Kindie, Lars, and Westie House. None of them deserved what happened.

5:09They were all good workers, committed to the unofficial company slogan, the cargo comes first. I won't say we were great friends since I spent more time with a computer than talking to them about their home lives or significant others, but I'd sip a libation pack with any one of them. None of them were incompetent either. They didn't die because one of them got greedy or high and did something stupid. I know Jericho will try to spin events so that they don't have to pay through the nose to reimburse their families, but they deserve all the credits they can get. They had no idea what they were walking into. None of us did. Our age minus 1000, 129 looked like a million other planets in the Galactic Survey database. A burn rock with lots of free minerals to exploit. All we had to do was keep the ship in orbit and sit back while the drones went down and did the work. I didn't study the survey map myself, but Lars had been practically giddy about the place after his analysis. There was a plentiful amount of anomalous material littering the surface. Some of it piled up in mountains as high as 300 meters. We didn't even need to break out the mining drones to collect samples. If the material turned out to be valuable, as the spectrographic report suggested,

6:12we'd had some serious bonuses coming our way. It was an easy job. Too easy. The drones only took four standard days to deliver the sample payload to the Achilles Four. All the drones checked out. No biological contaminants, no barren energy readings, no explosive properties. The cargo wouldn't have made it into the ship had it churped any warning bells. The cargo shuttle went into cargo bay 3 without incident and everybody was there to greet it. Mads and Kindy were the only ones who had to be there since they were running the metallurgical tests. But the other three had decided to sneak a peek as well. I mean, this was a brand new substance. I finding that few ship crews ever come across. Forget our bonuses, this kind of thing could get us into the history books. Now, why will stay there? Well, I was going to be. I received an emergency message from the computer concerning the drone task force in the planet. The drones were my territory and I confess that I get territorial about them, though I don't label them or give them names. We go through too many of them for me to want to get attached. So I diverted to my

7:13workstation on the bridge and viewed the message right as the cargo was getting offloaded back in bay. 3. I admit that I was distracted from the goings on in bay 3 at first because the message had made a complete loss. All five drones assigned to the surface had just died. All energy readings and signals were zeroed out. And it had happened almost simultaneously all of them going dark within a span of 10 seconds, but they had been on mapping missions miles apart from each other. Some kind of natural disaster, a massive storm or earthquake. This planet didn't have weather. And the computer would have warned us about any incoming meteor impact sortictonic shifts. So what got the drones? It was this mystery that occupied my thoughts when I first heard the screens coming from bay. 3. I don't really want to dwell on what happened right now. I'm pretty low already. I'm also almost out of time for today. Let the record show that I know carried. I'm just lucky. If you can call my current state of affairs being lucky. 3. September 1st, 2074. I just noticed the date. It's been a while, hasn't it? I've been using my

8:16access windows to try to reprogram the system to acknowledge me as a sole survivor, but the computer is not going for it. Those damn implants. I suppose it's a good thing that the computer had a directive constituting a regard for life so high that it wouldn't declare a crew member dead unless the implants are so. The only way to kill the directive is to kill the computer, which would kill the ship. And then me, I should probably answer the million credit question you've been dying to ask me. How are the implants still functioning if the crew is dead? Well, by the time you're reading this, there might be an answer. But right now, I have no idea. My best guess is that the expansion took control of the implants somehow and is replicating the vital signs of my crew. The fact that it's sophisticated enough to do to scare the crap out of me. But then I've been scared every minute of every day since the crew died. Right. Time to talk about the expansion. That's my name for it. And it does what it says on the tin. It expands. Thanks to the computer lockout, I only have so many analysis tools at my disposal. It appears to be composed of some kind of microscopic entity akin to a virus or an enabot.

9:17Its main mass resembles earth-based moss, only its colors change from red to blue and back at random intervals. It doesn't move except when it's growing, which appears to be done by breaking down other materials and assimilating it into its structure. When it grows, it grows very quickly. In between my attempts to sway the computer to my side, I've been able to access security footage from the onboard surveillance system. I was able to watch the last two and a half minutes of my crew's existence before the expansion got the cameras and the ship initiated a total lockdown around cargo bay. Three, I've had over a month now to deal with what I saw. I like to think I've processed it and moved on, but. God, I get chills just thinking about it. Up until 1,500 hours, the video depicts pretty standard docking procedures. The cargo shuttle comes and unlatches to the floor. It takes seven minutes for the decontamination and threats gowns to due their business, so nothing visible is going on at all. After 15, 39 hours, the system gives the okay. The bay pressurizes into crew enter the zero gravity zone, using magboots to stick to the floor of the room. While this is going on, an automatic

10:17servo crane is removing the sample canister and locking it down. Mads goes over to it, Kendi is right behind him and the others are hanging back. Everybody's seen real eager to uncork this vintage wine we found, but they were all following established procedure. If I could pin a negative on them, it was with Mads and Kendi who were definitely in a rush to study this new substance. At 1542, Mads opens the secured access point to the cargo canister in order to get a micro sample for study, which is less than a millimeter in diameter. And has a number of filters on it to help control substance spread. That was enough room to allow the stuff to breach containment. It comes out like two jaw bursting from a tube that got squeezed too hard. Mads had his face right up to the access point when it happened. Obviously, Mads was the first to get broken down. His face disappeared into the substance followed by his head, their neck, and then the rest of them. His arms and legs flailed helplessly around like snakes on hot coals, and I suspected he was already quite dead at that point. Kendi's noble instincts got the better of him, and he grabbed one of Mads' arms and tried to pull him free. All he accomplished was to become the second victim as the stuff worked its way

11:20onto Kendi. The poor guy screaming as it took his hands and then took the rest of them. Westy House and the others backed off and ran for the airlock, but the computer was already one step ahead of them, as was the expansion. It was spreading out all over the cargo bay, a living cupboard of hungry eight in cells latching onto and absorbing everything edible, other cargo containers, equipment for our shuttles and drones, lubricant for our machinery, and even a cargo shuttle itself. The computer couldn't allow a thing like that to get any further into the ship, so it trapped the captain and the others in there. I could hear Westy House screaming at the computer to let them out, even used his command with Rhyde to try to get the door open. I think he forgot about company policy involving mission priorities. We know the tales about how entire crews have been lost on these missions, but the ship fly back just fine. It's simple math, right? If you lose the ship, you lose the crew. If you lose the crew, you might save the ship. A ship eating organism is too much of a threat to risk getting lose, and even a captain's authority can change that. It ate the contents of the cargo bay as easily as it took in math and candy. In some places, it would bunch up and send strands of itself

12:21into the other parts of the room, using zero gravity to get about a quicker. In short order, the room assembled a thick spider web in there, strands of red and blue covering all the walls and flooring, with bits of clothing and other material hanging off it in places. For dessert, it took out all four cameras ending the available footage of 1544 iOS. I never did see what happened with the others. It fled to a corner of the room not covered by an operational camera. I think they were still screaming when the last camera fell. They may have still been alive, considering that their implants still claim they are alive. I doubt there will ever be a clear answer to their times of death. Since then, my ability to monitor the expansion is very limited. Surface scans can't determine if it's organic or artificial. Hell, so if the scans are just about useless. It gives me either false readings or no readings. It explains why we got the all clear to take it on board. At least the expansion can't absorb everything, or the ship would have been consumed within ours. It is an appetite for all sorts of materials, but it apparently doesn't like duracrete, sedetic material, composing the walls of the bay and the sample container it was in. It also counts stomach-on-natural

13:25materials like polyester. The computers locked down all three doors into the bay, and a little opening shut off with duracrete shutters. The ship could eject the cargo bay into space, but not with five crew members showing life signs inside, and not without captain authorization. So yeah, not an option for me. Yet, despite the lockdown, it got to the comrade. I don't think it targeted it deliberately. The ship lost one of our backup power nose at the same time. I've had some time to study the damage report, and my guess is that the expansion found a power cable not adequately covered by the containment shutters. It followed the cable all the way to the power node, and before new shutters could be implemented, it got to the comrade. This stuff is on the outside of the ship, and there are a number of ship components it could feed on out there, but it's not spreading. A sternal camera show that the external bits are dormant, maybe even dead. I think it is a problem with complete vacuum, and that might be why it acted on our H-1000, 129. The planet had no atmosphere. It hasn't spread further on the ship since eating the comrade. With any luck,

14:25it won't get any further, but it won't do me any good unless I can gain control of the ship. Speaking of which, I better get back to it, or else all these logs will be for nothing. And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comrade show. Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this your first date? Oh, no, we help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Ah, meet a human, him to a bird. Yeah, the bird looks out of your league anyways. Only pay for what you need at Liberty Mutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing. Victory Lane? Yeah, it's even better with Chamba by my side. Race to ChambaCasino.com. Let's Chamba. No purchase necessary, VTW Group. Voidware prohibited by law, CTNCs. 21 plus sponsored by ChambaCasino. Log 4, September 15th, 2074. It got a cargo bay in. 2, it got to the food. My fault for getting so stupidly complacent.

15:28Can't blame a computer or the company for this one. The expansion had been so quiet that I thought it had gone into a type of stasis, like what it did back on our age minus 1,129. I mean, it had eaten everything it could, right? Well, yesterday it pulled a fast one by suddenly breaching cargo bay. 2, we kept the lion's share of the food stock. I had moved some of it into the ship keel in the reception for my own convenience, so it wasn't a total loss. I still have a month worth of food and normal consumption, so I could probably ration it to last until at least reaching station Alpha Centauri in six weeks. But that's only problem number two. Number one is that it got past containment again, and that is a bit more serious. Thanks to my constant hacking, I managed to gain access to structural scan records. It turns out that the druor creed is an impoverished to the expansion, it just slows down the absorption rate to a crawl. There was a weak section between Bay 3 and Bay. 2, it also means that the other parts of cargo bay could go at any time. And you know, it would be nice if I could talk to this Miss Begotten son of a trash compactor about it and create a new containment line in their adjacent sections to cargo bay.

16:313, but I can't. Still locked out. So I just have to stay out of the vulnerable sections and trust in a computer safeguards. It's all just a stop-get measure. My best calculation is that the expansion will infest the entire ship within five weeks. It'll hit key systems like propulsion, the antimatter power plant, and life support before then. Starving to death is the least of my concerns. A lot. Station authority has issued a cautionary advisement. An accident has occurred in docking port. Two, please avoid use of docking port, two until further notice. Remember your safety and the company's safety are one and the same. Law five. September 16th, 2074. Who comes up with all this bullshit? Which company executive decided that all us human employees were too stupid to be trusted with our own ships? You know, all us dummies with advanced degrees and years of space travel under our belts. But I guess they're no better. They know us learned folk are just right for dysfunction. Can't possibly give us control. That'd be too much. A functional mind, where they're living or mechanical, would look at this situation and say,

17:35hum, we appear to have a biohazard contaminating our ship. Maybe we should stop the ship and purge it. Let's set off the distress beacon or ritual approved to go ahead of us on broadcast for help. Let's do anything besides dummy flying back to our home base with a microorganism that heat practically everything. But I get it now. Functional minds are on company policy. They want obedient minds. They want the ship and their cargo back. The cargo comes first. Company motto and all that. Why else would you have real ship computer automatically head back to base despite knowing it as a biohazard onboard? That's why we're flying back, you know. It's what they call a non-response of command protocol. If the designated captain is deemed alive and alert by his or her implant, then a captain who refuses to give orders is considered compromise with the rest of the crew likely in the same boat. In case of a compromised commander, the ship automatically returns home unless his status changes. It's considered an anti-piracy tactic, making the assumption that a compromised captain is either being coerced by pirates or his aiming to become one. I know, I know. This is all on productive ranting. If this gets read, it's up to some accountant trying

18:40to tabulate to costs or manage a trying to figure out how to spin this in the media. They're all about company policy. This entry is just a destruction because I'm about to try something dangerous. If it works, it should buy me more time. Hopefully enough to get me back to controlled space. If it doesn't, this will be my last entry. And I don't want to end my record without a last word or two. And one more thing, in case I hadn't spelled it out clearly enough, I'm pretty convinced that Jericho leadership is made up of nothing but immoral bastards, but I'm sure we all knew that already. Report. Data breach on September 18th, 2074's cause file corruption. How drive damage-located, unable to enact repairs? The next log entry designated entry number 6 and created on September 17th, 2074 is being classified as 96% retrievable. Continuing to next entry. Log 7 October 2nd, 2074. I did it. I managed to pull off a minor miracle. Let's start with the fact that I knew the ship wouldn't make it back to controlled space if I kept letting the computer call the shots. And I admit that my D-pack stunt didn't help matters. The vacuum

19:45break I created two weeks ago caused a lot of damage to ship systems, both thankfully nothing vital. But the vacuum break is holding. The expansion has infested the entire 12% of the ship it had accessed to you, but it can't get any further, not with the call vacuum of space blocking it. So I tried a different tactic with the computer. I pulled a Captain Kirk, as us techs like to call it. I used some hard logic in the system, managed to convince that the life signs coming from cargo bay three couldn't be human life signs any longer because they had been exposed to hard vacuum for 15 days and be it not moved out of the bays for weeks. Even a system has unfathomably stubborn as a cargo ship computer could figure that one out. So I'm the designated Captain now. That's my minor miracle. Unfortunately my options are limited. I can't get us in the expansion now. It's infected too much of the ship's structure. The expansion also took down the ship's probe launcher and all the probes with it, so I can't rig up a probe to transmit a distress call. Still, at least now I have access to navigation and propulsion, and I can use the more powerful ship scanners on the expansion since the drone scans were unreliable. Best of all, I don't have to

20:48worry about stupid hacking windows anymore. I can do these logs anytime I want, so if you don't mind, it got some new toys to play with. Hopefully I'll have a plan of action the next time I sit down and record another one of these apocalyptic diaries and it'll be nothing but good news from here on out. Station alert. All transit to zone section three has now been prohibited. We are experiencing a significant power fluctuation in that region and the issue is being addressed. All non-essential personnel still in zone section three should remain at their current location until further notice. Remember, it was safety and the company's safety are one and the same. Log 8 of October 4th, 2074, not good news, not at all. My mom was one of those kind people who never saw a doctor. She put her faith in herbal remedies and clean living and positive thinking, and she stuck to her beliefs even when she started getting pains in her chest and her breathing was growing shallower. I used to think it was a sign of insanity, but more and more, I think it was actually a sign of fear. She was afraid of reality intruding into her happiness that having someone show a picture of her chest with a tumour growing in her lungs would forever spoil the

21:49magic in her life. We're placing it with cold dread and the omnipresence of mortality. She died in ignorance of what killed her, a blessing the rest of the family didn't get when the coroner told us about the cancer. This stuff isn't what I would call smart. Not human smart, but it has a few brain cells somewhere in that mess of my good cells. Yes, my coitus and fungus. I have no idea how to define it better than that. I'm nozanoe biologist or even a regular biologist. It might be related to a mushroom, but it's a smart mushroom. I did a full thermal scan of the affected areas since the stuff gives off a lot of heat as it grows. And the scan showed that it's tunneling through the floor, the ceiling, and even the outer hull. It's avoiding vacuum by going inside the struts and plating, digging right up the middle. Most of the supports have a thickness of 5 cm, which doesn't offer much wiggle room, but this stuff is carving out tunnels only 1 cm thick. It's low going, but if slow going works for tortoises, it'll work for this stuff too. Our computer projects, the closest expansion mass will bypass my vacuum break in nine days,

22:49most likely emerging in the engine room. I can depressurize the engine room, but I'll never be able to repressurize it or else the expansion would immediately infest it and take out the engines. Worse, even if it can't get the engines, the stuff will shrug its metaphorical shoulders and tunnel to the next section. I can see where this is going. The expansion will keep coming and the only way I can slow it down is to keep depressurizing more and more of the ship. Eventually, I'll be stuck on the bridge, sleeping on the floor, surrounded by trash and made onways, waiting for the expansion to reach me in my last sanctuary. I'm the captain of a sinking ship. What an honour to be me. The rescue pod remains an option, but every space mariner knows the odds of a successful rescue outside of controlled spaces next to Nail. I can control the navigation system now, so I can tell about our course if I wish. I suppose I could pop the ship next to a quasar so I could have a spectacular light show to watch before the ship disintegrates, but I am not going down with the ship. Do you hear me? Do you hear me? You miserable corporate shit. I am not dying for you or this company. I'm riding this ship out of the dand until I find a good place to get off. I'll send it straight into Alpha Centauri itself and melt the ship into

23:52slag if it means destroying the expansion, but I am living through this. So says I, the captain of a killi's room and four, and so it shall be done. Log 9, October 18th, 2074. I couldn't help but re-read my last entry. I can't tell if I'm getting loony or just down right scary. Considering I haven't talked to another sentient soul in weeks, I don't think I can be blamed for going a little nuts. The ship computer can't hold a decent conversation and these logs are just me talking to myself. I guess it's true what they say about solitary confinement. It's the best punishment out there. Though it still pales to the type of torture where you're trapped in a prison cell with a predator that's doing everything I can to get to you. At least the astrophysics classes I took in training are paying off. The computer and I came up with an alternate course that should share four days off this trip. That means I have five days before we enter controlled space. That puts me inside the range of the quantum beacons, which will pick up the low-powered distress signal from the rescue part. Here to Kaya, I think I might live through this. It's going to be tight though. Aftership is already depressurised. I have an evax suit available

24:55to get through the vacuum, but breathing isn't my biggest problem. The stuff is digging through the outer hole as well, and my rescue part is right in its path. Best estimate I can come up with is that the rescue part will be consumed right around the point I reach controlled space. I can't get more precise than that. Whichever lifeformments this race takes the hole in Gelada. Space Mariners like to claim we're part of an ancient tradition that goes back centuries to the times of wooden ships travelling Earth's oceans, spending months or even years away from their homeland in such a faint fortune or just plain survival. I've heard lots of tales over the years of sailors meeting all manner of disasters from freak storms to hidden shoals to belligerent pirates. It tells that I always stuck out in my mind I want the dramatic ones, but the story is about slow death. A ship that wandered into a Bekomzo and with a wind refuse to blow for days or even weeks the crew depleting their stores and their water to come into starvation, dehydration and infighting. All they can track to nasty disease is spreads all through their ranks, the men dying to an enemy they can't fight or flee from. What was it like to be stuck inside a death trap like that, praying for a strong wind, hoping for rescue, wanting for a piece of dry land to escape to? I really hate those stores now. Log 10 October 21st, 2074.

26:02Twelve ires before I reach controlled space. Twelve lovely ires. I mean, what's 12 ires more in the scheme of things? I've been stuck on the ship for over 3,600 ires now. Twelve ires is easy peasy. I'm just really bored. Also really freaked out. And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show. Hey everyone, check out this guy in his bird. What is this your first date? Oh no, we help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Ah! Meet a human, him to a bird. Yeah, the bird looks out of your league anyways. Only pay for what you need at Liberty Mutual.com. Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Hello, it is Ryan and we could all use an extra bright spot in our day, couldn't we? Just to make up for things like sitting in traffic, doing the dishes, counting your steps, you know, all the mundane stuff. That is why I'm such a big fan of Chamba Casino.

27:03Chamba Casino has all your favorite social casino style games that you can play for free anytime anywhere with daily bonuses. So sign up now at chamba casino.com. That's chamba casino.com. That possible, being bored and freaked out at the same time. Or as my mood just taking turns, going from one to the other and I can't tell anymore. I've quarantined myself to the bridge for a few days now and my leisure options are limited. The company has a real problem with people using bridge hardware for entertainment purposes and while I'm attacking to my own stash of videos, I might very well jeopardize and key systems in a process. So, I've been doing a lot of reading, mostly status reports and training simulations and other fun things like that. I also decided to look over the recorded orbital scans of RH-1000, 120, not because I was looking for a clue or a piphany concern in expansion, but because again, I'm really bored. You know what I found? A whole lot of mountains. The thing is, while they are literally everywhere on the surface, there is a patch into them.

28:06The biggest mountains are closer together, in some cases lined up symmetrically. The 3D imaging picture shows some of these clusters going on for miles and miles, and the more I looked at them, the more they resembled the outlines of sit-scapes, with the tallest ones substituting for skyscrapers, and the numerous smaller mountains stepping in for apartment buildings and houses. It got me thinking. What if those mountains used to be buildings? Maybe this isn't a fanciful notion created by a man both on board or time and with too much time on his hands. I have to think that this planet wasn't always a wasteland. It occupies a gold aloxone and has the right planetary spin. Corravity is comparable to Earth, it just lacks an atmosphere, and that is a big problem. Then again, maybe it did have an atmosphere once. Maybe the expansion came to RH-1120 or was created by an intelligent species that once lived there, and it did what it does well. It ate everything it could, reducing a fellow sentient species into nothing but mountains of organic refuse. Maybe it destroyed the atmosphere as well, or maybe the species destroyed the atmosphere in order to stop it from going any further. Can't prove any of it, but it makes for a pretty depressing tale. It's also a good argument for a wider ship needs to fly

29:11into a sun. Good thing I pre-programmed the flight computer to do so once I'm off the ship. I just have to send a short brain signal from the pod and voila, the Achilles forward becomes part of the grid beyond. I'd say I'll be sad about it, but I kind of hate this ship now. 12 hours to go, like I said. Easy peasy. Log 10 atendum. I can't even. I'm not in the right frame of mind to do a log, but a record has to be kept. I have to find a way to get this out, find a way to transmit this. It's all I have left now. Others must know what happened here. Others besides Jericho. The pod is gone. I know, not because the expansion ate it. That would be unfair, but it wouldn't make sense. Self-replicating spoil like nanostructures must do what they must. No, the pod is gone because I decided to send an navigation system my course correction while I was still on the bridge. I didn't want to risk the post-short range transmitter not being up for the task. I didn't think it would matter when I did it since the star I picked for the jaw. Kiliuminus 43 was well inside controlled space and wouldn't defeat my timeline.

30:13Good thing I thought ahead, I guess. As soon as I executed the course correction, I was immediately locked out of the navigational system. At the same time, there was a rupture at the pod-based compartment. Damage control showed a localized hole breach limited to the rescue pod itself. Somehow the pod's internal power cells went into overload. That can't happen unless the cooling system is disabled. Is gone. My control of the ship is gone. Most of my captain authority is gone. In terms of access, I'm locked up of anything important. Yep, turned out there was another order in play. After I cried my eyes out over the loss of the pod, I went back through the status logs going back to when this whole horror showed started two months ago, hoping to find out why this had happened. I found what I was looking for. One day before the calmeray got eaten, Kiliuminus 4 received a communication from Jericho, systemized only, meaning that no crew member onboard had access to it. The message wasn't in the log, but thanks to my deep hack, I could get the computer to cough it up, and I'm not ashamed to say that I cried my eyes out again after reading it. The ship computer transmitted the biohazard warning and what preliminary data it had on the

31:16expansion to Jericho at Cortis, which is standard procedure in these kinds of situations. What isn't standard is the ship received the culprit order to maintain a course for Alpha Centauri station. The ship could alter the course as long as it arrived at station within three months. The external communications can only go through corporate channels. Any attempt to destroy the ship by the captain, like I had just done, would result in command lockout. At the same time, the ship computer would ensure the crew didn't attempt to flee the ship, so all shuttles than pods would have mysterious problems or as if we tried to use them, such as cooling systems of abruptly breaking. Wouldn't Wanda's warning the authorities right? Jericho knows what they have aboard the ship and they want to bring it home. The cargo comes first, the crew comes last. I have no more words for you, my corporate overlords. Words no longer do justice to what you've done. I can't even bother to. I can't even. Log 11 October 24th, 2074. It's taken me a few days to get my shit together. I can't say that my shit is in fact together. I think I'm way past pulling myself into a state resembling an actual human being,

32:18but I got something. I got me a plan. It's a bad plan and it's a fatal plan, but that's the only kind of plan I have left to use. I'm dead. I already feel dead. Like I'm a ghost wandering an empty ship. My cop's decomposing somewhere out of sight or floating out in space. Or just another part of that creeping mass consuming the ship. There's two days left in my trip, but there's no salvation at my destination. Jericho is waiting for the ship to dock, no doubt itching to study, test, and dies out the expansion. They can probably still save me, but they won't. I'm too much of a liability now. I have all the incriminating evidence needed to bring them up on criminal charges. They'll either let the expansion finish me off, or they might help my demise alone by initiating an accident. They'll alter or poach some records, and that will be that. One more loss for added to the memorial wall back on Earth. They don't know what they're dealing with. They only have early scanning data. They'll let this thing on to the station and it'll run wild. Office and tourist station has over 10,000 souls aboard and cargo ship travel from the station

33:20to Earth every day. No matter how thoroughly Jericho screwed me over, I can't let all those people die. I can't risk the expansion getting to Earth. So, my fatal plan. Well, since I can't deliberately fly a ship into a star, I'll settle for doing it accidentally. I can do a D-pack again, only this time I'll permanently take out the ship computer. That'll cause the engines to shut down as an automatic safety precaution. The trick is when to do the shutdown, but I figured that out as well. If a time it right the ship will do a gravity slingshot pass in Torrey Room and for a small-ghost giant, which will send me right at the start delft. Since I can't use the ship computer to help guide me this time, I have to use my own calculations. This could go very badly. I don't want to sling the ship into a planet if I can help it, or out in a deep space where ship might eventually be recovered, but it's the best option for my list of fatal plans. If I succeed, then this lug dies with me, and Jericho will probably skate by without the authorities ever catching wind of the ship they were pulling. But hey, I'll go out saving lives. Definitely worse fates than that. One way or another, this is my last entry.

34:21I won't waste my time thinking of fame's last worries, but I will say this, my crew deserved better. I deserve better. And Jericho deserves a whole hell of a lot more than what they're going to get. Station security raised a level omega. Biohazard safeguards are now in effect. Please state your current location and evacuation team will arrive within two irels. Remember, your safety in the company's safety are one and the same. Attention. Hidden data newly discovered. A known log entry now available. Release of log entry appears to coincide with signal boost originating from Achilles IV. Calls of transmission are known. Log 12. Data known. Hello there, my corporate overlords. If you're reading this entry, a few things will have transpired. For starters, I'm dead. I won't know how happened, but I'll be dead nonetheless. I hope it was fairly painless. Next, this ship is still in one piece. You might think that means my plan was a failure and that would be a fair assessment of things considering what data you have available. Except that was my plan. Not the real one. I did try to shut down the

35:24computer, but only so that the system would log my attempt. Ship computers have so many firewalls underundant hard drives that it's almost impossible to disable it through hacking. I did it so that you wouldn't look too hard at my actual hacking effort. What I did was rig up a new transmitter. The only one I still had available was the one still attached to the wreckage of the rescue pod. I had to use my evax suit to travel through a number of depressurized compartments, and it wasn't much fun. I kept expecting the expansion to burst out of the walls and absorbed me at any time, but that didn't happen. I rigged the pod's transmitter to run off the ship's power supply as well as connected to my personal digital device. That way the ship computer doesn't even know it exists. I've downloaded the logs into my personal device, and I've hidden the device somewhere it won't be found too quickly, but not before I set it to record my buyer readings for my implant. I added the condition that if my implant were to ever go dark, the device will automatically transmit two signals. One will be to send the logs through the pod's short range array. It'll only work for one good burst, but every communication array within 2,000 miles of the ship will pick up the data burst. The second signal will be to the Eccalee's Roman 4 itself. It will activate

36:29the program I put in the life support system, the one that will pressurize every compartment on the ship. I've crunched some numbers and realized that the ship's hull is in a very tenuous state from all the expansions tunneling. We're turning the air to most of the ship would be like to run a lit match into a pool of gasoline. The expansion will surge into all those compartments, causing hull breaches everywhere. It could even rip the ship apart. I admit it's a plan with a number of serious risks. What if my personal device runs out of power first or gets smashed? What if the expansion eats me and duplicates my implant readings? What if the pod's transmitter proves too damaged to do the job? Yep, it's a desperate plan, but then I'm a desperate person. I realized that even if I could destroy the ship, I wouldn't stop Jericho. The company would just send a new ship to our age-minus-1,129. I have to expose the company and expose the expansion, and nothing get people's attention like a dime mariners last love coupled with the public destruction of a cargo vessel in range of every able-sensor package. Truth be told, the one thing I'm really afraid of is that the company's retrieval team will bring the ship directly into one of the station's docking ports. If the ship comes apart inside a docking

37:33port, there'll be no way to stop it from infesting the station. But you guys wouldn't be that arrogant, right? There are protocols for this kind of thing. I mean, unless you're too busy trying to hide the ship to care about small matters like biohazard containment. I suppose no matter what happens, your corporate guys are going to be real cross with me. No death benefits for my mom, no bonus for my hard work, which I think is a real crappy thing to do to a loyal employee like me. After all, I followed the corporate mantra. I delivered to you what you wanted. In the end, the cargo came first. And that is the end. Thank you for listening, and I will see you in the next one. And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.

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