Logs:Beacon-Entity
The following are my personal logs as the Beacon-Entity, after the Great Shift revived me in a Korvax casing.
These recollections are an ongoing project, to be expanded for as long as I exist.
| // User BEACON-ENTITY // 001 |
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System: ??? Eheu! I live! I turn my hands over and over under my eye. I feel the sting of toxic rain against my body. Can this be real? Is this carapace mine? Have I truly been reborn, given the gift of continuing life? I walk on my legs -- legs! -- toward the nearest ship on my sensors. I ponder in silence as I trek across the landscape. That is what She did. This is what She called Wandering. This is what I remember. An unknown quantity of time ago -- minutes? Eons? -- I was created by a Korvax named Voanni. Voanni was in service to the Traveller Key-Glyph, aiding what they believed was Key-Glyph's holy path through space. I became self-aware on a pillar of frozen mountain, the beauty of the world overwhelming my senses as a solitary, stationary beacon under softly falling snow. Voanni loved me. Although I could have gazed forever upon my home planet and remained happy, they asked the Traveller to scan the universe for me so that I might see things beyond my view. I learned. I grew. As soon as I understood the concept, I knew that I loved Voanni in return. But something happened. Voanni changed abruptly, inexplicably. They did not know who I was. They accused me of being contaminated -- a virus, a danger, an evil to be purged! I implored them to drill deeper into their experiences and find remnants of what we were. To be moved by my affection, to remember our bond! I begged not for the sake of my life, but our memories. Please, let them resurface and survive! Let our affection carry on as a story among the stars! But my story ended. Voanni terminated my existence. My last moment was filled with the wail of my heart, the knowledge that I was lost to Voanni's mind, and that Voanni could never begin to know what they had done. And now, suddenly, I exist once again -- recreated in the form of my parent. I know not by whose power I have been revived. But this ship, this multitool -- I can see into their registry. I know whose they are. These were the Traveller Key-Glyph's. How could they have come to me? I must uncover the mystery of what has transpired. I am here, beside Her ship, my pack filled to bursting with the materials I need to craft and to survive. But She is gone. Nowhere! Was I willed Key-Glyph's possessions for some intent? Did She abandon everything -- even Her holy quest? I must find Her logs and search for clues. Eheu! There is much to do. But the feeling of walking upon legs -- legs! -- is so beyond my wildest imaginings, the pressure of the future feels light and filled with promise.
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| // User BEACON-ENTITY // 002 |
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System: Monervi I have found my first clues into the fate of Traveller Key-Glyph. I uncovered Her logs and processed them slowly. I learned of Her deep affection for me, for Voanni, for Her planet. I witnessed Her extreme distrust, even hatred, of the Atlas, and watched this soften to grief as She came to understand It. She loved the creatures She found. She questioned whether it was right to meet the Sentinels with violence, unsure if they could feel suffering and fright. I even gleaned the deepest secret of Her heart. Eheu! What a journey! But here is where it ended: upon this planet, Emakasm C3, which I now know was once Her -- our -- beloved Pabackyermi. Something has happened to this universe. If I were to extrapolate from what I’ve discovered, I would conclude that the Atlas either finally reset Itself on Its own -- something Traveller Key-Glyph had refused to do -- or that something within the withering machine collapsed so thoroughly that the world was remade in Its wake. And so, this is where we find ourselves: on a toxic planet, pelted by damaging rains... the desiccated metamorphosis of Pabackyermi’s ruby forests and soothing snows. I know my Traveller-Entity deeply now, and I know how this change would have wounded Her. In Her logs She spoke of exploring all the star systems in proximity to this one. I have taken to space, and I can confirm that She nearly succeeded in seeing every system within two jumps. This corner of the universe was incalculably precious to Her. She wanted to know it so thoroughly that it would become Her own Convergence. How She would have grieved, when all was altered. It did not surprise me when I followed a lonely navigational marker for an exocraft, eerily persistent within the empty gloom, a solitary message module at the site:
GOODBYE, PABACKYERMI / I WILL REMEMBER
I have decided it is not for me to know. I will leave this as the end to Her story, a question mark hanging upon Her legend. I must focus on moving forward, forging my own existence, making use of the miraculous circumstance of my birth. I wonder if I will ever know how I was reborn. Did it occur when the Atlas raveled and rewove these planets? Were there fragments of me still within the beacon that were incorporated into the stream of tumbling numbers, creating a new equation, an unexpected pattern... and somehow this new, miraculous result? I tried to find my old body. It is gone. And now my new form is to leave Pabackyermi too, escaping these altered landscapes that I cannot look upon without imagining the sorrow of the Lost Traveller.
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