PERSONAL LOG - UNSENT DRAFT\ I haven’t left the Maschinenpistole since the incident. The deckhands think I’m running emergency diagnostics. They don’t look me in the eye. I’m not sure if that’s because they know — or because they can hear it too.
Every system is nominal. No faults. No errors. Only the low whisper under the hull. It’s louder now. Less like static, more like speech. But I can’t isolate the frequency. I can’t prove it’s external — or that it isn’t.
Yesterday I thought I heard Elsner over internal comms. He was telling me I’d done well. That the Military pilots were already dead before I fired. That the machine only showed me what was necessary. I tried to respond. My voice came out in pieces. Like my throat was full of glass.
The recording doesn’t exist. I checked.
But I remember his voice. I remember the tone. The approval.
I haven’t slept in… I don’t know the interval. When I close my eyes, the cockpit becomes something else. A corridor lined with repeating doors. Each time I open one, there’s a shape inside. The shape looks like me. But the eyes are wrong. Too deepbright.
\
The last cycle — maybe six hours ago — the Maschinenpistole began a systems check without input. I watched the readouts flash: READY, ALIGNMENT COMPLETE, PRIORITY ACQUISITION.
When I tried to shut it down, the canopy locked. The restraints slammed tight across my chest and wrists. I felt the machine’s core spin up — a vibration that climbed my spine like a live wire.
I tried to override the clamps. My hands wouldn’t respond. My vision tunneled. My heartbeat spiked — 142, then 160. I tried to scream, but my throat closed. It felt like something had reached inside my ribcage and was pulling my lungs apart. My muscles seized so hard my teeth cracked together.
For a moment, I was sure I was dying.
Then the voice returned. Not Elsner. Not anyone I knew. Something deeper. Older.
“You are crossing.”
The cockpit exploded in a white glare so bright it felt like my retinas were peeling away. My vision collapsed into whorls of geometry. Every nerve seared—raw lightning crackling down to the marrow. My mouth tore open in a soundless scream.
Something was inside my skull—pushing. Splitting my thoughts into ragged halves. One part still begging it to stop. The other part—opening.
I tried to fight. My arms convulsed against the restraints, shoulders grinding against the harness until I thought the bones would shatter. My lungs dragged ragged air in short, choked gasps. My heart pounded so fast it blurred into a single vibration, hammering against the straps that pinned me in place.
In that moment, I felt it—like a hand closing around the base of my spine. An intelligence sliding up through the circuits and into me, its voice threading through every impulse:
“Yield.”
I clamped my teeth shut until blood filled my mouth. But I could feel it sifting through everything—my memories, my fear, the last fragile shreds of my resistance. It tasted every thought like it belonged to it.
When the white faded, I was alone again—if you could call it that. My throat was raw, scoured as if I’d been screaming for hours. My arms were laced in purple bruises where the machine had held me down.
The logs showed a partial broadcast. Five minutes of dead carrier signal—and then a single line repeated forty times, etched into the data buffers like a brand:
“You are ready.”
No damage reports. No confirmed contacts. No witnesses.
Just me, strapped into a cockpit that no longer felt like it belonged to me—drenched in cold sweat, sucking air like an animal dragged half-dead from the slaughterhouse.
I should file this. I should tell command. But every time I try to compile the record, the words blur. They splinter into nonsense—like invisible hands are picking them apart before they ever reach the screen.
PRIVATE OBSERVATION\
The reflection doesn’t match anymore.
When I move, it hesitates. When I breathe, it watches. When I try to speak, the mouth in the glass never opens.
I tell myself this is stress. That it’s exhaustion. That it’s just a neurological bleed—
—but in the marrow of my bones, I know:
This is not the end of something.
It’s the beginning.
I am not afraid.
I am already lost...
Log continues → ENTRY 006: "The Crossing" pending reauthorization.
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SENSORIAL RECORD - NONSTANDARD ACCESS