Thrown Away

[Geno]

Z-NET ACCESS 4.0 | S E C U R E | FREEPORT11 version 0598.83915551A Copyright Alex Maccabelli, 832 A.S., Confederacy of Freeports - You are using FREE edition.

cof_client_login.mrpx

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CONFEDERACY OF FREEPORT PUBLIC SUBNET Welcome, User. Quick Access Shortcuts: → Homepage → My Ship → CredFund Homepage → NEW! Homepage Public Data Archive (99+) → NEW! My Contacts (2) → NEW! Public Service Announcements (13) ↓ NEW! Bookmarked Data Files (1) - EXPREP File - ZXV "Blunder" - EXPREP File - NXP-038 - EXPREP File - SA-43N - EXPREP File - ZCV "Naiad" - EXPREP File - ZXV "Comet" - (!) EXPREP File - "ZEV-3301"

cof_console.mrpx

Expedition Logbook "ZE-3301" - Size: 8838421.23 MiB Downloading data onto local file. Please do not sever your connection to the local subnet or turn off your device, this could take a few minutes. downloading: cache_data.mxrp archive downloading: cache_data2.mxrp archive downloading: assorted_data.pkg archive downloading: nlxp43.mxrp archive downloading: decryptor.jrpk archive Compiling databanks... 10% ██ 10% ██ 29% █████ 33% ██████ 33% ██████ 33% ██████ 33% ██████ 33% ██████ 33% ██████ 33% ██████ 35% ██████ 43% ██████ 43% ██████ 43% ██████ 43% ██████ 49% ████████ 49% ████████ 49% ████████ 58% ████████████ 58% ████████████ 67% ███████████████ 89% ██████████████████ 93% ████████████████████ 93% ████████████████████ 99% ██████████████████████ 99% ██████████████████████ 99% ██████████████████████ 99% ██████████████████████ 99% ██████████████████████ Data archive compilation complete. Decrypting... 100% Logbook "ZE-3301" data acquired. Beginning playback data from: entry_01.bxp

[Geno]

entry_01.bxp

Log entry... one. On day one. Nuts, I never got to do this before. This is... in fact, the very first one. My very first time doing all the journaling. Logged forever in this spiffy, charming and old Dunlin rustbucket model’s navcom. Here we go. Ahem. Crew member report, Amelia Monroe Sunderlake, head of logistics, head of boring paperwork, head of requisitions, and the head godmother of our supply stache. If anyone wants anything, I’m supposed to log it down here, and God forbid if I ever forget the password for the locker room. Anyroad, since this is my own personal account of what will occur from today until… well, whenever our charting operations are done, I can very well say whatever the hell I want in this shoddy computer stuffed into this bucket of bolts. Now, for the important stuff. This is the ZE-3301, and… for now, we really haven’t settled on an official name for this old lady. We have however temporarily settled on “Throw-One”, a wordplay on “Three-oh-One”, the ship's official ident code designation. It’s stupid enough that it might just work for everyone. We tried arguing about it last night when we were having a few drinks in Eleven shortly before leaving for the expedition, but we instead mostly ended up talking about ourselves while trying to get to know each other and trying to laugh away the misery of this space station deep in Nomad space. So far, my registry reports the following crew member for this operation. Trevor Morales, assistant to gunnery chief Wensdale. Aged… twenty-two, I think. He’s just a kiddo who can’t distinguish a pipe wrench from a multitool screwdriver. I don't think he ever attended any type of formal education, he's a local Zoner who really wanted to get away from this nightmare, and I can't blame him. On the other hand, I hate to be pragmatic here, but if he doesn’t get his act together, he’ll just wound up as an extra mouth to feed with nothing in return. Gunnery chief Scott F. Wensdale, he’s in his fourties. Bretonian. Former Armed Forces. Has two kids and a wife, but he’s divorced, and he left them all behind for some reason. He's the gruff, strong and serious cut-and-dry type. I couldn’t make out much from him except from his pretty concerning drinking habits. I think I've seen enough people like him in my time to know for sure that we’re not going to become besties. Astrological charting assistant Pamela Rodriguez, she’s about thirty-two, from what I can recall, I think I've misplaced my file on her. She's a cheery, fun loving Cretan who cut ties with her people to pursue a more dignifying line of work as opposed to having to smuggle dangerous alien crap around all day. She’s alright, I think. But with all that’s happened between us and their people… I can't help but feel some form of... resentment towards her. Moving on, our main astrology charter is Doctor Okasa Kagero, fifty-five, from Kyushu. Getting a doctorate in astrology in Kusari is no mean feat, and as a lady, no less. I haven’t had the pleasure yet – I know she’s somewhere in her lab right now. She must’ve done some serious back-breaking studies in her time to get here. Despite her stern demeanor, she seems to get along very well with Pamela, almost like a mom and a daughter working together. It’s kind of cute, but I digress. Pilot Riccardo Treccani, a pilot of… Outcast descent, it seems. A frequent local to Eleven in particular, he's done a lot of jobs around here. He didn’t want to share how old he is, but he seemed friendly enough when he signed up. He vaguely alluded to his criminal past by mentioning a few smuggle runs he did for the people in Erie, so he’s probably sympathetic to us… but we don’t really know why. Oh – and due to his physiology, he has to carry a whole bunch of cardamine cartridges with him. They’re all under lock and key under my surveillance, and strangely enough, he made sure to tell me not to “share it with anyone else”. The guy’s… strange, but charming. But with Pamela on-board, I’m expecting some serious drama to flare up between them. Oh, can’t forget the comms officer: Haley Redford, she’s a twenty-five-year-old Californian, and she seems knows her line of work well enough. She’s quick witted, smart, playful, and she doesn’t know how to keep her mouth shut. I think there's a lot more to her than she lets on, but I'll let the girlie be for now. She doesn't need to be scrutinized just yet. For our security division, (as if we’re ever going to need one) we have Unit P-03L, we nicknamed him “Gap”, or "Gappy", for the way he has this weird big empty hole in the middle of the torso part of his chassis by design. He is a loader unit, repurposed into a sec robot that can pack a punch, as well as the alleged ability to “suplex you if you start to misbehave”. Of course, he’s on two legs, and has two hydraulic arms, and he can walk and everything, and he’s tall and can get pretty mean if you start to be aggressive and out of pocket. I don’t think I have… anything else I could talk about Gappy; he’s just a lanky ol' droid unit with some impressive human social awareness you wouldn’t expect from a machine designated for hauling cargo. I think one could easily mistake him as a human, if it weren’t for his very obviously robotic features, like that blue light he has for an eye. I’m sure he’ll be plenty useful during power outages or ion storms. Paired with him, we have sec officer Joseph Rendell. Libertonian, like yours truly, thirty-seven, and he seems to be a bit of an oddball. I saw him during the boarding; he sported some scary looking skull and flame tattoos around his arms and neck. He held his rifle like a mother holds an infant. He was… probably some kind of convict as some point, I think. But he seemed friendly enough towards me, for some reason. He even brought me a cup of joe when he was heading in here to request a sewing kit, of all things. I can’t say I am going to trust his puppy-loving demeanor right away, but he’s okay in my book. Oh, yeah, can’t forget about the med staff. Owen Larson, twenty-six. Not a doctor. He’s got to be some kind of addict – I searched through his lockbox and found a copious number of syringes, jars that had a strong scent of disinfectant, and some sealed beakers with some weird looking, strangely colored fluids inside. Despite there being a whole dedicated lab for this kind of thing, he’s instead choosing to keep these away from the lab people. Even with his weird facial twitches and messed up hair… he’s apparently competent enough in the field of medicine. Heck, some transport ships that were docked here on Eleven were willing to pay out of the wazoo to have specifically him onboard, but he chose us, despite the lower salary we are offering him. Moving on, along with him, we have a nurse called Art Wagon – I know, funny name. And he’s a funny looking guy, too. Fifty-three, large as a Barge, big burly hands, and he looks like he could probably knock Gappy on his metallic ass if he felt like it – but strangely enough, he doesn’t seem to care about being violent at all, or so he says. The first thing he did upon loading his stuff on the Throw-One (note to self: we should change this name eventually) was opening his canvas on the observatory room, and sketching something with his pencil while looking outside the tempered glass of the observation room. He was some kind of medical assistant in the Liberty Navy as well as some sort of psychologist, but due to some kind of incident, he chose to move out here with us losers to “gain a new perspective on things”. Well, I hope he'll find it out here. Lab director Doctor Bernard Enrich Muller, fifty-three, a pretty stern Rheinlander. He’s the walking, talking definition of “being pedantic to a fault”, and when I was with the Captain during this particular interview, I’m pretty sure I was able to complete five whole rounds of poker on my PDA. Nevertheless, he’s acquainted with biology, xenobiology and psionic studies regarding Nomad interferences and the whole shabang. For someone with a doctorate, he is apparently far more interested in the effect this kind of energy is capable of altering the human mind rather than telling us how to prevent being afflicted by it. He's not here to study stray Nomads, but rather, he's here to study how said Nomads are going to affect us. Lovely. But needed to compile a reasonable and juicy expedition report that's going to give us enough credits to make up for all of this. Lab assistant Johann Schmid, twenty-four, also a Rheinlander. Handpicked by Doctor Muller, he's under his wing to hone his studies, treating this expedition like his own personal study-vacation. He mentioned that Doctor Muller was a friend to his father, and he’s pretty much just here to document the findings our nerds are going to come up with and use them for his own dissertation. He’s here with some acceptable knowledge of hydroponics and botanics. Besides that, he seemed completely clueless socially, not knowing whether to look at my face or the floor to avoid eye contact and he even tripped on his own shoes on the way out. Academics, am I right? Tech lead Rhodney Palmer, thirty-one. This guy looooves music. Wanna know how I know this? One of his personal belongings I have here in his locker is some... strange looking jury-rigged device that has a pretty large, black grooved disk-thing about the size of a pizza kept in the center of it, and some kind of weird pin that scratches the disc, all powered by clean and renewable nuclear energy cells. He gets along pretty well with Veronica, his personal tech assistant, and they both seem to know what they’re doing. He gave me a heads up an hour ago, about how he was going to start setting up some drones for gardening hydroponics, and how we’re not supposed to mind that funky music coming out of the repair bay. Both of them appear to be hard at work even as I’m recording this. Oh, and speaking of whom, Tech assistant Veronica Bernardino, twenty-eight, or so she says. We have no idea where she came from or what she did in life, as this information is privy to the Captain. She was, however, deft enough to swap out her resume file with a blank one at the last second before we could insert her permanently in the crew registry, and right under our noses, too. Something I noticed about her was some kind of yellow artificial hand implant, but I didn’t bother asking anything else. Is she a petty thief? Some kind of secret informant, maybe? Ehh, I have enough on my plate already, maybe when I’m done recounting the more basic information about all of my colleagues, I will have to schedule a chat with her. Hopefully with Joseph and Gappy keeping a close eye on her. Last but not least, we have the man himself, Captain Elijah Glenn Winslow, or just Eli, or Glenn specifically on Wednesdays. He’s thirty-three, from Denver, an idiot to a fault, but he’s got a heart of gold. He already cares about us, despite having met us for less than a cycle. I’ve known Eli since we were in the same flight school classes in Valley Forge ten years ago. I totally flunked it, because I had some stuff going on at the time, but he passed with flying colors, to the surprise of everyone present. He took me flying while he was running stuff on the main lane between Manhattan and Pittsburgh for work. I keep him out of pursuing stupid ideas and I keep track of our supplies, and he gives me stuff to do to distract myself. I think we make a good team together. Alright, that should be just about everyone. So – let me get to the meat and bones of this whole trip's entire purpose. As I mentioned earlier-- "Aaaattention, crew. This is Treccani speaking – I’m… your pilot, by the way. Please hold onto something, for we are entering in range of some pretty strong gravitational distortions. We will be entering shortly in a “Jump Hole”. Things could get shaky. So, put down your drinks, siddown, and get ready to leave Omicron Delta for at least a couple of months." …Well, that’s my cue. I’m going to wrap this up some other time. Sunderlake, out.

[Geno]

entry_02.bxp

Log entry numero dos. Sunderlake speaking, as per usual. You would not believe this. But I was today years old when I found out I can connect to this ship's security subnets through this console and take a peek into the major hallway intersections through the security cameras installed around the corners. Check this out. [ VID_003.bms ] [The playback of the recording shifts into what appears to be a static-spangled grainy footage in vivid saturated colors of a corridor within the exploration vessel. The video showcases an intersection within the ship which points in four different directions. The dim lighting from the feeble ceiling lights exacerbates the state of disrepair of the ship itself; the floors appear somewhat battered and rusted, and the equally unkempt and misshapen steel walls feature exposed colorful circuitry innards from within the ship, likely left open purposefully for maintenance purposes.] [After a few more moments, Sunderlake switched out the video footage over to different hallways and several other rooms as she showcased her brand new security access violations.] [ VID_004.bms ] [ VID_005.bms ] [ VID_006.bms ] [ VID_007mensa.bms ] [The footage moved over to what resembles a large cafeteria. If one was to dine and drink on those steel tables whilst surrounded by hundreds of rusting ship wall panels in different stages of decay, they could even call the establishment 'rustic'. The blurry footage featured two young men sitting by the tables, eating together in relative silence and privacy. They appear to be eating what looks like a simple steak and oven chips meal.] "You said you knew how to cook, Trevor." "Ah, well. I might have lied on my resume... ermm... what... was your name, again?" "It's Johann." "Oh, nice to meet you... erm... Jo-hann?" "Nonono. It's pronounced Yo-han. Like, yo, han." "Ah, I see. Man, your language is so weird. But it sounds really cool!" "Ahaha, oh, believe me, Trevor. Not even we Rheinlanders know how it works half the time..." "...What's wrong?" "I... I don't think I could eat this, Trevor. Are you sure you warmed up the steak well enough in the oven?" "Oven? But I used the microwave... wait, was I supposed to leave it in the oven? Look, I don't know how to pre-heat an oven. How do you even pre-heat an oven?" [The shorter blonde boy looked at the gunner with a stare of mild concern and disappointment.] [Shortly after witnessing the exchange, the appended footage was interrupted.] Well, look at that. They seem to be getting along. It's nice to see these two becoming friends. Oh, right, I guess I'm supposed to talk about what we're doing out here, I think. Well - here we are, in the Omicron Pi system - a desolate backwater in the middle of nowhere. I had some major concerns about this place, since Ricky mentioned there were going to be Nomads around these parts. I asked Eli to cut the new gunner boy some slack, and he agreed. Wensdale can probably handle a bunch of flying squids, provided he has a steady hand and we've got enough hands on deck and in the engine room to get the fork out of there. But I'm putting my trust in him. A few hours ago, we've deployed our first beacon - Beacon Alpha. It sounds really lofty, but it's just a stick with an argon lamp on it and a GPS tracker. It's somewhere in the Hotel-Five quadrant of Pi, we've flown for a while just to get here. But this is actually where the fun begins, because Doctor Okasa and Doctor Muller have both agreed that if we're to retrieve some valuable information out of where we're going, we'll have to go far - like, very, very very far, and slowly, too, so that we don't lose out on valuable H-Fuel. While our cargo capacity can definitely put that of most transports to shame, we still need to be careful with our overall resource consumption - which is why I've been hired in this position. Our goal is to pretty much chart out what lies beyond Sirius. This is usually the job for which unmanned probes were made for, but some eggheads in Eleven insist that there were some planets suitable for organic life, like, far, far away from here. We're not the first to make this leap into the void, and we will definitely not be the last. But it's kind of exciting to leave everything behind - and I mean, everything. Liberty, the Edge Nebula, all the pretty colors of the Sirius cluster becoming smaller in my metaphorical rearview mirror. To this end, Eli and I pooled some creds together to scrounge up some exploration gear, should we ever be insane enough to go for a landfall expedition, which should net us a ton of money if we ever get to it. I'm willing to bet my left leg that some nerds from the Confederacy are salivating at the thought of a detailed report of habitable planets with remarkable alien life forms. In our hold, we have the materials to assemble our own probes, a small shuttle to ferry supplies to and fro the Dunlin, and plenty of repair materials for our scanner satellite dish - this thing cost a fortune, by the way. Finding something that can reliably glance a planet for breathable atmospheres by passing long range carbon spectrometer scans was such a pain in the ass, and Eli and I aren't even sure if we got scammed by the vendor in the first place. But, we could always make some modifications, provided our techie nerds know their deal - I asked if they're both EVA trained, and they said "yep" while nodding, so that's probably a good sign. And hey, we can just send Gappy for outside repairs. He doesn't need to breathe air like the rest of us puny mortals. Oh, yeah. I'm supposed to also note down here that we're down some ration packages due to our daily consumption. The boys in the cafeteria just felt like going for a midnight snack, so I gave them a pass. They're both lanky, so they need to eat to get tall and strong. I gotta say... when I mentioned how... exciting it feels to journal down how leaving behind all the colorful nebulas of Sirius... I wasn't totally honest. With myself, I guess - some scans I received from Haley showed me that there are no nebulas... at all, for... forever. It's like... it's all empty out there, it's just an ocean of stars. It's a little ominous, honestly. I guess today marks the real first day of the expedition. We've planted our flag at this quadrant, and we're slowly trekking our way into parts unknown. However long this is gonna take. Eli must've lied to them all. This is not going to take months at all. It'll take years. I think I need to sleep this off. Sunderlake, out.