Readers, I’ve had what you might call a very narrow escape. Someone has been trying to kill me, and I’ve blundered through the whole thing without so much as a flicker of my usual alertness to danger. Living in orbit for so long has definitely atrophied my cunning and paranoia to the extent that it’s made me vulnerable.
In my previous update, I described a strange phenomenon whereby a hyperspatial portal node had turned up in my hallway, leading to multiple duplicate copies of my base, each one in a different Scottish mountain. Over the next few days, I explored them extensively using a bubble field generator attached to my belt, and I managed to catalogue all the mountains involved and their respective hyperwave resonances. By Thursday I had listed over a hundred, and was getting rather tired of the task, not to mention feeling rather anxious about the responsibility that had descended onto my shoulders. Taking care of the environment is a priority of mine and is one of the conditions of the Galactic Non-Interference Treaty, but although looking after a single mountain was easily within my capabilities, there are obviously limits.
On Thursday night I had an idea, which I don’t know why I hadn’t had before. I could modify my probe, adding a bubble field to it as when I had sent it through the first time, but include a hyperwave tuning API in its firmware so that it could explore everything autonomously and complete the catalogue unattended.
I sent it out five times before realising that I’d forgotten to program it to take GPS surveys and open the door for photographic evidence before returning. That was a little tricky to do, and it took me until Friday morning. On Friday I repeated the five missions to add the full data, and then set it up to run through the remaining frequencies so that I could relax.
On the third mission, it failed to return.
At first, I wasn’t sure how seriously to take this. It could easily be a fault in the drone, or in my programming. I was about to activate my own bubble field and step through to retrieve it when – at long last – my paranoia kicked in. What if the probe had encountered something dangerous?
By Friday evening I had constructed a new device that was heavily armoured, and whose sole purpose was to send a high-bandwidth hyperwave stream to a relay satellite to transmit full sensor data as rapidly as possible before anything could destroy it. Hyperwaves can penetrate all normal matter in the universe except black holes, so I was confident I’d receive some data: I’ve actually used one of these devices in the past to test weapons by placing it inside the blast zone and recording the data for the 100ms or so that it survived due to its protective shields. If a probe of this type could survive for a tenth of a second in a superhot plasma, I was sure I’d get some sort of information from this one.
I got two microseconds.
At this point, I was thanking my lucky stars for the return of my paranoia. Whatever had destroyed the probe, I would have stood no chance against it. I analysed the data carefully, noting the temperature, pressure, and approximate location (which can be deduced based on gravitational lensing). When I found the answer, it explained everything.
The probe had ended up in the heart of the Sun.
I don’t know who is responsible for this horrific piece of trickery, but I’m terrified that I almost fell into their trap. In order to survive the next few weeks I need to become the Space Lord I once was. I had grown too lazy and too contented during my time with Jalaa.
I sincerely hope there will be another update next week. If there isn’t, don’t worry too soon: I might just be busy…
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