date written: March 5th, 2023. This is very messy and currently in the process of a re-write. you probably shouldnt read it unless you are curious to the rough idea of where this is going. as it currently stands this is a subpar draft more than anything else.
The lush, indulgently green valley was bathed in a radiant light. Different shades and hues of that deep familiar green spilled out from every hill, cliff, and mountain. Bare rock only giving way to contrast the wild overgrowth, granite fighting vines and vines fighting granite, each just as driven to show itself upon the world. He stood in a clearing, wearing only a set of trousers. The blades of grass rose to his knees, and wrapped themselves around his ankles in the cool, refreshing gale. Then, as easily as they entangled, their grip was broken, as he began his stride. Trees several hundred meters tall soon encompassed him, each impossibly unique, but passing so quickly that they all soon became indistinguishable from the last. He stopped his stride. The trees still sailed past him, the entire forest and valley moving all on its own. Fast. Moving faster and faster by the second until the hues of green passed his vision as streaks and the shrubs and branches of the forest floor dissapeared from perce-
BEEP BEBEEEP BEEP BEBEEP BEEP BEPEEP
In an instant, the wild green was replaced with flashing teal.
6:00AM
*:**AM
6:00AM
*:**AM
6:00AM
*:**AM
6:00AM
*:**AM
6:00AM
A cosmos shattering groan echoed against the station walls. Surely, even wavographers back in the Milky Way must be confused at what just shook their receivers. A groggy human man rose from the bed. By his looks, he must have been in his late 20's. While his build was a fit and youthful one, his eyes and mouth wore an exhausted, bitter expression. An expression not at all bound to only his morning routine. As his bare feet hit the cold metal floor, the lights of his station lit up. A clinical white glow.
"GOOD. MORNING. \ammonia\ WATCHER."
The robotic voice rang from the speakers of his metal box.
"Can't turn on my own lights... can't even wake up on my own..."
He pulled on a t-shirt, and a set of plain grey polyester sweatpants.
"THE TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE IS: NEGATIVE. FORTY, ONE. CELSIUS."
"God how do I shut this thing up..."
"THE DATE IS: THURSDAY. JUNE 26TH. 2793"
"Is a little peace and quiet too much to ask for??"
"DAYS SINCE LAST |solar flare|: NINETEEN."
"I guess so..."
"DAYS SINCE LAST |catastrophic reaction|: SIX. HUNDRED. NINETY. TWO"
"And that dream..."
"God... god I wish..."
"Why's it gotta taunt me like that, though..."
The man continued to kvetch and complain to himself, making his way to his desk and throwing himself into the chair. Automatically, a stain marked mug began to fill up with coffee. Plastic packaged donuts falling in tandem from an adjacent chute.
A spartan warrior of the old world would have felt the space a bit too sparse. A four walled room, with smoothed corners. A bed, a desk, a terminal. chests of storage that went unused. A bathroom, a sink. laundry machine. An airlock stood in the middle of one of the walls, leading outside. A supply cache was in the ceiling of the room, distributing vittles at a command. All in dull, featureless brushed metal.
The man sipped his coffee and gazed tiredly at his surroundings, lazily rotating on his swivel chair. He thought for a few minutes about where a dwelling like this must have been constructed. Surely, hundreds of light years away on a factory system somewhere. Mass produced by the thousands, and dragged on to cargo ships to be delivered to hungry trillion dollar clients. Distributed throughout hundreds of systems, a completely uniform and identical structure made to sustain life efficiently and clinically. For people just like him, to sit in and do their jobs, in whatever corner of the galaxy where work was found. Each one, living and operating as uniformly as the other. Using the laundry machine just as the next one, taking a shower with the same kind of shower knob as the next, drinking coffee in the same way as the next. Only physicality separated their shared identicalness.
Could someone, by coincidence, have pressed the coffee button, in this same model of space dwelling, at the same exact time as he did? Surely, someone must have. Out of the thousands, hundreds of thousands of dwellings utterly the same as this one, someone must have pressed their coffee button at the same time as him. Especially at the near of 6AM universal time on a standard working day. Maybe even someone in the same corner of the galaxy. Maybe even someone within a parsec or two of him!
And yet, he would never know. This hypothetical doppelganger may as well not even exist. As much as he might as well not exist to a hypothetical doppelganger. Even if they are thinking the same question, at the same moment.
"Alice. windows up"
"WINDOW COVERINGS RETRACTED."
He swiveled in his chair, and took a bite of donut, as the metal shielding retracted.
The ecology of Falsador-5 unveiled itself to him, as it had done every morning since his arrival. He hadn't been to many systems, but the Falsador system certainly was the weirdest. Dark black ground was interwoven with large, sprawling crisscrossed veins that glew a brilliant pink magenta all times of the day. The tendrils rose up into the air in some places, 5 to 10 meters high and as thick as oak trunks. They were less trees, more like a bacterial colony that broke through the bounds of vertical growth. The minor tendrils a-tip these structures would arc in smooth sine and cosine waves, reaching skywards. And each one remained uniformly, and deeply, bioluminescent. The same color and hue as the tendrils beneath it. Unchanging.
The man sipped his coffee. Staring at the landscape. This was one tower of Thirty-six. They were peppered across half of this dwarf moon. Some farther away. Some closer. Each was the same construction as this one. And each one had basically the same view.
He tried to enjoy it as best he could.
"!!!! \ammonia\ WATCHER !!!!"
"YOUR. REPORT IS DUE. AT. |7:00AM|"
"IT IS: SIX. FIFTY. EIGHT."
"oh shit, oh shit..."
Hurriedly, he put down his breakfast, and set upon his terminal. Within a few seconds and a few clicks, he sent off a report. And that was that.
He took a moment. Before serving a chuckle to himself. Served at his behavior.
"and if I didn't send it off, eh? So what?"
"What are ya gonna do to me, ey?"
He argued to no one in particular.
"[oh oh, uhhh, s-sir, due to your poor performance you are being relieved of your duty as employee of the Tullimore Corporation, please collect your belongings and-]"
"and what! huh? Send me back to Kepler ey? fuckin PLEASE"
He seemed to be doing well.
"have fun paying my travel costs too, ASSHOOOOOLES"
"how else ya gonna get me off this rock, ah???"
The imaginary representatives of Tullimore Corp certainly stood no chance against this rhetorician. His arguments were impenetrable.
"or, heck, come down here yaselves!"
"you thought you could just cut your corners and send me off without a reciever ey? you GOTTA come down here and TELL me I'm fired! To mah FACE!"
"heh..."
"ya... ya, that's what I would tell em..."
"I'd put em all on crutches, too..."
Satisfied with this victory, he feasted on his processed breakfast, as well as taking to the rest of his morning routine. After an hour more, he was freshly showered, and back at his chair.
"wait.."
"wait what if they really are en-route to fire me?"
The fallout of his victory seemed to be settling.
"I wouldn't know, would I?"
"They only let me send data, not receive it"
"because its too expensive..."
"..."
"fuck"
"I do need these credits..."
Sighing, and accepting the consequences of this battle, he absentmindedly swiveled around in his chair for a bit. Before finally acquiescing, and dawning his walksuit. He did a final check, making sure everything was in order for the walk. But as he was about to grab his helmet and begin to leave,
something caught his eye.
He went back to his desk. The Journameter he brought on his first touchdown was on top, gathering dust. In the two months of planetside duty, it hadn't moved an inch. He had always kept forgetting to bring it with him on patrols, even after dozens of passes. He really thought to himself "ya, this'll be perfect! A year of isolated firewatch, it'll be nothing but time. I'll be able to write all I want!" But instead, he spent the free time in his 8 weeks eating freeze dried pizza and watching whatever entertainment data was loaded on the terminal systems.
Today though, something struck him.
And well suited, he took a seat, starting up the old tech.
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KEPTECH-VERS1.0904
JOURNAMETERTM PERSONAL DUAL MODE RECORDING DEVICE
43KB/15.99EB
2793_0626_0855
Thursday, June 26th, 2793
Well, atleast it's still operational. Jeez, 16 exabytes? Why even include that much storage? I guess its cheaper to just use whats already lying around than custom order something that actually makes sense.
Whatever. My name is Jay Karetny. Firewatcher for the Falsador system. Nearside of the Andromeda, closest to the Milky Way if ya wanna come find me. I'll be heading out of tower 9 soon enough to start my shift, bound to the West. Should take the whole day to get to the other tower. Total time on Falsador-5: two months.
Hmm. I've been out of the loop for so long, I don’t even know what to write about. I guess, what I'm doing? As a start?
Well, I'm SUPPOSED to be on firewatch. And I'll still call myself a firewatcher, because I think that's way cooler than 'ammonia' watcher. But basically, someone fucked up. Surprise surprise, eh? I signed up for extraterrestrial firewatch, maybe see to some lumber site off on a converted planet. Nice blue oxygenated skies, lovely greenery. I figured it would be just like Kepler. I actually had a dream about it again, last night. There aren't a lot of wilds there, not anymore, anyhow. It's all too developed, Pricey as well. Kinda the whole reason I'm doing this in the first place...
Anyway, whatever wordcloud algorithm Tullimore was using to find me a worksite spit me out onto this rock instead. 500 parsecs away from the nearest settlement. Atmosphere toxic as all hell. Coated in this, weird, pink, rubber, stuff. God, I remember my eyes going wide as saucers staring out the ship window, slowly dawning on me: oh. THIS is where I'm going.
I TRIED bringing it up with my rep on the transport ship's phone, but apparently it's more cost effective to let the bug keep going instead of hiring a software engineer to patch it. I asked, How much more efficient?
0.0048% more efficient.
ya.
After a few minutes of awkward silence, he said instead of looking for fires, I would be looking for ammonia instead. I asked why.
"The Falsador moons are known for their... unexplainable bioluminescence, un...re-searched biology, and the deposits of ammonia that pool at the surface in small lakes. It is also found in large concentration in the atmo-"
I could tell just from his voice that he was reading the Wikipedia page.
"so uh, look out for them, mark em, and we'll come back in a year to collect it all. bye"
And that was that.
Something tells me they never even had the intention of sending me to a forest planet.
I mean, I've HEARD horror stories about the utterly deranged goings on that these kindsa corps do on the daily, but I never in my LIFE thought I would be on the receiving end of it.
Dumb of me, I guess.
Man. what the hell even is 0.0048% more efficient??? Well not like I could have backed out of it.... Couldn't I have, though? If I never got off the transport, like, what the hell could the pilot have even done? Force me off? I don't think he'd be getting paid enough to do that. But at any rate, I just HAD to go and walk off like a good little boy. Figure maybe it won't be so bad. Maybe it'll be over before I knew it.
I took it for granted to have breathable air. Fresh food. Hell, to even have receiver tech on this rock. Like, surely, I thought, and I REMEMBER, because I was looking around for nearly half a day in the terminal menu. S U R E L Y, they wouldn't cut that out just to save a few bucks, right? Surely something as comically standard as receiver capabilities wouldn't be just, refused? Right? Surely something as fundamental as being able to talk to other people wouldn't just be sectioned off as a pie-in-the-sky luxury, right?? That would be soooo. SO. stupid.
Well. Welcome to stupid town. Population: every exec at Tullimore. And me, apparently.
Alright, enough blah blah. I gotta get goin.
-jay
===============================================================
With that, Jay took a sigh, donned his helmet, and packed in his equipment. A holomap, some provisions, an emergency kit, and his Journameter. An airlock cycle and a ladder climb later, he was on the ground. Outside.
The canopy of magenta tendrils soon hung over Jay's head, creating a delicate web that stood against the deep, foreboding blackness of space above. He trotted along, silently. Disinterestedly looking down at his map, then his surroundings, then at his map again. Sometimes the canopy would give way to complete darkness, distant stars interspected across the sky. But before long it would resume once again. Everything bathing Jay and his surroundings in a dull, pink glow.
After a few hours of walking, Jay came to a fairly wide clearing. He sighed. Exhausted. Defeated. Gazing at the expansive, empty indentation in the ground.
He soldiered on.
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KEPTECH-VERS1.0904
JOURNAMETERTM PERSONAL DUAL MODE RECORDING DEVICE
55KB/15.99EB
2793_0626_1321
*SYNCING WITH GENERAL LABOR PROTECTIVE SUIT #K398*
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*SYNC COMPLETE*
*VOICE. DETECTED. BEGIN AUDIO RECORDING.*
Well, how bout that? The voice record still works too. Phenomenal, being an old model and all. And it even syncs to the suit! Which is, well, surprising. Did you know this suit comes with comms? Microphone and all. Almost as if it was made to talk to people or something... TULLIMORE.
Anyway, another bunk patch. I keep expecting this site to one day spring full of ammonia so I can mark it, but nothin. I'm walkin and talkin right now. The ground on this rock is so soft, you couldn't imagine, even if I told you. And I will. It's like I'm walking on sponges, but still real dense. Like it won't rip or nothin, even with a thousand pounds. What is this stuff? Nothing we know of, that's for sure.
I remember being so bored that I looked up what I could from the local databanks. It really wasn't much. All they know is that it isn't soil. I coulda told you that. And this glowing crap, man. It is SMOOTH. Like, GLASS smooth. It's freaky. How can something naturally form like this? A few weeks ago I tried cutting off a piece of it, just to see if there’s anything deeper, if its like, just a skin or something. The knife glided through. And inside? Nothing. Completely the same as the outside! The entire thing is just this consistent, rubber jelly mass. Smooth glass jelly. The piece I cut off was weighty, dense, like it was full of water or something. And its everywhere...
Y'know sometimes, sometimes, there wont be any trunk at all. And there will just be, dozens of half spheres, two or three meters wide. Stumps, I guess. Or, early growths? They just sit on the surface, all of em phased in with eachother at the edges. You can pull up an edge of one and it'll lift up like a rug. Fuckin' nutty. The databanks say that this stuff *is* life, but literally not a single person knows how it works. I guess its just not that important to study.
Anyway, I'm almost halfway to tower 10. Maybe I can catch a glance of some new ammonia sources from there.
...
.........
......................
...........
....
*VOICE DETECTED. RESUMING RECORDING*
Hi, I'm back. its been about an hour. So there's this, coral, I guess. It's all webbed and stuff, basically like bushes here. Dark blue. Now this stuff is actually attached to the ground, you can give it a tug and it'll stay put.
Anyway, thought I saw something. And guess what? I did! A slug, or something like that. Weird too, I mean no surprise there. Its dark blue, like the coral, must be why I haven't been able to see em yet. It's mouth splits into four parts, looks like an eyeball at the end of each one. Opening in the middle.
The databanks don't make any mention of fauna here. So, I guess that means I get to name it, right? Heh.. Jaylien...
...........
..................................
............
.....
*VOICE DETECTED. RESUMING RECORDING*
Still hiking, I'm not far from the tower now. Still nothing to mark. Big shocker there. Hey, I never told you about the sun in this place, did I?
well, there isn't one.
It's the size of one though, that's for sure. They called it Falsador Prime, and it's the same color as all these pink vines. And it glows real, real dimly. But it's there alright. I'm just mentioning it cause I can see it up in the air, right now. Hard to miss. From what I read, the going theory is that all this pink crap originally came from Falsador Prime, and it somehow floated through space and came to colonize these moon sized planetoids.
......
.............
God I'm fucking bored.
.......
......................
I really miss Kepler sunsets...
I miss just fresh food. Even developed to hell and back nowadays, Kepler cuisine got this real, real special taste to it. It permeates in all the vegetation that grows there. Maybe it's cause we still use the soil that was there originally? Everywhere else just uses the same Earth based garbage because its easier to distribute. But not Kepler, man. We keep it real.
...There’s no bringing back how it used to be, though. Looking at the wilds as a kid, well there already wasn't much of it left, but it would just stretch on and on and on. Like it was infinite. And I would look at it, thinking "ya. One day, one day I'll explore every inch, I'll turn over every stone. And everyone will know that I was here." But it's all just gray now. Clear cut and resource drained. No different from the dozens of other hyperdeveloped metro sites across the galaxy....
......
...........
Even still, I miss it all sorts of strong. There are parks and stuff in the city, but most of the wilds were just reduced to wasteland. Some planets keep a tight, tight environment rejuvenation regiment. But apparently the human race could suffer the loss of our's without much care. Atleast you can't extinguish a sunset...
...
In other news, I'm seeing more of those slug things. They're on the tendril stumps now. Maybe they like it there. That's about as interesting as it gets. Jay out.
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.....
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KEPTECH-VERS1.0904
JOURNAMETERTM PERSONAL DUAL MODE RECORDING DEVICE
7.03MB/15.99EB
2793_0626_2123
*VOICE DETECTED. BEGIN AUDIO RECORDING*
Stupid FUCKING OVERENGINEERED COSMIC COFFIN. ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?!?!?! LEAVE IT TO TULLIMORE YOU FUCKING STUPID BASTARDS.
Lockout. The tower is LOCKED. OUT.
No power!!!! So now the door won't open! You caaaAAAN restart the generator to GET power! But the control panel is inside! And you can't get inside withouWHO THE FUCK THOUGHT THIS ONE UP?????
oh fuck Tullimore, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUUUCCCCK TULLIMORE. I HAVE A TEN HOUR HIKE BACK TO TOWER NINE NOW. OH MY FUCKING GOD.
You know what???? fuck this. FUCK. THIS. I'm done!!! That's it!!! And you know what else? I see two from here! Two ammonia pools, big ass fucking lakes to boot! Bubbling and boilin away! Ain't marking that. You can go to HELLLLL Tullimore.
What the hell. What the HELL. Am I doing here?!?!?!?
No, that's it. I'm not having it one goddamn bit. I'm sick of this. I'm sick of ALL of this. WHY am I out here??? What? So I can get money to keep living at my HOME????? My home that's fucked beyond repair?!??!?!!?
It all just feeds in to itself. Tullimore is no different than whatever fucked up Kepler to begin with. Fuck it. Even if I just make it half of a half of a half of a percent less efficient, I'll take that. And I'll take it as a victory. Those share prices are down a one thousandth's of a cent because of me? GOOD.
No more reports. No more hiking out here in this toxic hellhole swamp backwater cosmic magenta clownhouse. I'm sitting my ass down in Tower 9. And I ain't taking a single step out unless its on a transport ship.
===============================================================
Jay ended his tirade, screaming his passionate lament into the expansive sponginess of Falsador-5. Climbing back down the ladder, he began the hungry, thirsty, exhausting march back to tower 9. His mood and his motivation stayed sour the whole time. Understandably so.
With every hour that passed, both his mind and body became just that little bit weaker. The recycled air was flat and free of any satisfaction. The ground ebbed and flowed with each footstep, marshmellowing more than it had on his first trip, making it difficult to keep his footing solid in his weakened state. He tried to keep his mind on his goal, on reaching the tower. But with the idealized version of his precious Kepler fallen from his mind, each footstep became slower than the last.
Finally, after several hours of trudging, feet dragging on the ground, he was only a few more miles from the base of tower 9. Mouth well parched, stomach well empty, mind well exhausted. He could see the metal glint of the tower's top, through gaps in the canopy. Far off. Getting closer.
It was here that Jay desperately needed a break, and took to sitting against the half-sphere stump of one of the growths. He breathed deeply and indulgently, in and out, head aimed up.
It was then that something, odd, caught his eye. Usually the top growths of these structures wave and loop towards space.
What were these branches doing aimed down? So sharply angled too...
Before Jay could think, one of the branches detached.
Plunging. Slicing across his suit.
His left arm bearing a fresh.
Deep.
Gash.
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KEPTECH-VERS1.0904
JOURNAMETERTM PERSONAL DUAL MODE RECORDING DEVICE
17.35MB/15.99EB
2793_0627_0355
*VOICE DETECTED. BEGIN AUDIO RECO-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
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