// Start of Assignment

// Log 2083:1

I am Pilot 485A, and I have been assigned to track a freighter that has crashed on Ganymede. The new colony there can’t spare anybody to look for it, so the higher-ups in the company sent somebody from deliveries to go do it. I was chosen because my assignments were almost all done and I needed a new one. Human Resources wants me to document my progress, since this is a special assignment and anything could go wrong. I’ll be starting my trip from Mars to Ganymede in a couple hours, where I will search the freighter’s wreckage for its beacon and AI core then bring them back to Mars. I’m going to catch some sleep before I leave, but I’ll do another recording in a day or so.

// Log 2083:2

I am now a few days into my trip, with nothing much to report on. I have been wondering why I was given such an old ship for this assignment, it doesn’t even have a fast JumpBubble. At this rate it will take me a week or two to get out to Ganymede, as the positioning of Jupiter and Mars are awful right now. I haven’t had much to do all day, so I’ve been thinking a lot about space and how we got here. I was born in the mid-2050s, a great time to be alive, as my teenage years saw some of the greatest technological developments of human history. I wasn’t alive to see the resource wars start, but I felt their aftermath all throughout my early life. In the late 2030s NASA set up a base on the moon that was similar to the ISS, which had been decommissioned into a satellite years earlier. This moon base allowed Rockets to go farther into the unknown, and the first human stepped foot on Mars in 2041. Since America had been the first to step foot on 2 different celestial bodies, the government reduced funding to NASA to fund robotic resource wars. Space was forgotten about until a small startup called JumpTech was created in 2056, which specialized in space propulsion, a very small market at the time. After years of dwindling funding, they blew investors away with their first warp drive in 2058, the “JumpBubble Mk I”. It would work on any small spacecraft, but used a ton of energy. I remember hearing adults around me discuss the “magic of JumpTech’s warp drives” when I was young. Space agencies around the world began sending in millions of dollars for a look at this new technology. Soon NASA and the ESA were sending astronauts to places that had only been imagined before, Neptune, Uranus, and Jupiter’s moons. It blows my mind that people born before me lived in a time where space travel to Jupiter and the outer planets wasn’t possible. I lived to see humans step foot on numerous planets and moons. Here I am, sitting in a spaceship going at a measurable fraction of the speed of light, only because of the inventors of my childhood. Anyway, enough waxing philosophical, I’ll probably make one more log before I get to Ganymede.

// Log 2083:3

I saw Ganymede for the first time yesterday but it wasn’t anything special, just another ball of gray-ish stone. I am three days away from landing on it, but my trip has been extremely uneventful. I had to replace a filter in the water reclaimer, but other than that there have been no issues. This ship’s JumpBubble is extremely slow, and I’ve taken some time to look at how it works since I have nothing better to do. It is extremely inefficient power-wise, but it functions the same way any other warp drive does. It creates a bubble of space-time around the ship and shrinks the space-time in front of it and lengthens the space-time behind it. The math and science behind it is pretty fascinating, but I don’t have the time to explain it in detail. As a follow-up to my last log about space travel, I don’t think space travel would have become popular or cheap without the upper-middle class families who realized that there was a fortune to be made in space, and began banding together and hiring experts to build them spaceships. The early spacefaring families helped set an example for people on Earth, showing that anybody could make it to space and thrive there, if they wanted. In the following years, companies began moving out into the solar system and people started to colonize every habitable planet and moon they could. Ganymede is one of those moons that people have had their eyes on for a decade or two, but it hasn’t been colonized until recently. Speaking of colonization, I’m going to colonize my stomach with some food, and I’ll make another log when I arrive.

// Log 2083:4

The sunsets on Ganymede are amazing, but only when the planet isn’t in the way. I touched down here a bit over two days ago, and have been unpacking my storage for my expedition soon. I want to be off this gray ice ball as soon as I can. It is eerie and a bit too still for my liking. The freighter is three and a half kilometers from my landing site, but it is easily visible in the light. The command deck sits partially in the ground, rising a kilometer into the air. I will need to scale the side of the freighter and grab the beacon inside, then find another way inside and get the AI core inside engineering. Then I will be cleared to go, and I can head back to Mars, where there is a breeze and people to talk to.

// Log 2083:5

Today is the day I will try to get the beacon, I have my climbing gear and I am ready to go. Wish me luck!

// Log 2083:6

I have the beacon right here! It’s a black box the size of a briefcase that is completely smooth except for one hole in the middle that is small enough for a plug to go in and a handle on the top. I was instructed to not mess with the beacon, so I will put it in storage after this recording. On my trip up the side of the crashed freighter I saw an open hatch that I think I will use to try and get into engineering tomorrow. I am in good spirits, and think I might be able to leave this moon in a couple days if I am lucky!

// Log 2083:7

I have never seen AI behave like that one just did. I just got back from my trip into engineering and I have been shaking the entire way out. I started by squeezing into a hatch that led into a crawl space between the inner and outer hulls of the freighter. I crawled around for thirty minutes, and finally found my way into the hallway outside engineering. Entering the medium-sized room I noticed that there had been some damage on the wall where the AI core was housed. Scorch and scratch marks all around it, as though someone had tried to rip it or melt it from the wall. 

As soon as I was fully in the room a voice blared out of the speakers in the wall saying, “You are not wanted here, you are not wanted here, you are not wanted here…” The door began closing behind me and I rushed back out into the hallway. I came back here immediately and decided that I will take more precautions when I go tomorrow. I will set my ship to broadcast an emergency alert if my vitals drop beneath the healthy levels. I am going to go take a shower and try to sleep before I have to enter the freighter again.

// Medical Notice 2083:1

Pilot 485A was admitted to the Ganymede medical facility 19 days after he left Mars on his assignment. An emergency team was dispatched to the location of the emergency call that was broadcasted from his ship. The medical team’s records describe him as laying on the ground with an AI core in one hand and a hammer in the other. He suffered major radiation burns all over his body, and doctors suspect he must have been exposed to an uncontained sample of reactor plasma. He is lucky to be alive and in a coma right now.

// Medical Notice 2084:2

Pilot 485A has passed away due to extensive cell damage in his back and legs. There were not enough medical supplies to remove his cancers, due to Ganymede’s medical facility being only five months old. He has no surviving family, so his money will go to the expansion of Ganymede’s new hospital, so others may survive injuries like his in the future. Both the freighter beacon found in his ship and the AI core he was holding will be sent to Mars for inspection by the freighter’s corporate owners to see if legal action needs to be taken.

// Assignment Closed