>INCIDENT_REPORT_VICKERS_MAECKER_102370523T194803Z.pdf
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“Hmmm...”
The man rhythmically tapped the tablet’s aluminum frame, his eyes scanning the field of numbers before him. Countless configurations of digits rolled through his mind, all in pursuit of anything he could figure out for certain.
Any progress.
Any breakthrough.
At last, a realization sprouted in his mind, his fingers soon dancing across the touch screen. A two here, a four here, superpositions collapsing all throughout the grid as possibilities bloomed into contradictions. Remove that eight, narrow down that nine.
A small, self-satisfied smile crept onto Vickers’s tired face as he triumphantly filled in a one on the Sudoku board, breaking a two day long dry streak.
He knew full well what he was getting into when he grabbed one of the hardest boards the ship’s database held. Just five digits given. Agonizingly difficult, almost impossible, requiring days upon days of brute forcing to make any progress without the knowledge of advanced techniques.
Exactly what he needed.
Onto the next digit-
[18:45 - DAILY INSPECTION]
Vickers grumbled to himself before acknowledging the pop-up on his tablet and standing up, his joints complaining following several hours of stillness. Months upon months and years upon years, but those annoying alarms still caught him off guard embarrassingly often.
Just annoying chores in the end, more than worth it to maintain the rest of this relatively comfortable existence.
Fake rubber soles squeaked on the floor and walls as he navigated through the cramped corridors of the maintenance deck. Felt uncomfortable in no gravity, and somehow even worse when he had to actually use his legs. Just like with everything else here, though, his comfort was perhaps the very last priority considered when designing this monstrosity.
Observers’ sanity was optional, maximizing the lifetime of every item and minimizing the air pollution by sheared off micro particles wasn’t.
It sure helped that there was an essentially unlimited number of humans available to fill that and all the other “unskilled” roles. Triply so with their perceived prestige.
Become a part of history, contribute to the expansion of the Human Federation, see what no man had seen before! Work in conditions that drive almost all mad, take a part in pilfering the many worlds of the Milky Way for natural resources, do nothing of value on taxpayer’s dime.
Enough to shred anyone’s soul just one journey in.
Critically, though, that assumes one has a soul.
The door to one of many maintenance panels swung open with a click; revealing a single display panel with the outputs of a myriad of sensors. It wasn’t Vickers’s job to know what any of it truly meant. That was way above his pay grade. All he had to do was to verify that all the values were within specified ranges, and if not, go through a corresponding checklist.
A computer from eight thousand years ago could’ve done that automatically. A droid from four thousand years ago could’ve done that manually, and exactly like a human at that. Open the door, photograph the screen, parse the displayed values, engage the appropriate subroutine.
The only reason Vickers had to be the one to do this menial labor was the paranoid desire to have at least one flesh and blood human awake on board at all times. Didn’t matter that the cruise would take tens of years, didn’t matter that adding even two people equaled tons upon tons of extra supplies needed.
They wanted a human around, just in case.
Funny how this was the only situation where they considered him unequivocally human.
Croak of a panel being opened, tippy-taps of the readings getting recorded on his tablet, a light exhale as Vickers kicked himself off the nearest wall towards his next stop. And again. And again.
Utmost monotonous routine, day in, day out.
Year in, year out.
Most humans aren’t built for this. Hell, Vickers doubted even most xenos could endure this, and that extended to that one vaguely reptilian species that lived for millennia.
The thought of a xeno being given a position like this made him chuckle, the horribly dry sound echoing through the dead corridors of the maintenance deck.
He might’ve been a bastard in literal and figurative senses, born so far into the periphery of the Human Federation that he was only slightly higher on the pecking order than dog excrement, but even that was incomparably higher than all but the most hand picked xenos.
Hardly any better than the average human out there in personality, and neither did he think himself such. More than likely a terrible person under any moral metric, but this position was comfortable enough to make morality a very distant concern. ‘Comfortable’ was a rather strange way to describe what most humans would describe as being stuck in hell.
Even beyond being lower on the racial ladder than most, though, Vickers wasn’t like most humans.
With the last few digits entered, today’s maintenance checklist was finished. One thousand four hundred and seventy-sixth day in a row with not a single issue found.
Hooray.
Now, back to the-
[INTERVENTION REQUIRED ON MAIN DECK - [MINOR]]
Fuck’s sake.
Vickers grunted at the notification on his tablet before heading towards the nearest elevator, one bounce at a time. Guess he’d be using the cargo one this time.
The massive contraption opened with a deafening whine, revealing the barren insides. The artificial gravity inside was configured poorly, the pain in his legs adding fuel for his annoyance at being forced to take such a long detour because of what was more than likely a spurious alert.
Oh well.
The elevator ride up through the ship was a journey in its own right; the passage of time forcing the Observer to confront the sheer size of the vessel. Maintenance deck to main deck took over fourteen minutes, and that assumed no irregular conditions. The elevator shaft having windows was less a courtesy to make the ride enjoyable, and more so a strict requirement to let passengers know that the whole thing was even moving.
It was also the only elevator with an on-board bathroom Vickers had ever seen.
The tiny bathroom window was fogged on its other side, but by now the Observer could list out every single part of the ship he was passing by from memory. Almost empty hangars the size of skyscrapers, fusion reactor assembly, hydroponic setup producing enough nutritional value to sustain thousands of people in suspended animation.
A tiny glimpse of the majestic mountain-sized pile of metal garbage known as ‘Her Majesty Marxen III’.
Might as well check up on what that intervention was supposed to be for in the meantime.
[UNKNOWN ARTIFICIAL OBJECT ENCOUNTERED. QUARANTINED IN SUB-BAY 14-755A. INTERVENTION REQUIRED.]
Hmm, curious.
Not the very first time he’d ran into that alert, but it was firmly on the rarer end. Suppose a bit of variation here and there wouldn’t hurt, even if it was likely to end up being a piece of iron-rich meteorite like the last time this had happened.
Who knows, maybe he’s stumbled upon some ancient treasure like in some of the adventure books he’d read.
The thought lingered in Vickers’s mind for longer than he would’ve wanted, his brain eventually steering towards other, similar topics. He had something of a fascination with the old, by now downright ancient texts from the early space age and even earlier. It was fun reading their guesses on what the future would be like.
Some of them were even partially accurate, sometimes.
Alas, no dogfighting in space. Both because of lack of any enemies to dogfight against and because of the impracticality of such an endeavor. The last time one of the peripheral solar systems tried to secede from the Federation was well over a couple thousand years by now, and reading the reports of the aftermath chilled even him.
One moment, the many country sized cities throughout the by-then recently colonized Dritter II were going through their usual churn with a side of building a space navy to enforce their independence with. The next, billions died as thousands of tons of kinetic shrapnel traveling at oh-nine-c reached their target after having been fired years earlier, tearing off a significant chunk of Dritter II’s crust and plunging the rest of the planet into an extinction event.
The rest of the Human Federation got the message.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Space combat wasn’t the only aspect about which the older human writings were wrong about. Size had to have been the most striking one, of everything. Figures their imagined space ships would be the same approximate size as their water ships, but time had shown just how amusingly inaccurate these estimates were.
The bigger the distance, the larger the ship.
For intra-stellar-system scales, ships several kilometers long were the standard. Scaling up to the intra-galactic scale, the vessels become the size of mountain ranges or small countries, billions of tons racing across the skies at the standard speed of half-c.
Indescribable energies. And yet, still lacking. Still nowhere near enough to feasibly explore more than the very immediate galactic neighborhood. Marxen III was the cutting edge of colonizing technology, and even it took on average thirty to thirty-five years just jumping from one stellar system to another.
Just a pair of jumps back and forth would’ve been enough to churn through the entire lifespan of an early space-age human. Even with the heavy-handed application of eugenics in the centuries since pushing the average human life expectancy into mid hundred thirties, a normal human lifespan was still nowhere near enough.
Drugs helped.
Suspended animation did the trick.
Reversible, non-damaging process, stretching a day of aging into multiple decades. Perfect solution for journeys like these, and for pushing the age of some aboard to obscene numbers.
Apparently the Captain fuck-his-face was approximately five thousand years old by now, his face not a day above forty-five. From Luna, too, almost as pure-blooded as one gets.
Bastard.
Suspended animation broke humanity. Anyone blessed and cursed enough to be forced to rely on it arguably stopped being human, no longer able to establish any human connections. A single night of rest on one end, decades on the other. Decades that some didn’t survive.
Especially if they were unfortunate enough to live on the peripheries.
As with any average, positive outliers are liable to skew it heavily, and that was the case here. Average life expectancy on Terra, the very jewel of the Human Federation? Easily hundreds, possibly even over a thousand natural years. Average life expectancy on Sirius IV where Vickers had received his higher education and training for this job? Hundred twenty, more or less. Average life expectancy on Gandau, where he was born?
Mid sixties.
The daily cocktail of drugs and specifically tailored diet would easily let Vickers push into low two hundreds, and he would spend the vast majority of that time doing this exact routine, day in and out. Thirty years of Observer duty, thirty years in suspension on the way back while another pair of schmucks handles the job, a year or so to enjoy his paycheck, and then once more into the long trip.
Hell for most, but not for him.
Whether because of being gifted or broken, he appreciated the monotony, especially since he had more than enough material to keep himself occupied. Puzzles, video games, fiction, knowledge, all at his fingertips. All to enjoy at his leisure.
And enjoy it, he did, one day at a time.
Into eternity.
Finally, the main deck.
The massive chamber was completely empty, Vickers’ artificial gravity-fueled steps echoing off the metal walls. Only the maintenance lights were lit up, providing just enough light to make the unending maze of aisles, chairs and screens manageable.
All the latter were disabled, all but one.
His designated terminal was crammed into a tiny nook off to the side, completely hidden unless one knew specifically where to go. A perfect match for him on multiple levels, a kindred soul aboard a city-sized colossus of steel.
Too bad it took over a minute just to boot up.
The wall mounted seat affixed in front of the screen provided no comfort, though whether that was intentional or merely a happy accident, Vickers didn’t know. Make it too nice, and you’d be encouraging the maintenance personnel to spend too much time in the same places as true-blooded humans, the ones from the Terra system if not Terra herself.
If there ever was a cardinal sin of a polite Federation society, it was mixing of the castes to that extent.
Mr. fancy-ass captain apparently piloted from the comfort of his personal chamber, deep enough inside the vessel to be way, way outside anyone else’s clearance level.
And if the rumors Vickers had heard from the internet were true, there were places inside this labyrinthine mess to be outside of anyone’s clearance.
Federation kept as many secrets as it did tallies, and he’d gladly skip out on one of the former to avoid becoming a part of the latter.
Finally, booted up. Onto that supposed artificial debris.
Spectrograms were one of these fancy things that only the more educated got anything out of. Vickers had almost closed that tab there and then, about to delve deeper into the provided info before one oversized bar caught his attention amidst the sea of data.
...how much uranium?
In an instant, this whole situation became something else, something he was much less prepared for. He considered himself smart enough to split his mind cleanly between his work duties and anything that could conceivably count as entertainment.
This... crossed that boundary. It wasn’t just his job anymore.
He was interested.
Vickers navigated the windows that followed with an unusual haste, following the procedure until the software graciously provided a low-quality photo of the encountered object.
...
What in the world.
The contraption comprised a massive, slightly damaged metal dish with a small cabinet of electronics attached to its back and two arms extending from it. Humanity made this, that much Vickers knew with certainty, the fact sufficient to throw a wrench or two into Federation plans considering that this was supposed to be a trailblazing mission.
What was incomparably more worrisome was that he faintly recognized this specific vessel.
A few more shaking inputs later, and the option for manual inspection was selected; Vickers outright leaping from his seat shortly after at the possibility of making history.
He didn’t care about clout or prestige. Even if this turned out to be a genuine discovery, it would be attributed either to the captain, or someone else that the Federation had an interest in promoting, reality be damned. He knew much better than to be motivated by clout.
Genuine interest after eight straight years of daily routine, though? Yeah, that’d sway him.
In no time, Vickers was cramming himself down one of the small designated elevators towards the storage bay in question, possibilities racing through his mind. His tablet’s screen flashed as he jumped from one Wikipedia entry to another; the entire site downloaded well in advance for his trip.
Human spacecraft, early space age, enable images-
Pioneer 10.
This was it, this had to have been it. Did Marxen III inadvertently intersect its course, or-
No. That was impossible.
Blood drained from Vickers’ face as he crunched the numbers in his mind, none of them adding up. Pioneer 10 couldn’t have even made it to Proxima Centauri, let alone here. The math just didn’t work out. This couldn’t have been Pioneer 10.
This had to have been a trap.
None of the xenos he knew of had anywhere near the technological prowess to pull that off.
The Federation made sure of that.
It wasn’t hard to notice the unsubtle racial undertones start creeping into historical reports the moment xenos went from fantasy to reality. They were always present from that point on, but their intensity varied.
Curiously coincidental spikes in racial rhetoric right before the discovery of a new species of xenos was announced, gradual relaxation when the reality of said species yet again being firmly behind human technological development hit.
Just how far behind varied.
Some were in the process of colonizing their stellar systems, others were still yet to leave their planet. Many were pre-industrial, with the Federation’s intrusion known to be thought of as a divine intervention on at least four separate occasions. No xeno species ended up in a good position once humans learned of them, but between the various possibilities, Vickers would’ve preferred to be in the shoes of a pre-industrial xeno civilization.
Gods show up, stay away from politics, excavate all the worthwhile natural resources with machines the size of continents, leave some for you, and fuck off afterwards. Maybe kidnap a few people, maybe leave some magical devices behind, who knows. Of course, that kind of plunder is enough to cripple the said civilization permanently and prevent it from ever leaving their planet, but nobody alive knows that yet.
Sudden influx of resources, all is well, and by the time anyone realizes the full implications of this divine intervention, everyone who had witnessed the first contact is long dead.
Hardly an ‘objectively’ correct choice and Vickers knew that well. Having enough technological progress to at least be at least able to communicate with the Federation via radio prompted a markedly different response, but whether it was any better for the unfortunate xeno shmucks was... arguable.
Being used for knowledge, resources, and your brightest while the other side never lets you come close to catching up with them technologically with them doesn’t sound all too fun. Requiring permits to travel anywhere within the Federation, being constantly monitored and thought of ambivalently at best, and very bad at the usual.
And that’s if nothing about the species in question was off-putting to average human sensibilities.
If xenos hadn’t made that fake probe, then who? Something else, possibly from beyond their sphere of influence.
FTL transport was still a pipe dream, but FTL communication was another matter entirely, and completely undetectable at that. If one of the xenos had got a hold on that tech and established communication with a Federation-level race from beyond the human sphere of influence-
Then what more poetic way was it for them to bring down the Federation than with a booby trapped replica of the sign of humanity’s conquest of cosmos?
All it took was a software virus, a method of mind control, a covert bio-weapon. Many ways to establish control of Marxen III. Afterwards. they’d just need to engage a long jump without Terra’s authorization, aim this mountain of metal right at that sorry rock. Hell, detach all the cruisers and use them as mass driver projectiles too, aim at everything inhabited, destroy the humans.
Destroy their galactic machine of cruelty.
It was insanity, one that Vickers found himself looking forward to with every fiber of his body. Blood rushed into his head as he got out of the elevator. This was his chance. He would take the Federation down; he would be the unsung, unknown hero of another world.
Vickers’s heart raced as he took the final few corners, suddenly finding himself face to face with the transparent door separating him from the obvious trap. It was even more obviously worn down in person; space dust eroding every exposed surface over thousands of years.
Time to finally contribute to something larger than himself.
The door opened with a metallic whine, exposing the human to the stray spacecraft in all its alluring glory. He wasted no time before encircling it a couple times, waiting for... something to happen. Anything.
Explosion, psychic forces tearing his mind apart, suddenly keeling over because of a chemical weapon- nothing.
Nothing happened.
Nothing kept happening.
Vickers’s body shook as reality caught up with his inane ideas, leaving him staring down the ancient hunk of metal. The air grew colder by the moment as a thin layer of ice surrounded the recently captured space debris, finally warming up after millennia of near absolute zero.
He looked down in between the metal struts, catching a brief glimpse of the famous plaque affixed to the rigging, much of its detail completely eroded. Only the two human figures remained, standing alone amidst the scratched, ravaged cosmos of their own creation.
They were all that was left of their message to the stars.
With a shaking hand, Vickers brought his tablet up once more; tattered mind navigating through menu after menu. Of course, he wouldn’t bring it all down. What the hell was he even thinking? To think a barely human like him could ever amount to anything.
He was just an Observer.
And like any good Observer, he had to fill in a report from time to time.
"I-Incident Report, Vickers Maecker, 23rd of May, year 10237."
He knew what he’d be doing for the rest of his shift.