Leviathan 623
Experimental Virtual Recording System (EVRS) Iteration 3.4: January 13th, 2252.
Local time: 23:07
Location: Deep Space, 8000 light-years away from planet Earth, 297.3 light-years away from destination.
Log 1:
*Kzztpop!* Oh! It's on, it's on! Thank you so much, Cindy!
That's Lieutenant Graves, to you, Litzy!
Not until tomorrow! I got almost a whole hour of not having to deal with you outranking me!
Ah, fuck, where's the rest of the booze?
Dumbass, just head back to the synth. Lemme be alone for a bit, I want to figure out how to use this thing.
Alright, but you better come back out soon. Celebration isn't the same without you!
Yeah, I got it, I got it. *slam*
Alright, let's get this going… Oh, it's already recording! Um… Hello! Me? You? Somebody? I don't know. It feels weird talking to nothing… Maybe I'll give you a name… like… writing? Writer? Cool? Cool writer thing? …Maybe some Japanese? Kaku…ii? Kakuii? Hmm… I like it! Kakuii it is! So… where to begin?
It's January something or other, I'm waaaaay out here right now. I don't know exactly where, but we're almost there! This mission we're on is the first official test of the F-Punch Engine, and it is working like a dream! We've been in space for a few months now, but we've traveled thousands of light-years! It doesn't even give us any of the relativistic problems that the crew on the ground was worried about. It seems like the ships communication arrays have been behaving exactly as predicted. Oh, it's so cool!
I got this electronic journal as a gift for my birthday before I left, but I never thought to use it until tonight. Sorry Tallu! But it looks like it is working like a dream! I was worried that its battery wouldn't work, but it runs on energy that it harvest from gravity waves, so I guess it pretty much has battery wherever I go, so long as something massive is somewhere in the near cosmos. I can't believe something like this even exists. Thank you Tallu!
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
But maybe I should make this a little more official, this is a log of an important mission. Okay… hoo… here we go.
My name is Corporal Lio Bitz, or 'Litzy' as my friends have been calling me lately. I didn't like it at first, but it's grown on me a little bit, like a fungus. I am on an exploration mission to the stars along with a team of a select few others. In total there are ten of us, we're all from different backgrounds and specialties, but we have one major thing in common: we're all nerds of some kind or another. John is an astronomer, David is a proper doctor. Torque, I mean Winslow is a mechanic and can get just about any machine running if he needs to, and so on and so on with all the others. Cindy, I mean, Lieutenant Graves is the only one among us who doesn't really have any scientific skills, but damned if she can't fly a ship.
Oh? So who am I to be part of this crack crew? You know, I sometimes ask myself that. I got a bit of biology, a bit of medicine, a bit of mechanics, I got the jack of all trades going on for myself. If there were any one thing I think I specialized in… hmm. Probably communication. Not like I'm some expert or anything, I think I just get along with people, you know? Maybe that's why I got selected for this mission. I'm just up here to make sure nobody kills each other. And I'm doing a damned fine job if I do say so myself!
So anyway, the mission. We're only a couple of days out now, maybe ten? Maybe a bit less? As cool as the F-Punch is, it isn't exactly the most consistent, sometimes we really get moving, but sometimes we have to stay still for a while. Lieutenant Graves assures me that it has absolutely nothing to do with her driving, but I'm not convinced.
We're heading to a planet. It's a water world, like ours. It's called LEV-1T-AN-623, or as me and the crew have been calling it, Leviathan 623. We don't know what happened to the first 622 of them, but we figured this was as good a place as any to start counting. Heh.
It's supposed to be a good fit for a possible fit for human life. We've managed to hold together our own planet pretty well, but there's only so much to be done, and branching out to the closer planets in our solar system ended up being a bit of a stretch. So here we are.
Leviathan isn't just viable, though. We're out here using a very expensive and brand new spaceship because Leviathan has something special: signs of extant life.
The telescopes that the wizards back on earth were using are pretty mighty nowadays. We've been able to tell chemical emissions and such to verify if planets were viable for humans or had similar compositions to Earth to allow for life, but it wasn't until recently that they also found a way to test for unnatural activity on the surface of worlds. Turns out it's pretty hard to make a scope that can just see things that far away, so we needed to work a little harder than that.
But so that's the gist. We're on a really fast ship, left home, passed the middle of nowhere, and we're most of the way to somewhere, and when we get there we might finally get to see what something would look like if it weren't made in god's image! How bout that?
I've got some more I want to say, but I think that'll be it for now. I can hear Cindy calling my name from outside the steel door, she probably can't figure out how to get the synth to work again. I promise I'll come back and use this again, it really just slipped my mind until now.
So, uh… Journal off? Diary close? Kakuii, end my recording?