Pull (Deep Darkness Book 1) (30 page)

Log - 1
Year 00110010001100100011001100110111
ENTRY: 010101110110010100100000011000010111001001100101001

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110010101101100001000000110111101100110001000000110110
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101001000000110000101110010011001010010000001110100011
010000110010100100000011101010110111001110111011000010
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‘We are a vessel of lies. We are the unwanted, the unclean. My name isn’t
important. It’s just important that you know what happened to us. The things
we have seen. The hell we have gone through. If you are able to decipher this
then I hope to God you are human if you aren’t and you are a Skrav I am
sorry. I am sorry for what we have done to your world. I understand please if
there is any of us still out there please show some kind of mercy.’

‘Cold black empty space. We’re on our way to nowhere. Parts of the hull
wither away. Time itself is telling the ship it’s time to decay. Inside the dim
lights show nothing but shadows and silhouettes. Controls need to be felt for
and it is only because of the hard jagged surface of a console you would even
know you were on the bridge. The ship smells old and musty it’s amazing we
can even breathe. The air is stale. Most men or women would have gone
insane. You can feel the abyss that is cold space outside trying to push itself in
on you. The walls are always closing in. The darkness reaches its hand in
front of your sweaty broken face. It is ready to suffocate you. It begs you to
let go constantly reminding you there is nothing out there. No one is coming
for you. Everyone you have ever known is dead and you are not worth
saving.’

‘The smell of copper
fills the air. It's the smell of the lucky ones; those that
died in their stasis chambers. Their bodies lay over broken glass severed
limbs void of life they lay like dried fruit. Their bodies have long since
withered away long before I woke up; they are nothing more than fossils now.
A small reminder of what we will become soon enough. It's only when you
take a deep breath does the madness of it all sink in. You realize you are
breathing the dust of their remains. There were only a few of us left in our
new home here on this starship. It’s the first of its kind. It was meant to hold a
few hundred unfortunate there are so few of us left now. Welcome to the
Praxis. Glad you could wake up and join us.’

‘When we made
first contact we committed one of the most voracious
acts in the history of man. Genocide wouldn’t even be a good word for it. We
washed with the blood of our enemies and covered our hands with dirt. They
weren’t like us so what did it matter. The universe is a hostile place and if we
are going to survive we have to be the ones to strike first. We made a
preliminary attack against an alien force known as the Skrav, an alien species
we know absolutely nothing about. We forced their armada to fall from the
sky. Certain intelligence was given showing evidence that they had intended a
hostile takeover. Yeah intelligence, that was part of my job at the U.E.C.
before I went black ops. It was enough it always is. All it takes is one man to
say the wrong thing. The Skrav meant to destroy us. In the end I wonder if
they actually had -it seems from my point of view they succeeded at least. At
the time of the first attacks we had barely made it out of our solar system.
Most of our exploration and research past Mars was done using drones
equipped with sophisticated A.I. systems. Plug and play that was the most a
drone could do. We spent most of our time, money, and manpower mining for
resources and rebuilding Earth. I didn’t fight in the resource wars myself but
I saw the video, the films and the things we did to each other; the most
powerful nations in the world dissolving one after another. Every few years a
new independent nation would start and fail building over the ashes of an old
one. When the Skrav came the human race united. Our reward for their
failure; we recovered their starships far superior to our own and it changed
everything. No longer divided the human race could flourish. The stars were
ours.’

‘They would have you believe there were three. The Tritan, the Aelita,
and the Erebus. Somehow we’re still picking up radio waves and updates and
the most talked about just had to be all about the great three massive seed
ships; capable enough to support life generation after generation for
thousands of years. Generational. I guess that makes us an offshoot. We’re
the alpha group. You see there was this place - the birthplace of the universe?
The origin point of life? Is it a planet, a world the human race could start all
over? It doesn't matter. It’s called the void. What dipshit chose a name like
that? Great marketing.
010010010111001001110010011001010110110001100
10101110110011000010110111001110100
Eden was not our destination. It never
would be.’

Log – 15
‘Sorry about all the cursing on the last one. I guess I’m not being a very
good narrator . My name is
0100110101100001011011000110100101101011
though some just call me Kabe or Kabul. I just woke up after sleeping maybe
twenty or thirty years. Wow, don’t get to say that often enough. I am not old.
I still look and feel as if I am in my mid twenties. About me. Well… put
simply I am a murderer, a soldier, and a guinea pig. My crew and I were
given the simple choice to die for the crimes we committed or repent. We
chose to repent and act as the world's lab rats. There were no parades, no
cause for celebration; we were taken off the books, blacklisted and our
mission classified top secret. Most all of us are soldiers. Many of us are here
because we wouldn’t fight whatever insurgency - some of us the older ones
ran away during the first invasion. They were branded deserters. I guess now
they have nowhere to run. All of us are the first human subjects placed
onboard a ship that is a hell of a lot more Skrav then human. Our crew- half
men and half women - were testing the effects of space travel. The ship was a
hybrid codenamed XA-1 or as some of the more lighthearted scientists called
it Praxis. Practice – it was all we were to them. We were the first humans to
journey inside the immer, that’s short for immersion field, another dimension
of reality that allowed a starship to move faster then light. We were supposed
to be in stasis. Our experiment should have only lasted a few months, a year
at most. I guess they wanted to know whether we would die, go insane, or
wake up fine and dandy. The ship would monitor us and then take us home.
We would sleep through our whole sentence - Best vacation ever. Something
went wrong though and fortunate for us we woke up. The ship had a built in
A.I. not unlike most mining drones only it was bit more sophisticated. It
demanded a human crew. We returned to where the Earth, the sun and the
entire human race should have been and there was nothing, nothing but
pitch-black empty space. Our world was gone. Something had gone wrong
and what had started as a practice run had turned into a marathon. We were
no longer criminals serving out a sentence. We were the last of our kind. At
least we think. We have no idea whether the other three ships made it out or
were even successfully finished.’

‘An engineer named Ray had managed to scrape together some
information about what happened. Ray was only a few years older then me, a
young man once charged with disobeying orders on a rescue operation
compromising the safety of several high ranking officials and his crew so he
could save a young girl near Deimos. This is basically what he said - We had
been in stasis nearly a thirty years. Our ship never jumped back out of the
immer when we should have. It glitched and froze until finally it snapped to.
By all rights we should all be dead. The thought crossed my mind enough.
We barely had any food. The ship was a mess. While some of us were more
innocent like Ray others onboard had committed brutal crimes of murder out
of hatred and blind spite. Perhaps we were in hell. Maybe the experiment was
a failure and now we were destined to spend eternity together as the walls
slowly closed in around us. If anyone is listening to this then I guess you are
the only one that knows for certain. The Praxis was a tomb adrift. A small
monument standing in the place mankind had called home.’

00110010001101000011010000110100
‘In the first few days of our awakening there was chaos. Many of us believed
we had gotten lost that these were not the coordinates of Earth. Then we
aligned the stars. Orion’s belt, both the big and little dipper, all of the
astrological signs all there. Ray and a small group of engineers managed to
figure out the controls of the ship. We could move forward, backward, we
could roll - we were a flying floating giant dog. They even had a basic idea of
what it would take to jump into the immer. Whether or not the ship could
handle the stress of ripping another hole in space-time was another question.

That
first week several of the crew lost their minds. They were already
killers and being trapped alone in space was more then enough to awaken
their psychopathic tendencies. There was a bloodbath in the mess. Two
hardened sociopaths grafted glass from broken stasis chambers into bone
from one of the dead guys creating knives from his arms and shivs from his
ribcage. It was myself and another named Scile who found a gun locker
tucked away in the underbelly of the ship. I couldn't imagine why it was
there. In a way it seemed the ship was prepared for an event like this.
Perhaps it was meant as a security measure when we arrived back or it was
just another test. We had several animals, insects, and plants on board too.
The plants had taken over an entire wing of the ship turning it into a small
jungle. That was were Scile and I made our stand.’

‘We announced that we had found food. The sociopaths took the bait and
walked straight into our line of fire. After that we threw their bodies out an
airlock. This inadvertently made Scile and I the leaders. It also turned out we
hadn't lied about the food. The jungle was growing fruits and vegetables
unlike anything we had ever seen before. Purple grapefruits and blue spheres
that tasted like a cross between a squash and a zucchini. The fruit had a
rough texture like bark from a tree but once it was open juice flowed out like
water from a spout. We now had a means to survive. A couple of Ray’s pals
even found a way to make moonshine from it. It wasn’t half bad once you got
past the taste and the smell.’

‘Not wanting to die in the nothingness that surrounded us we have
spent days searching databases for stars that might have habitable worlds. A
large part of our database was information carried over from the Skrav. We
looked through point after point; planets glowed in front of us on holographic
displays as information poured itself out around us circling us. Finally we just
chose a world.’

‘The world had no name. At least no name we had given it. It seemed a
better option then nothing. The only problem is it is several thousand years
away. So we are making plans to sleep. Several of our crew will have to stay
awake making sure that the others can go to sleep properly. The computer
can monitor vitals and wake someone up but it cannot physically make sure
all the right buttons are pressed. Ray is one of the few volunteering to stay
awake. He is in love with this ship and more then a few of us are happy for
him. It has become his adopted child and his reason for living. It was only
because we will be in his hands that I believed we are going to survive. Thank
you Ray.’

‘I’m marking my logs with an K now so they don’t get confused with
anyone else’s. I have already had several of mine overwritten and even if this
doesn’t matter I don’t want to lose anymore. Going to sleep now. Goodnight.’

‘When you’re in stasis you don't dream. Your body shuts down and slows
to a crawl. A small ventilator covers your mouth the thin line between you
and the icy liquid that would freeze your cells. A few years in stasis is barely a
minute to your body. Imagine waking up in sixty years and feeling like you
were out for only a minute. Everything around you older, a bit more decayed.
Things that were brand new become tarnished and rustic. Those that were
awake have passed on or become old. Their faces aged, wrinkled. They are no
longer the same people you left behind. Their cells constantly regenerate,
layers of skin turn to dust, every detail about them about who you knew
becomes something else. Given enough time even they become something
else. Their knowledge expands. They learn more about the world something
some call wisdom but for most its just selective memories. What was a
memory to you could all be forgotten to someone else. Time is an illusion but
yet it is also our greatest threat. It is with time we measure the value of our
experiences and the weight of our life.’

‘When I woke up I woke to a dark starship. It was nothing how I
remembered. It was like being in one place where you have memorized the
walls, the texture, even the smell of the air and then you turn around and find
yourself lost. You prepare your body for that first breath expecting the stale
oxygen to hit your lungs like nails to a chalkboard but instead its rich. The
Praxis had replaced its bio-organic cells and regenerated becoming something
more with each passing year. The biomass inside the ship expanded. I awoke
no longer onboard a ship that was part man-made and part Skrav. The Praxis
had evolved into something more. The organic parts of the ship integrated
and intertwined with the jungle creating plants that produced their own light
and replenished themselves. The walls had become muscles and the stasis
chamber had become a womb. The ships A.I. grew over the years conversing
with Ray and the few who stayed awake. It wasn't quite human but more like
an animal. It reminded me of the way a man would talk to his dog or someone
would guide his or her horse. I joked about us being inside a dog in one of
logs. It seemed the joke was becoming more and more true. The Praxis had
even devised a way of creating entertainment. It was writing books and
stories. It had studied the great authors of the old age and found ways to
make old ideas fresh again. It was all mathematics. Some of the stories were
stale lacking emotion and depth but the ship's latest attempts were quite
profound and even thought provoking. The A.I. had no control over the
things happening inside of it just as a human has no control of their heart,
blood, or veins.’