CYGNUS RAL 246

Ok. It’s been a while. I’ve been in the village for months. I restocked, and was able to conduct a few experiments. Seems to be more than meets the eye. About 236 RALs ago, I stopped logging, but I’m back with reports. By the way, I’m still in the village right now.

Subject A: The Ghost Town. The village, which by the way I spent living on Xenon-Infused tablets, actually has a secret. It has a bunker underneath, probably for the war I’m currently dealing with. But that’s not the best thing. I found a LOSMIR class hyperdrive inside. If I can install it onto my piece of shit ship, you can take the “shit” out of that nickname. By the way, I also found some backup memory drives, so lucky you, you get to deal with my shit talk for even longer.

Subject B: The radioactivity. My uranium counter was off the charts a few parsecs away. This may come as a surprise, but the Strike Force team didn’t get uranium filtering suits. We had pretty slick, repainted military uniforms. Standard military uniforms. When I saw the counter, I lost it. I quote: “SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! GOD DAMMIT SHIT! OH GOD I’M SCREWED!”

Yep. That was me.

Anyway, I donned some radioactive-proof clothes and went in. Besides a few rats, the first thing I noticed was a skeleton. Definitely a couple millennia old. I can tell from the lack of flesh and similar bone structure to the Mehari, a species that went extinct a while ago. Seems that the bunker has been here longer than I first thought. This means that the war’s been here a lot longer than I thought.

First, some exposition on the Mehari. They were humanoids, with a similar height and mortality rate. They had some sort of ancient religion that they never neglected to follow. Then one day, all of them just…spontaneously combusted. Some said that it was their religion, others said they were hunted. The bad news is, that 60–70% of the army was Mehari. The Galactic We were left without most of our defense, and we lost some of our outer rim territories. This planet, because it is not in my database, is outer rim. Some Mehari survived the combustion, but only those that were dualspecies. That’s why there isn’t a Mehari left. The skeleton was a real surprise.

Subject C: The Truth of Ghost Town. Outside the bunker, in the buildings, there was nothing. The buildings were empty. A test site.

A mock site.

A lie.

Just like the whole thing.

The Village.

The Bunker.

The Mehari.

Lies.

I’m Going Crazy.

Something tells me, in the back of my head, that I’m a lie.