Greetings...

[sigh]

I'm not in a very good mood today, though this time it's not the weather that I blame. Nor any of you, of cause... I'm really glad you are out there, listening to me. Because if this goes on, these messages might as well become my obituary! [irregular breaths, swallowing, then a pause]

As I am alone out here, in the desert, dusty wind rattles at the hull of my ship, and when I step outside, my skin is singed by your alien sun. The landscape is serene, vast; a magnificent sight, red and brown dust and rocks and a blazing blue sky.

In space, distances are so enormous that they lose meaning; everything just blends into background an becomes a wide, cold, foreign distance.

But this, this very desert, is so alive! There are ragged bushes, bending under the wind, lizards swishing about between the rocks, and the stones and the Earth themselves resonate with the ages they have seen; being battered by wind and sudden rain, for centuries and centuries. Your world is beautiful (just as any other, perhaps, but this is the first I spend several days on alone, so perhaps that's why I like it... or perhaps because it's true what they say, and our kind is just drawn here... yes, I should tell you, because now it does not matter any more if I keep any secrets, if my ship and I will both die here... but not now, not yet, not if I can still fight).

I have to keep a bit of order in this, or my confused memories will just gush forth, like the energy which is drained by something, I don't know what. The ship is slowly bleeding to death. No matter how hard I try, no matter which systems I repair, I cannot find the leak, I cannot find the cause, she just... dies. And chances are, I will die with her. There is one thing, one last thing I can try, but I'm not ready for that yet. I linger, and I think talking to you will help be find my resolve... or to sort my thoughts, at least.

So I will begin, at the beginning of the end, as I promised, and tell you about the girl in the corridor. It was about four of your days ago, while I was watching the ship, alone. I took the chance to improve structural integrity in the upper living quarters, so the inner shields were partially down, but the outer shields were up and holding. I had to make sure of that, see, because otherwise I would have lost atmosphere, or worse, if one of the walls opened up to space during the process. The ship doesn't like me doing that, rearranging her (she prefers just to build new rooms and bend space to make everything fit, no matter how much energy that may waste), so she turns all shaky and displaces stuff. That's why I had to wait until I was alone, so I'm the only one to suffer from her tantrum. Ow! [sound of sparks flying]. No reason to let a cable fizz out on me, dear, I still haven't given up on us yet!

Anyway. I was reordering the rooms, going through the corridors checking for irregularities, when suddenly she appeared before me. I mean, she materialized, in a split second. No flicker, no fading glow or passing distortion caused by the after-effects of a transmat or something. She was just there. One moment, nothing but an empty corridor, and the next, there was a girl, falling backwards as if she missed a step on a stair. She hit the floor, bottom first, with a dull thud, got all teary-eyed, and then she saw me, just as I dropped my tool box, spilling its contents all over the floor.

I must admit I wasn't all too eloquent in addressing her, and since I could not exclude the possibility of her being a threat – popping into a shielded ship and all – I reached for something I had just wielded a moment before, something I knew to be lying on top of the pile of tools. I was never good at threatening people, so I just pointed it at her, and she raised both hands in a universal gesture of capitulation, claiming – without crying, i give her credit for that – she had just been travelling with a friend, missed a step on a stair, and appeared in my ship. She seemed to believe her friend would appear any moment to pick her up... and then she realized what I was holding, which was not, as I intended, a blowtorch. It was a dentist's periscope.

We got over that surprise, and I persuaded her to accompany me to the control room. Upon arrival, however, she went as pale as a sheet, mumbled something like "impossible" and stated screaming nonsense about me giving her drugs, trying to extract information, and how I could dare, and something about her friend being either terribly upset or terribly angry, or possibly both. At that point, I had enough of her, and the ship didn't seem to like her much either, so we put her in a stasis field and called back the others.

When all were assembled, we discussed what to do with her... You know, now I think if I hadn't been so rash... If I had been patient, if I had tried to talk to her, to find out what her story was... But now it's too late to ponder on that.

I remember every second of that last scene. The girl, frozen in a split second, hovering in her stasis beam. The diplomat, whom I have never seen wearing anything but black, his face only inches away, studying her. The mechanic, my master, scanning her with his... well, he calls it a wrench, but it's more like a multifunctional diagnosis tool; his dark eyes almost closed. My dear Light in her red ballroom dress (because I had snatched her away from a posh dance party on some space cruiser), working the medical console. She is only a few years older than me, but we grew up in the same orphanage, having lost our parents in the great war, and she practically raised me... Then there were our two main pilots, him leaning on the railing, her watching the diplomat (her husband) and the girl with profound worry. And the musketeer of cause, who also stood at the railing, but this arms were folded and he looked as unperturbed as ever, despite wearing some ragged clothes because I had pulled him directly from an underground wrestling match or something.

There we were, when suddenly the engine's humming slowed down, the lights began to fade, and a strange howling echoed through the control room. I ran over to my part of the console, punched the shield oscillators some notches higher, and then the whole ship began to tremble and to screech in a way I have never heard her before, and everything went white before my eyes, and then we were falling, falling, tumbling through space, and when I came to, I was alone, the ship was badly damaged, and they were all gone. The girl, the light, my friends, everyone.

I called out to you, and what strange fate is it that we ended up here, of all places...

Now, no matter what I do, the energy levels keep dropping. Before long, my ship will be dead, and then, seeing this is a desolate, lonely place far from any human settlement, I will soon follow.

The only thing I can do now, the only thing left, is to link up with her directly. If I connect my consciousness with her operating system, the matrix consciousness if you will, she might be able to tell me what is wrong with her. But she is a five-dimensional engine; she does not exist in linear time, and letting that into my head may as well kill me, or drive me insane.

If only Zephy were here. He is the real mechanic, he would know how to do this correctly. If only any of them were here. But they are gone, beyond my reach – I am beyond their help. So I sit here, in the gathering darkness as the lights begin to fade, in the rising heat as the atmospheric control slips away, listening to the sound of my own voice, echoing through the shadowy dome this control room has become.

Time is running short. I have to decide. Thank you for being with me, and good bye.

[click.]