Sometimes I feel like I'm lost in a desert
And every dune is the same as the other
I see my footprints in the sand
So I know where I've been
And these steps I take won't go to waste
If I'm moving towards something

New Discovery – The Crane Wives

Elsie Bray Log 04052961L

I've concluded my investigation into the most recent reset. Fish has been extremely helpful, as always.

I just don't know what went wrong. The previous timelines have always ended with a catastrophic failure. Destruction and ruin on a system-wide level. I've poured over my memories of the last few days of that loop, but I can't find a single thing out of place. I hadn't been keeping the best of tabs on the City the past few years, but I don't see how things could have gone so wrong so quickly. I had people in place that would have warned me if there were corrupted Guardians or problems with the Traveler.

I don't like not knowing my enemy. I'll have to keep a much closer eye on things. No more years-long exiles to Europa. It was a doomed idea in any case- I can't kill Eramis by myself. I'll need help.

Even more concerning: the timeline did not reset back to its usual spot. Every other reset, I've gone back to October Thirty-First, 2938. This time, it was June Fourth, 2960. Less than sixteen months back- it should have been twenty-three years. Why did things change? Why June Fourth? Why now?

I suppose I should be asking why I used to go back to October Thirty-First. Always back to that damn parade, with that damned Hunter. Even after all these loops, I'm still no closer to figuring out why any of this is happening.

I even looked into what Cayde-6 was doing this time, when the reset happened. He was on a mission in the Reef. It ended badly, but he seems to have survived just fine. Is anything actually connected to him? He's died in most of the timelines- surely not. It must be a coincidence.

I'm cautious to become too optimistic, but this last loop was the best I'd seen so far. The Black Heart destroyed, with no lingering corruption I could find. The City even survived the Red Legion's invasion and freed the Traveler.

My thoughts keep going back to that Guardian. That Awoken I met in the Ishtar Academy, the one that killed the Black Heart. They're the key to all of this. I should go find them again.

No, first I need to get back to Europa. I can get things moving there much more quickly this time, with the foreknowledge I have. I'll talk to Eris Morn again, when she emerges.

I can't afford to be sloppy. The future is never guaranteed- even less so now. I need to know more. Do better.

Manual to My Enormous Fuck-Up:

A treatise by Azra Jax

This thing will never get published unless I die. So hello, future people! Come to find out how I messed up and kicked it (probably)? You're certainly not reading this for my scientific prose. I wonder what journal this ended up in.

A little background: in two words, time travel. There was one timeline, which got aborted through some Ahamkara Wish Magic Bullshit, sending me (and only me) back about sixteen months. Just my consciousness. This did several things, most notably causing a split in the timeline, or an alternate branch.

I didn't even think splits or alternates were actually possible, until recently. Yeah, we can see reflections and echoes of different possibilities- the Paracausal nature of Light and Darkness does some weird stuff when it comes to cannon reality- but not actual splits. The stuff we pick up from the edges should just be reflection and refraction of the true timeline. It's the same basic stuff all shuffled up and bent and put back. Even the strongest Vex Simulation is built out of the substance of our reality.

But this can't just be a reflection of a really powerful echo. I had Praedyth check it out, and he's reached the same conclusions that I did. I am from a different timeline. Me coming back caused a hard split, since it introduced new information into the system. And that's not even getting into the mess the Dreaming City is in…

Where was I?

Oh. So, the main problem is: I came back. My Ghost didn't. He died before the Wish was made. I wonder if he would have come back with me if he hadn't-

Not important. The reality is, there are sixteen months of memories I have that he doesn't. Our main goal is to get those back for him.

Now, with a Human, your best bet would be some, like, Thanatonautic bullshit, probably combined with the Future War Cult's very spooky and mysterious prophecy machine. Even then, you're likely to just give them a vision, without the actual substantive memories and all of the mental framework and processed emotions that would come package. If you somehow did manage to pull off injecting actual raw memories into someone's head-

Well, let's just say it wouldn't be pretty and leave it at that.

But Ghosts? Ghosts are sentient energy signatures. The Shell is like a body, the Core, a brain- it has data storage and sensors and all of the hardware and software needed for existence- but the Light is the soul. If you take the signature of Ghost A and somehow locate and fix it into Ghost B's Shell (Okay, the Core, not the spinny bits, you know what I'm getting at), you get Ghost A in Ghost B's shell. And you get an empty shell for Ghost A. And hopefully you haven't messed up Ghost B's consciousness in the process, you monster. Look up that nonsense that happened two and a half years ago with the Infinite Forest for a real-life example.

BUT! What if Ghost A and Ghost B are the same Ghost? A signature is, at its base, information. I suppose a Human consciousness is, too, our brains just aren't built to absorb and process things like that.

But a Ghost's Shell is!

So, the idea here, basically: we pull a copy of Spark, right before he died, and shove it in there with current him. The identical parts should just integrate with no adverse effects. But from the split, there'll be two sets of memories. It might take some time and processing to wholly build them into a mental framework- to remember them happening to you, not distanced like you would be watching a video- but with the vast majority of the framework being the same (my Ghost is several centuries old, after all), there shouldn't be long-term issues with it.

You might notice that this proposed plan isn't technically possible. Because Ghosts are not actually computer programs, and you cannot just copy them- there is a physical aspect to their Light. And their mental framework is not just a stored recording of everything they've experienced, where you can pick and choose what to keep and what is irrelevant.

And oh yeah also, there's the whole 'reaching into an alternate split timeline, locating one exact moment in one exact place, and somehow forcing that to interact with our current timeline' thing. That is not how causality works, even with this new paradigm. If it were that easy, the Future War Cult would be winning every lottery, and the Vex would own the Universe.

Funny enough, the impossible bit is going to be the easiest part. 'Cause I have a Vex Light Construct called the Aegis, which is really, really good at breaking causality. And a big 'ol timeline tunneling machine called the Sundial.

Really the hard part is going to be messing around with energy signatures. I'm not an expert on Ghost Thaumaturgy, though I have done a lot of reading. I'll leave you all a bibliography at the end of the report. You guys go nuts for those. But I have acquired several powerful pieces of hardware that should make the process easily.

That's about it for this introduction. I'll go into the minutiae below. I'm sorry it's not that well formatted, but hey, I'm dead. Cut me some slack.

And this is getting deleted once I'm done here, assuming I am not dead. I know some people out there who couldn't resist the temptation of mucking around in the timelines. Looking at you, Lakshmi. And you, Osiris. Leave reality alone for a bit. It's been through a lot.

Azra Jax out.