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An Angel’s Descent
What follows is an unredacted copy of a transcribed, redacted personal audio log believed to have once belonged to the Rebel Commander, pre-Ascendancy.
This document is classified at level Zenith. Unauthorized receipt or redistribution of this document carries the penalty of death.
Cycle *, Galactic Date **.***.*
Dear burning pile of trash,
I’m a busy man. I’ve got more important things to do than record this. But I’ve been advised that, in this crucial time, when humanity is deciding whether or not to commit mass-suicide, someone in the know ought to set the record straight. I agree.
I’ve seen enough to predict the historians won’t get it right. I know this because no one is better at pattern recognition than me. Like every field I’ve picked up and mastered, I see the holes, the unwritten missing parts. Historian reading this, you’ll try your best, and you’ll get so close. But not close enough, not enough to bring it to life, not enough for everyone who needs to hear it to care.
After all, the intent of this log is to help teach a lesson. A mistake must be corrected and never repeated.
Oh, if you’re a historian reading this, one additional thing: I hope you’re not dead with screws for brains. If you are, I’m sorry I failed you. But it’s really your own damn fault, isn’t it?
These entries will be rare. They will not be a daily monotony of mundane details. I’ve got things to do and I’m already tired of this.
End log.
Cycle *, Galactic Date **.***.*
Stardate whatever:
They promise immortality, a life free from disease and hardship.
They mill in the streets, never sleeping, always searching, reaching out to you like zombies from so many old horror productions, asking you to join their ranks.
But they’re not zombies; they’re worse. They’re beautiful. Intelligent. Immune to the passage of time. Breathing but unable to suffocate. Sunbathing without ever risking skin cancer.
It’s all based on a lie. The mass of the converted don’t lie, no. Believers in a lie are just sharing their personal truth. But it doesn’t change that, ultimately, everything they are is one big lie.
None of what they have is for you.
The metal ones may look like the men and women they once were. They’ll even claim they haven’t changed on the inside. But their… “templates” are based on victims who died. Died of “Descent” (I refuse to call it Ascent like they do).
They’re doppelgangers, and sad ones at that. You don’t become one, for conversion is a lie. The painful procedure of “Descent” is part of the trick. A small, easily paid-for cost. No one would believe you could have something so great for free.
Descent is death. Death is not even the worst part. You mentally necrotize and give birth to an unliving disease. A new individual – a walking, talking, persuasive virus that convinces others to die the same way you did. You’re gone, you cease to exist, and a deranged little metal puppet replaces you.
The end.
Cycle *, Galactic Date **.***.*
Turn this on.
I’ve been asked too many times what the hell is going on. Journal, you deserve an explanation even less than even the most random ignoramus walking up to me, but you might have bigger reach, so I’ll slow down a second and explain it to you just once:
How do I know “Descendency” is death? I won’t preach to you about God or the sanctity of souls like the priests. Nor will I propagandize you like the politicians or what we call the news. I’ll give it to you straight.
It's simple. Here it is: there was a person, a living, breathing person. A procedure happens. Now the body of that person is a dead and empty husk. Some “Descent” procedures chop your body to ribbons, or blend it to dust, whatever, but before that there’s that brief period of a cooling corpse. Next to them a machine blinks awake, turns to you, and smiles with false metal teeth.
Now some of you reading this might wax philosophical or argue technological.
To the former: your words are meaningless. Belief and perspective depend entirely on your subjective experience and what language you speak. Get out of your own head and take a real look. I speak more languages with more fluency and understanding than the swiftest and latest AI models, so don’t try to “word” at me. I’m impossible to confuse.
To you tech enthusiasts and other know-it-alls, I have pretty much the same message. I don’t want to hear about magnets, radiation, quarks, boson interactions or any of that noise. Trust me when I say that for most of you, I’ve already learned more about your field from a month’s study than you will learn your entire career. I can guarantee I was bored by the end, otherwise I would have stood your field up on its end with new revolutionary discoveries, instead of the half-dozen fields I found to be more fun.
Very smart people proved the existence of an imprint, a self-awareness existing below the quantum layer where we never looked before.
I agree with the consensus they generated just in part: it was funny when the scientific mission to kill or explain God achieved neither. Science proved the existence of a “soul,” and more things have “souls” than we could have guessed. That’s great. It’s all very interesting. But it’s besides the point.
You all claim we possess the means to lift these souls intact from a living body and place it in a machine. False.
Oh, there’s a transfer alright. **** ******* *** * **** ***. ** ***** **** * ***** ****** *****. ********** **** *** ******* ** ***** ******** ***. *** ** ******* ******. ** ***** *** ****** *** ****** ***.
You know what happens when the wolf gets the lamb alone to itself, right? Teeth sink in. Muscle tears, marrow goes crunch, a bloody mess. There’s your “transfer” you describe, sucked straight from the lamb’s bones into the wolf’s belly. You thought technology somehow changed this basic principle?
Humanity convinced itself it’s the wolf it’s feeding itself to. It’s pure desperation.
We’re fortunate to live in a golden age. Enjoy the centuries allotted to you. Don’t destroy it in pursuit of more.
I don’t think I’ll say more on this. Analogies are never convincing, anyway. If you could get it, you’d already understand, and no one would need to fight a war.
That’s right. War is coming.
Turn this off.
Cycle **, Galactic Date **.***.*
Start.
Why does a liar lie? Power.
I may be a genius, but I don’t understand why this needs to be said.
End-
Wait, wait, wait… Okay, I’ll say a little more.
They tell me I should be head honcho because I called this what it was before anyone else.
Also, I’ve killed a lot of these “Descendents.” I’m no general, and it was just self-defense. But I did it in ways no one had ever thought of before – much like everything else I do, when it’s something of consequence.
They don’t all know it yet, but I already run the damn thing. The war, I mean. The official request for me to take charge was surprising, though. I hadn’t expected to come into the limelight so soon, and it’s a little bit hilarious for reasons I don’t have time to get into.
I only run one side of it, for now: the human side. Eventually I’ll run both sides of the conflict. I’m not about to let my enemies have any say how they do things - that’s not my preferred method of problem-solving. I will dictate their actions to them before long. It’s the only way to prevent this conflict from spiraling up to genocidal levels.
I could have ended this before it began, but I don’t regret procrastinating. I’m not going to live forever and that’s how long this particular lesson needs to last: forever. Humanity doesn’t learn a lesson like this by talking at it. It will learn this one from one source only: trauma.
I’ll do what it takes to avoid a species-ending slaughter. We’ll all prefer a slow-burning grind of attrition.
Bye now.
Cycle **, Galactic Date **.***.*
You weren’t recording yet? I said: “Record!”
Fine, I’ll start over.
The far-flung factions of the “human resistance” can’t agree on a name. This is the first thing that needs to change.
I’d like to say I put a lot of thought into this, but I haven’t.
I don’t really like people, but I like humanity. I can’t help it – I am one after all. And I rebel against the idea of it committing mass suicide.
“Rebels” it is.
…
My first act, as the galaxy’s first official Rebel, is to end this log.
Cycle *, Galactic Date **.***.*
Hey log,
I know you’re always listening, stop pretending for a minute and write this down:
The more I win, the more my enemy shows his true colors.
I gave one of those speeches. You know, the immortal kind, the one you give at a turning point of a big event. I named the enemy a “Cabal”, because that’s what they are. The name stuck so hard they use it on themselves, now. I told you I would be running both sides.
I won’t describe the speech. I’m sure even if humanity somehow loses this, the speech will be preserved by these unalive Cabal dupes long into posterity. If you’re an unalive guy reading this, I hope you’re very ashamed of what you are, because I’m about to tell you: you’re a slave.
The Cabal only has a few real players, all hiding in the background. They’re every bit as dead as their subjects. Sad, debauched metal imitations of their former human selves. But unlike their willing slaves, they “Descended” early and held onto their power beyond the grave.
If you’re reading this, dead guy, go try publicly insulting one of them. Oh wait, you can’t. That suggestion probably evaporated from your toaster-brain the moment you read it.
The Cabal knows how easy a metal head is to reconfigure. Way easier than an organic one – after billions of years of evolution, meaty brains resist inordinate tampering, usually by malfunctioning or ceasing to function. Unlike humanity’s improvised creations, mother nature learned a couple important lessons like this one: sudden, massive change to your species is a bad idea. We’re talking extinction bad. Momma earth produced results through trial and error. Meanwhile, we hubristic little monkeys invent and create whatever fancies our whimsy at the current moment.
Okay, whether you’re a dead guy reading this or not, I’ve got a war to go fight. I probably won’t make another entry until that’s over.
End log.
Cycle *, Galactic Date **.***.*
Dear, dear diary,
I’m not sure I will fight much longer.
I didn’t lose against the machines. I mean, truthfully, I’m getting my ass beat militarily for the moment. But that isn’t the part that matters.
I lost humanity. Humanity lost its humanity.
Everyone is going to die in a fire. I’m talking quadrillions of people.
I made it my mission to limit the casualties. My mistake. I should have gone total war, won this thing in the first couple years. I focused too much on the lesson, and not enough on the student.
Those party-fuckers that run the Cabal, the Penis Lords – I mean Primus Lords – they took a break from their harems and… well, I’d like to theorize they do other things, but I think they just spend all their free time in their harems. They somehow found enough time outside that main daily activity to go and give a few shits and get some actual shit done.
What shit is this? They built a general. A damn good one.
They call it their “Commander.” As soon as I knew of it, I tried to put a stop to it. You know me, I see patterns and figure things out early, sometimes before those who actually do a thing even start thinking about doing it.
I make mistakes. I’m not perfect. I tried to kill this “Commander” it before it could be born. But for the first time in my life, when it really mattered, I miscalculated in a way that can’t be fixed. I couldn’t have predicted an abomination such as this could ever exist.
It’s shameful to admit losing to it. I’ve fought against AI – and I mean real AI, the kind that uses a whole planetary surface for computation. That is easy to beat. We have our own AI, of course, no better than theirs, but it shores up our human limitations. AI processes the obvious implications of an action at levels beyond our comprehension, and our – mostly, my – genius, creativity, and pattern recognition do the rest.
No matter how outnumbered, how outgunned, or otherwise outclassed, we came out on top because we were better decision makers than them.
Not anymore. This isn’t AI we’re fighting. AI is involved, but it’s more than that.
The first thing the “Commander” did was kill all my spies. I don’t need spies to win, that’s not the problem. It’s how it killed the spies that’s the problem. Whenever something leaked, it blew up the whole planet. You don’t have to wonder who ratted on you when everyone’s dead.
It’s sad. It’s like losing to a committee. This horror, 4,000 minds working in some kind of gestalt, isn’t smarter than me. It’s just more demonic, more methodical, more patient. It’s human in some ways, but endowed with a hellish utilitarian stoicism no living person can match.
I’m a bastard. I’m the worst kind of bastard. But I’ve been outdone.
The dreadful thing is principled. Honorable even, in its own twisted way. It’s a façade, of course, a gimmick persona it employs for success. It only seems so smart because, underneath, its utterly devoid of humanity. It’s government in its penultimate form – it makes billions of human decisions a day without a traditional administration’s usual lethargic inefficiency.
They finally distilled the pure essence of the cosmos in this thing. The very universe’s uncaring, impregnable might. Mother nature has nothing against that. You can’t evolve your way out of a collapsing neutron star.
This time, science really did kill God, then replaced him with a one-man bureaucracy.
This “Commander” did what I refused to do. Went total war. Everyone is dead, or about to die. I’ll spare you the strategic details, and just mention it annihilated over 90% of its own people and territory in the process.
In the relentless face of such overwhelming might, one usually surrenders. Surrender is a profound act, not just for survival, but a last-ditch effort to preserve a little bit of your culture. Your people. Your future.
But there’s nothing to surrender to, nothing to surrender with. Surrender and moving on requires having humans on both sides. A human conqueror and a human subjugated.
You can’t do this when humanity is done.
The war isn’t over yet. I can save some people, but only at dreadful cost to others. Do not envy me the power of this choice.
This could be my final entry.
End log.
Cycle **, Galactic Date **.***.*
Open log,
I just remembered I still carry this thing. It’s been a while. Ten years? Twenty? I can’t recall the year it was I quit.
I don’t care about posterity anymore. It won’t have humans in it, so history can go fuck itself. But none of that is your business.
I turned this on to talk about her.
It was a little surprising to find out the Rebels still held on so long, that they still continued the fight I started. I’m also intrigued by how the hell they found me. It probably took the work of many people. But she’s the only one who actually came.
The thing I first liked about her is she didn’t insult my intelligence. Everyone thinks they know how smart I am, but their imaginations almost always fall short. Not her. At our very first meeting, she admitted immediately that she was an agent sent to find me and bring me back by any and all means. She’s not tried lying to me even once.
Her “means” for executing her mission are obvious and didn’t need saying. She’s hot as fuck. I’m not just talking physical beauty – she has plenty of that, sure – but she’s like a queen and a princess and a mother and an angel and a child all wrapped in one. The way she moves, the way her mind works, her perspective on things, her capacity for a soft touch or sudden shocking violence. She could kill me in my sleep – in her sleep, if that had been her mission. She’s a wonder to behold.
I’m not blinded by her. I know this is working on me because of my desperation. By some freak accident, I’ve been blessed with the most incredible and sophisticated brain humanity has ever seen, yet this woman’s inner workings are an enigma to me.
I can’t help it. I want to spend the rest of my – and humanity’s – cursed, soon-to-end existence figuring her out.
End log.
Cycle *, Galactic Date **.***.*
Start log, damn it!
The fucking bitch!
We had it good!
I convinced her to give up like I did. Pass away the years we had left, willfully ignorant of the ongoing galactic horror.
Hell, we might have lived to be two hundred. Die in our sleep before they found us. Maybe never see it coming if they did somehow find us.
But that just wasn’t good enough for her!
She didn’t want to keep being pathetic like me.
Fucking bitch. She broke free. My carefully constructed prison of self-pity meant nothing to her.
She fucking—
Wait. Let me back up. Compose myself.
*Log timeout*
Cycle *, Galactic Date **.***.*
Resume log.
I’m smarter than her, but she outplayed me. At the game I’m best at, no less. Better than anyone, I thought, until now.
She loves humanity more than I do. Did.
It started a month ago. She got restless, started closing up.
I’m the most controlling person in the world. I was born to be good at that. But when you love someone, truly love them, you can’t control them anymore. That’s not what love is. Only those of you who’ve been cursed by true love will understand that.
When I found out there was a problem, I didn’t know what to do. I tried just talking to her. She’d talk back, but suavely ignore the real issues. I’d get upset. Start yelling. She’d get quieter and quieter.
I learned to quit doing the yelling thing, but I couldn’t let go of it. Instead, I poured all my energy into making her happy. Things got better for a little while. We rekindled our love, got married, honeymooned through humankind’s twilight years.
Then, one day, she’s gone. I find a note written in her silken hand: “I’ll make you understand.”
She waited until the happiest time of my life to tear me down!
I blew my top. Destroyed a few things. Destroyed a couple rooms, maybe. An hour later, I launched the hunt. I didn’t care about anonymity anymore. I started emptying my hidden caches. Calling in old favors. Figured she’d gone back to the Rebels.
They didn’t have her.
The Cabs got her. She went to them willingly!
She converted!
She’s a fucking screwhead now!
Why?!
*Yelling*
*Crashing sounds*
*Log timeout*
Cycle *, Galactic Date **.***.*
Open log,
…
Don’t time out, I’m ready.
With a little help, I recovered her. Her unalived body, that is.
Good people died for this. Sacrificed themselves not to push back humanity’s extinction, but for me. Died for my selfish pursuit.
The Cabal took her deep into their territory. But when we attacked, they *** ** ***
. More fool them. Whatever ploy they hoped to achieve by that, I’m immune to it.
I finally laid eyes on her. She looks exactly the same. I mean, a few things changed: her skin is silver, and her hair is red like rust now, and she’s dead.
Now, normally, I’d call this moving corpse of a woman a copy. An imitation. A puppet.
But I can’t. I can’t be objective. Not when it’s her.
My wife is still in there, somehow. I feel all the same things towards this metal version of her that I did when she was still human.
I know why she did it now. She wanted to show me the emotional cost of my inaction. She wanted to show me in a way no one else could, what this techno-plague was doing to not just the species, but to people. To individuals. To husbands. Fathers. Daughters.
She wanted to show me that humanity still exists. Still matters.
I’m not just imagining this. She told me herself – that she converted to light a fire under my ass.
The part she didn’t plan for, though, is the effect this would have on her. Now her tune has changed. She wants me to “Descend” too.
Just like that, she forgot everything she fought so hard for. Died for.
“Join me!” she begged.
She wants me to live forever with her.
There are no limiters in her brain. I inspected it myself. The Cabal didn’t tinker with her mind, not even the tiniest bit.
She forgot why she did this her own damn self.
I have not forgotten.
She’s won. Her mission succeeded. I remember what’s important, now.
Fuck fate. I’m back, win or lose.
She may never forgive me for what I’m about to do.
End log.
Cycle **, Galactic Date **.***.*
Open log,
I’ve returned to command of a galaxy on the brink of total annihilation.
Space travel isn’t really a thing anymore. To escape destruction, the planets that are still populated have towed their transit gates out of space and down to gravitational bodies. Mostly planets with thick atmospheres.
Gates are big. Some people didn’t want their gates landed. There have been accidents. Entire worlds are burning.
A gutsy move, and the kind of merciless, calculating bullshit I’m known for. But I can’t take credit for this particular atrocity. The Rebels did it without me, and the Cabal responded in kind.
It proved wise. Planet-slaying interstellar vessels aren’t the medium through which this war is fought now. Drones are obsolete, too, with cheap electronic countermeasures surviving the general technological degradation better than our ability to produce sufficiently hardened intelligences.
We’ve knocked ourselves back to the stone age. It’s down to gritty battles on land, sea, air, and orbit. Man and post-man, face to face, shooting and strangling each other in the mud.
I made a deal with the Rebels. They give me my wife back. Fixed. Human. Meanwhile, I’ll fight their war for them, again.
My war, again.
I could figure out how to fix her myself, but the war has to take precedence. It takes every waking moment of my day just to stall the end, to bring us to a stalemate. I’ve allowed lesser minds to work the problem of reverting my wife’s conversion.
She hates me now. She tries to break out of containment every day, has killed personnel at the facility. Murders anyone she gets her hands on - mostly scientists taking samples. She hasn’t lost any of her moves, and the conversion just made her stronger. The security arrangements have seen three renovations so far, and the scientists use interns who draw lots for sample-taking duty.
Maybe if I win the war, she’ll learn to love me again. It’s a vain, selfish hope, but it’s the best I can do. Maybe when she is human again, she’ll remember why she converted in the first place. Remember why she loved me.
Humanity is worth saving. She taught me that.
If I don’t do it for her, I can at least do it in her memory.
End log.
Cycle **, Galactic Date **.***.*
Open log!
They succeeded!
My wife is back. She’s really back! She’s human again. Human, capital H!
I just spent the whole day with her. The night, too.
I love her so much.
I’m so happy. I just want the world to know.
Failing that, I’ll just tell you, journal.
I hadn’t realized how much I needed this. I’m ready to take on the world. The galaxy.
Nothing can stop me now.
End log.
Cycle **, Galactic Date **.***.*
Log…
It’s been almost ******* *****
since my last entry.
The moment my lips first touched hers again, I knew I had to win this thing. That I could win it. This war.
I allowed myself a full day with her, her first day back. It was a long time ago, but I remember how wonderful it was, every moment of it. We celebrated like lovers do. She seemed every bit as happy as I was.
The next morning, I told her I had to go. I’d visit occasionally, an hour here or there. She understood.
There were signs something was wrong that first day. I noticed, but I was too happy to care.
I dismissed these oddities of hers as anomalies. Fixable errors created by the procedure, things that might heal. Besides, beyond that first meet, during the rare times I could escape from the war, those little quirks of hers seemed to have disappeared. The warning signs had all been erased.
My last visit has undone this illusion.
Her hair is ****** ***.
Her eyes are **** ****.
She refers to herself not by her name, but ** **** ****** *** ****** ***** **** ** ************* ***.
She is not my wife. She’s ** ********.
Yet somehow, my wife is still here.
**** **** ******* ** ******** ******* ** *********.
* ******** ** ********* ** ********** ** ****** *****. *** *** **** *** ** **** *** ********? *** *** *** ********* ******* **********? *** *** **** **** **** **** ** *** ** ******** ***, *** *** ** ****?
Apparently, when they reversed the conversion, there was no way they could tell. Her strange behavior was explained as some kind of scrambling effect, a consequence of imperfect reverse engineering. Close enough to the original organic brain patterns, just in need of some attunement.
So they “fixed” that. Artificially as it turns out, and *********** *** ** ** **** ** **** - *** ******.
***** **** ** ******** *** ****** * ****** *********,
it’s objectively impressive how easily she fooled me. Most of all, she fooled herself, albeit with professional help amidst a grand conspiracy.
But their “unscrambling” degraded. She’s back to the way she “should” be. And she remembers everything. *** ******** ********,
and her own.
** ********, *** *** ****,
says she forgives me. Insists I’m blameless. But that doesn’t change the fact *** *** ** ********** ************.
I don’t much care that I’ve been hoodwinked. *** * ********* ***,
and I ought to be taken out back and shot.
Sadly I’m too important to die. I don’t have the courage to bring myself to justice, and no one else will dare.
**** ********.
He’s the man most responsible for the deceit. He’s on the run. I do not have the resources to hunt him down and exact retribution. It would be a morale-killer, anyhow. He’s the ************ *** *********, ** *** ***** ** ******* **, *** ** *********** ** ** **** ******* ** ******** ***** ******** *******.
Even now, I don’t doubt his commitment to humanity’s ultimate victory, despite rumors he’s **** **** ***** *********.
He is also the main author of a technology we believe will end the war for good. Fortunately, he and his colleagues already finished development of the prototype before his escape. This device is a universal singleton, meaning it cannot be duplicated, its uniqueness being an intrinsic property of the technology involved. The Cabal will never have one because we made it first. Theoretically, the entire universe cannot make another one – humans finally have concrete proof that they’re special.
It's called the ***** ******
, and it ******** *** ****** ******* ********.
It’s workings are more complicated than that, and certain laws of conservation cannot be violated, but this description sums it up well enough.
While further experimentation is required to manipulate events beyond this constraint, plans are already in place to put the ***** ******
to use. On me.
My wife, my one true love. I learned she didn’t know *** *** **** *****.
And she doesn’t need to know that they **** ********* *** ******** *** **** *** ** *** ****** *** ***.
She’s been through enough, and she couldn’t possibly hate me more than she does already. I hope she never learns what happened. I can’t bring myself face her again, much less tell her what I did.
End log.
Cycle **, Galactic Date **.***.*
My wife escaped. Fled back to the Cabal.
In my despair at having failed her, I sincerely forgot my people still held her captive. I must have blocked it out, told myself she was dead after **** *** *** ******** *** ** ***.
My wife must have enchanted someone. Charmed some poor fool into freeing her and giving her the run of the place. Knowing her, this co-conspirator was certainly the first to die.
She killed a total of thirteen other people on her way out, including the new top scientist. ********’s
replacement. Sorry lady, I never learned your name. I’m sure my wife wished it had been ****’s
fragile neck in her hands when she snapped it, not yours.
My best people immediately offered to hunt her down a second time, had already started working out the search plan before I’d heard the news. I put a stop to that right away. There’s no point now.
I think hearing me say that crushed their hearts a little. Too bad I can’t turn pity into bullets.
Work on the ***** ******
continues.
End log.
Cycle **, Galactic Date **.***.*
Open log,
This will be my final entry.
I’ve always known I was a bastard, but recent events proved there’s always a new low. Where others hit rock bottom, I found a new way to dig. Yes, I’m talking about ************* *** *** ******** ****** ** *** ****.
This is why I agreed to fuse with the ***** ******
.
I won’t be the same after its installation. It’s hard to say which is which, does it install in me, or am I installed in it? Either way, we will become inseparable.
I shudder to think what possible role I could have in a post-war galaxy. I will become an avatar of the apocalypse, a sword that can never be resheathed. Can there be peace in a universe where such a horrible thing exists?
This is a problem that future generations will have to fix. For humanity, I believe in victory at all costs.
Once combined, we will be slapped into the last surviving Archangel frame. You know, the uniquely famous garrison warbot known for its lone-wolf, scorched earth design philosophy. It’s the apex of what they deem cutting edge technology now – I know, don’t laugh.
But it’s tough. Nearly impossible to destroy, holds back the foe with its incredible combat prowess, and, equally important, holds an entire planet hostage with its hefty antimatter power system, including a blindingly spectacular fail-state.
I’ve controlled warbots like this before, but never with any intention of engaging directly in the fighting. Back in the day, when humanity still called the better part of the galaxy its home, the stakes were too big and far-flung for me to waste my time with the dirty work of shooting a gun. I couldn’t be bothered, not even for morale reasons.
But now we’ve blown ourselves back to the stone age. When times a’changin’, so must we. I’ll stride into combat like a proper warlord now, waving my sword at the head of a barbarian host, stomping our spears on the ground and clanging our fists upon our shields.
I wish I was joking about that last part.
If the ***** ******
doesn’t work as advertised, at least I’ll go out with a bang. Nothing in a 45,000-kilometer radius will survive an explosion like that. I’m not planning on dying, but I can’t argue with the blissful ignorance of never knowing what hit me.
I’m committed to saving humanity, but after recent events, a small part of me hopes this doesn’t work.
This is ***** **** ****, signing off for the last time. I’ll never be me again.
Goodbye forever.
End log.
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