AGT Stardate 3739.01.02- 3740.01.03 (Feb 1, 2023-Mar 1, 2024)

Lore By iGravemind

For some explorers, the idea of discovery allures. For others, it’s the journey of discovery itself that captivates the mind. For a young man in the Euclid galaxy, exploration was a means to an end. It was the idea of finding a new place, a new home, far away from the poverty he knew all too well. Exploration was a tool. But nobody really explored. Nobody he knew, anyway.

But what prompted such a thought? All he knew was survival. The second skin he was born in needed fuel but he had no real concept of what a ‘fuel’ was, or where to find it. But this second skin was unlike him in that it was not flesh, or bone, or muscle and blood. It was alloys, cables, coolant, membrane, and machine.

“Oxygen levels depleting.” A monotone voice rang out. At first, he thought it must have been his creator. But this voice was slow, methodical, and commanding. It wasn’t telling him anything directly, but rather, that whatever an ‘oxygen’ was, it was lessening. This seemed like it needed fixing. That was when a plume of smoke was visible from beyond the crest of the hill immediately to his front.

It was at that point in his journey that he realised his memory was lacking. He had an understanding of concepts. He understood what a memory was, what metal, bone, and muscle was. He was beginning to recall the concept of fuel and oxygen; what they were, why he needed them.

So, naturally, the smoke beyond the horizon was the place he would seek answers.

Coming into the world had been confusing but his memory was drip feeding him more information by the minute, and he was learning – or, rather, relearning – quickly. It hadn’t taken him long to reach what he’d come to identify as his craft, nor to fix things to the way they’d been. This strange place was his beginning.

The Golden Moon of Sedbur, was what he’d learn this place to be called. And he remembered what he understood as home with a dichotomy of wonder. Both wonder in its natural beauty but also its violent audacity. He knew his home but he knew not of who he was, or where he came from. All he knew was this place, a violent, pristine place that – he assumed- had birthed him.

But how? Or, more crucially, why, was he birthed? And why was he so different from everyone he encountered?

The others he began to encounter across the weeks and months were unlike him in a number of profound ways. Whether it was the metallic sheen of their ‘skin’ or the logical pragmatism with which they viewed the world. And then there were the others; the travellers. The small humanoids with the beaks that horded wealth as if it were lifeblood. The huge, monstrous lifeforms that valued honour over their own lifeblood.

And not a common word shared between him and the others.

The others weren’t the most disturbing fact of this new reality. He had no memory of his adolescence, childhood or otherwise. For the longest time he didn’t possess a concept of a child, or of childhood, until meeting the others.

Finally, he left the Golden Moon of Sedbur. The distant smoke he discovered on that fateful ‘birthing’ day has been the remains of a ship. A ship that led him to the stars, to space stations, other planets, other ships, and other realities.

The flow of information kept his mind occupied for quite some time. The technologies he was re-discovering took time to master, build, and use. Through each new planet and moon he learned of new materials, new ways of thinking, and – most importantly – of the technology that would feed that innate need to explore.

The warp drive.

And so his origin, while never immediately solved, never held him back from the wonders the universe had to throw at him. The first ‘jump’ through what warp technicians called The Bulk was mesmerising. But what kept his attention was what lay on the other side of this jump; a whole new system to explore.

But at what cost?

Each new system, new planet, or new discovery led him no closer to understanding the origin of who he was, or why he was here. The memory of waking up on his birthing day gnawed at his intellect and stifled his passion for the reality he found himself within. One can only search the stars so long before realising they were deviating from the most important search of all; a search for the self.

It was by chance that the universe revealed too much to him about the nature of what is, what can be, and what will be universe – questions that could never truly be answered. He stumbled across a beacon from a crashed ship, marooned on a far-off planet, in the ‘backwaters’ of the galaxy. A beacon which read: ‘The ship was charting a course to a region known as the Keleibniug Mass, bearing the yellow insignia of some far-off alliance.'