ANALYZING… FILE TYPE: Personal Log PERIOD: Unknown SPEAKERS: "Jasper" [ID: JASP] TOPIC: Survival Advice SUMMARY: A recording of a survivor after New Cascadia's collapse and abandonment. Colonist voiceprint cannot be precisely matched to New Cascadia records, and could be one of several individuals using the name "Jasper." =================================================================== [whirring] JASP: CyAc original, battery half-life of three hundred years. Jasper here. Don't… know if anyone will ever hear this. Still, I gotta try. JASP: Go further out. Stand on the spot you imagine the horizon line is and look back. You shouldn't even be able to see Marsh glow. Hunting's decent out there in the wilderness. JASP: Ticks are less aggressive, but… god am I sick of living off birds and bugs. Real meat's chewy; the fibers get stuck in your teeth. Mom didn't tell me that. I guess because nobody told her either. JASP: I just… I'm gonna say it. Reed's boys are gone too, so there's nobody to shoot me for sedition. Universe is a big damn place. What are the odds, huh? JASP: "A new home for humanity," they called it—my mother and my mother's mother. "Tau Ceti IV, the promised land." Tens of thousands of ordinary people gave up everyone and everything they ever knew just for a chance at something better. JASP: And for a while, it is… better. Then, one day… boom, Marathon goes dark, nobody talks. UESC gets real testy if you try. JASP: Reed says Galea's dead. So's her successor, and her successor's successor. So they put Caruso in charge. And what happens under President Caruso? JASP: Weird energy fields erupt across the planet's surface. Crops get sick. People get sick. Crops die. People die, some because of the contagion, others because… JASP: Because… JASP: I'd point the finger at Caruso, but he was just the fall guy. We were set up. Three hundred years ago, when Earth pointed the Marathon out here… we were all set up. [beeps, whir] JASP: I know, even I think I sound crazy. But you're all gone, and I'm living off bugs; crazy's the new normal. Please… Please, if anyone is still out there… JASP: I can't die alone. =================================================================== TYPE: TEXT [X]; AUDIO [X]