ANALYZING… FILE TYPE: Personal Log PERIOD: Colony Era SPEAKERS: Kuzmin, I. [ID: IKUZ] TOPIC: Complications at the Perimeter Expansion Site SUMMARY: Terra-platforming engineer Izaak Kuzmin seems to be having a breakdown. =================================================================== [IKUZ]: After the relays went up… We should've known. We should've… left. The Zone. The planet. That much data. That much… untranslated information. We know planets… I know planets. How they work. What's inside. Only, yeah… Only, maybe, this one's different. This one's not like ours. Not like anything we've ever considered. And instead of respecting that. Instead of acknowledging, ya know, that maybe we aren't prepared to poke at answers we don't even know how to ask. Instead of anything else… We built towers to the goddamn sky to steal impossible data from the heart of a world we thought we'd conquered. We could've stopped. We should've… Once one relay was not enough. Once… But they were scared. Leadership… Colony Command… They pushed for answers. They pushed to understand something more than we can understand. I saw… I did… I saw the readings. I warned them. It was too much. It's not… Far as I know… Far as anyone could say… It's not natural. Not to us. Not to anything we know about the universe. Someone called it an anomaly—the readings. An anomaly. That's it. But that's too small. Too obvious. It's… This… Whatever it is… Whatever these readings are telling us… is more than an irregularity. It's not an error in physics. It's new… It's new goddamn physics. Imagine that. I can't. It's everything we pretended wouldn't bite us in the ass. It's the unknown. It's the alien. It's the universe saying, "you're too small and too stupid to be here." It's this planet telling us to "go home." And we built towers to steal the unknown from a planet we thought we owned. And we sent that data to the stars. Because we thought … I guess… we thought we could understand it…? Control it? It was a resource to mine and manipulate, not a warning. Now the dreams won't stop, and I can still hear Rylla screaming in the static of the signal stacks. =================================================================== TYPE: TEXT [X]; AUDIO [ ]