Last view of ARC space before reaching the signal source. The view is beautiful. Mesmerizing as always.
I have found that I cannot sleep. It doesn't help that I have only a very short few hours worth of time in jump before I drop out and my first look at the source. Really a day plus a few hours. I'll still be almost a million light years from the signal source, but that should give me some indications. I'll then jump closer, but it will only be a few minutes in jump each time, and I will be far more focused on looking at data during those jumps. So I am doing my best to enjoy these last few hours of relaxation.
Kotth and Lurr have decided to let me continue this journey on my own. It is funny. That last conversation with them was so much different than anything I could have dreamed.
You see... Kotth and Lurr are actually their names, but they are anything but animals. They are in fact members of an ancient and powerful species of explorers and scientists. They are ancient themselves, tens of thousands of years old, and were exploring the wider universe much as I have been. They came across Trost before I did, several hundred years according to them. Upon noticing me, the began observing me.
They made it clear that they would not have allowed me to upgrade them, not that my upgrades hold a candle to what they have access to. I have been an object of fascination for them. How I am able to deal with things, despite being all alone. How I have my moment of alternative self, and how that other me is still me, and yet not. It seems that they deliberately presented themselves to that other me in order to be taken on by me. They were quite surprised when the other me let go and I became myself again.
They decided that they have explored enough with me, and needed to report back home to their own people. They gave me some absolutely invaluable information, which includes a map of the wider universe that I have already passed through, with universes and little systems like Home, out in the void. There are things out there that I have missed, lonely systems like Home, nebula, and other things, structures if I read the map right. Things that they are going to explore themselves.
I did ask them about the Dark Life, and they were as mystified by it as I am. It is one of the reasons that they have decided to let me know what they were, to give me the information that they have, and to return to their home to report. The Dark Life are something that needs study. More so than even I do. They did promise to find me again if they could.
They let me know approximately how long I have been gone from my original home. They don't know where it is, but they understand the ARC drive and were able to give me equations and calculations that will vastly improve my travels, and address much of the temporal deflection I have experienced. Not reverse it as happened as we passed through the Universe Nebula, but minimize it going forward. That reversal effect was just one of many reasons they are leaving me.
It is one of those things that you know, even though you don't want to know. I knew the answer, and it is possible that they might have misled me. But the equations bare out what they said, given that using what they taught me for this jump, the deflection has been less than a second, instead of several seconds as it would have been before.
There really isn't a reason for them to lie to me. The truth could be used just as easily as a lie. The effect on observations of me would provided an equal result. If anything, that fact gives me more confidence in what they have told me. That my original home world is long dead. Likely consumed in the Nova of my worlds star, and that death, from where I am now in time, happened no less than a trillion trillion years ago. They said that it is mostly due to the time with the Crew Compartment strapped to the Viteză Furie. As I already knew, the drive wasn't able to properly compensate. I was losing between a few hundred thousand and a million or so years per hour in Jump until I dropped the Crew Compartment. I did the calculation of how much time actually lost based on that, assuming a million years an hour.
By the ancients. A million years per hour....
Then again. Kotth and Lurr said that their species was trillions of years old when I left my world. So maybe my people are still out there somewhere. If so... I wonder what they are like now? Would they recognize me as some long lost cousin. As some anachronistic reminder of what they once were and have since grown beyond? Would they know me at all? Kotth and Lurr didn't know where I came from, and didn't recognize many of the places that I was able to show them from pictures taken of the ARC drive room display, or taken of places like the lightning bolt in space, and the Ultra-Violet star system. Though they certainly will keep an eye out fur such a structure, as it could give me some direction.
I am looking at the map that they gave me. Every dot on it a universe. Drawn to scale, save the size of the dots themselves, the scale of the Universe Nebula comes into focus. They said that such a structure is not unknown to them, though the previous one that their people had come across, even bigger than the one we encountered, was already quieted with massive black-holes, just as we saw the Dark Life working to move into place. Seeking, clearly now that I have that context, to seal the breach before the rupture in space goes too far.
I'm going to try and get some sleep again. Still almost a day to go.