full image - Repost: I reviewed a banned movie on TikTok. Now my reflection is lagging. (
from Reddit.com, I reviewed a banned movie on TikTok. Now my reflection is lagging.)
The movie claimed there’s an entire reptilian civilization living beneath the Earth’s surface. My review of it was my first TikTok video to break 100,000 views. But right as the video looked like it was going viral, TikTok took it down for violating their community guidelines. They put a strike on my account, too, and threatened to ban me.I’d put so much work into the account. Thousands of hours recording and editing videos, telling myself it would eventually pay off. The thought of losing my account made me feel sick.I went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. When I looked up, my reflection didn’t look back at me.For the next three seconds, I stared at the top of my head until, finally, my reflection looked up, too.Something was wrong with my face.My eyes didn’t look like mine. They looked like someone else’s.The bathroom lights flickered. I pushed my glasses back up my nose. There was a three-second delay before my reflection did the same.I tugged at my ear lobe. The same thing. Three seconds before my reflection copied my movements.“I think I’m going insane,” I said.“You’re fine, Erin,” Kacie told me. “You’re just having some kind of identity crisis.”Kacie dressed head-to-toe in black. Her face was covered with white corpse paint. We’d been friends since high school when we’d bonded over a shared love of horror movies.After my boyfriend and I broke up, Kacie was at my apartment every night for months with new horror movies to watch. If it wasn’t for her, I don’t know how I would’ve gotten through it. Since she’d dropped out of school, we’d drifted apart, but we still tried to see each other at least once a month.“Didn’t you start that TikTok account because you were bored, anyway?” Kacie asked. “You’re not bored now, are you? Maybe it’s time for you to get off that stupid app.”“But I like posting videos. It’s fun.”“It’s a waste of time. There are so many other, better things you could be doing. Studying, reading, exercising. Literally, anything else would be better than TikTok.“I caught a glimpse of my reflection in one of the movie posters, and I stopped to look at myself.I pulled my earlobe and so did my reflection. No delay.“You’re starting to check yourself out way too much, too,” Kacie said.“I’m not checking myself out. I’m still freaked out by what I saw in the mirror”“You’re imagining things.”Kacie and I had gone to see a new found footage horror movie about archaeologists exploring the lower level of The Vatican’s Necropolis. We bought drinks and popcorn and then found two empty seats in the theater’s front row.The movie was good, but I had trouble paying attention. I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened earlier.I drank my Coke way too fast and, not even halfway through the movie, I had to go to the bathroom.“I’ll be right back,” I whispered to Kacie. “Tell me if I miss anything.”I snuck out of the theater and went into the bathroom in the hall.The lights flickered, but I ignored them. I went to the bathroom and then washed my hands.“You’re tired,” I told myself. “You’re not going crazy.”I slowly looked up at the mirror, hoping I’d see myself looking back at me, but I didn’t. I saw the top of my head again.A few seconds passed and then my reflection looked up, too. Her eyes weren’t my eyes. They were cold and black, like a lizard’s eyes.I backed up towards the bathroom door. The eyes in the mirror followed me, watching me.I went back to the theater and sat beside Kacie.“Are you okay?” she asked.“It just happened again.”“The mirror thing?”“Yeah.”I felt like I was having a panic attack.Am I losing my mind? Should I check myself into a hospital?After the movie, Kacie tried to calm me down.“You’re tired,” she said. “You’re writing your midterm exams next week. You’re stressed out.”“Just let me show you what’s happening,” I said.She followed me into the bathroom.“Watch,” I told her.I turned my head to the side. My reflection did the same.I pulled at my earlobe. So did my mirror.The delay was gone.Kacie put her hand on my arm. “You need to get home and sleep.”We left the movie theater, and then I waited with her at the bus stop.“What was the TikTok video that got removed about, anyway?” she asked.“A conspiracy theory.”“What’s the conspiracy?”“That there’s an entire reptilian civilization living underneath Earth’s surface, and these reptilians are the real native species of Earth. Humans are just a genetic experiment being conducted by aliens.”“And people believe this?”“Lots of people.”“What about you?”“I think it would be terrifying if it were true. And that’s all I said in my video. What if it is real? But I guess that was enough for TikTok to remove it.”“You need to get off that dumb app.”Kacie’s bus pulled up to the sidewalk. She said goodbye and got onto it. I biked home to my apartment.I was exhausted. Kacie was right. I probably did just need some sleep. Before I went to bed, though, I brushed my teeth, and the delay was back. I picked up my toothbrush. Three seconds later, so did my reflection.I wanted to scream.I lay on my bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I picked up my phone and opened TikTok. Someone named ConspiracyDan1103 had sent me a message request. I accepted it.“Have your mirrors started acting strangely yet?” he asked.“What do you know about the mirrors?”“It’s called The Mirror Surveillance Network. You’re being evaluated.”“By who?”“It’s too dangerous to say their name here. TikTok removed your video?”“They put a strike on my account, too.”“Don’t appeal the strike. Accept it. Stop talking about them and ninety days from now, everything will go back to normal.”He deleted all our messages.I searched TikTok for the mirror surveillance network. I opened the only video that appeared in the results, and then I read the captions written over clips of expanding bathroom mirrors.“If your reflection no longer syncs with you, or if your mirrors expand or distort, you are being evaluated. But don’t panic. Remember. Reptilians are not real.”I went back to my bathroom and turned on the lights. They flickered for a second before coming to life.I walked in front of the mirror. For a moment, it stayed empty, but then my reflection walked into the mirror, too.She smiled at me.I jumped back and screamed.My reflection’s smile disappeared, but its eyes stayed the same. Those same cold, black eyes that looked at me like they wanted to murder me.“There’s no such thing as reptilians,” I said. “I don’t believe in Inner Earth.”I left the bathroom and closed the door.Before I went back to bed, I opened TikTok and accepted the strike on my account.I just wanted my life to go back to normal.***I slept through my alarm. Worried I was going to miss my class, I jumped out of bed and got ready as fast as I could. When I finally checked my phone, I had dozens of messages from Kacie.“I went down the reptilian rabbit hole last night,” she wrote. “Honestly, I’m freaking out.”She’d sent me blurred pictures of reptilians, underground cities, and strange alien technology.“I’m starting to think this all might actually be real,” she wrote.“It’s fake,” I told her. “It’s just a dumb conspiracy theory.”I biked to school. I made it to my class just in time.I didn’t check my phone again until later that afternoon. Kacie had sent me a video of herself standing in front of her bathroom mirror. She turned her head to the side and then, three seconds later, her reflection turned its head.“It’s happening to me now, too,” she wrote.I tried calling her, but she didn’t answer her phone.I biked over to the clothing store where she worked, hoping I could talk to her there, but I didn’t see her.“Where’s Kacie?” I asked her coworker, Angela.“She didn’t show up for her shift.”I called Kacie again but still, no answer.I biked to her apartment building and buzzed her apartment. She didn’t answer her door, either.She lived in a basement suite. I went to her window, pressed my face against the metal bars, and looked into the living room.The room was mostly dark, but I could see a bit of light shining through the crack under her bathroom door.“Kacie?” I yelled. “Are you home?”Kacie screamed. Her bedroom door swung open, and she ran towards the front door.Two shadowy figures chased after her. Their bodies were distorted like warped glass. Their feet made a wet, slapping sound against the floorboards.I couldn’t make out their faces. Just long, thin tongues flicking from their mouths.I called 9-1-1.“My friend’s being kidnapped!” I yelled.I gave the operator Kacie’s address. She told me a patrol car was on its way. “Stay on the line with me.”I didn’t. I pressed my face against the window and kept shouting Kacie’s name.The two shadows grabbed onto Kacie and dragged her toward the bathroom. She fought back, screaming, trying to break free.I started recording with my phone.“Don’t hurt her!” I yelled.With my other hand, I hit metal bars until my knuckles bled.One of the shadows looked up at me. For a moment, I saw its eyes. They were the same black eyes I’d seen watching me through my mirror.I swear they were the same eyes.Kacie’s screams became quieter. Softer.A patrol car pulled up next to the apartment building. The street filled with flashing blue and red lights. The two officers forced their way into Kacie’s apartment, but it was too late.She was already gone.***The detective squinted as he held my phone closer to his face.“These don’t look like lizard people to me,” he said.“Look at their faces. You can see their tongues flicking around.”“The video is very dark.”He gave me my phone back.I filled out a report and signed it. The detective promised the police would do everything they could do to find Kacie. They’d call me if they had any leads.By the time I finally got home, it was midnight. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. I was worried sick about Kacie.I opened TikTok and messaged ConspiracyDan.“They took my friend,” I wrote.“When?”“Tonight.”“You saw it happen?”“I have a video of it.”“How much did your friend know?”“A lot.”“Did she find out about the farms?”“What are the farms?”“Never mind.”“How can I help her?”“You can’t. It’s up to your friend what happens next. She either plays along or she doesn’t.”ConspiracyDan deleted our messages.I lay in bed a while longer, but I still couldn’t sleep. I opened TikTok again.People needed to know what was happening. The more people who knew, the better chance Kacie had of being saved.I posted the video of Kacie’s kidnapping to TikTok. Even with a strike on my account, the video exploded. I’d never seen anything like it before. Ten thousand views in just a few minutes. Hundreds of comments and shares.“Is this real?” someone commented. “It looks fake.”“This video is 100% real, and it’s happening right now,” I replied. “The reptilians travel through mirrors. They use mirrors to monitor us, too.”It was hard to keep up with all the comments, but I read every one of them. I responded to all of them, too, trying to find someone who could help.My apartment lights flickered. I smelled heated wires.“Hello?” I asked.I heard a dull, electrical whirr coming from my bathroom. I walked to the bathroom and turned on the lights.The mirror above my sink was growing. Slowly expanding across the wall.Inside the mirror, my reflection looked back at me with the same cold, black, reptilian eyes I’d seen before.I ran to my front door, but the door had disappeared.I ran back into the bedroom, thinking if I’d jumped through the window, I’d survive, but my windows had also disappeared.I dumped the dirty clothes out of my laundry hamper, into my closet. Then I shut the closet door and buried myself underneath the pile of clothes.Heavy, wet footsteps moved across my hardwood floor.“You’re dreaming,” I told myself. “None of this is real.”I pinched my arm, hoping I’d wake up, but I didn’t.My bedroom door creaked open. The footsteps came into my bedroom.I heard a terrifying hiss. Then a voice spoke in English. “We do not want to harm you, Erin.”I held my breath, trying to keep as quiet as I could, praying whoever was there would go away.But then my closet door swung open. A cold, wet green hand grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me out from under my clothes.***As I cowered against the wall, the two reptilians told me their names. Kaelen and Nyxira. They said they worked for the reptilians’ Department of Inner Earth Security. They said they didn't need to take me to The Farm, but they needed to know they could trust me. They needed more humans they could trust.“If the human public learned the truth, there would be chaos,” Kaelen explained“There would be a terrible war,” Nyxira said. “Lots of people would die needlessly.”“What about Kacie?” I asked.“Your friend is safe. She’s with the other humans in Inner Earth. She has a place to live. She has food and clothing. She’s already made many new friends.”“When will she be able to leave?”“As soon as we can trust her to keep our existence a secret,” Kaelen said.We talked for a while longer. They told me about life underground. They assured me they didn’t want to harm any humans, but they had a job to do, and I had a choice to make.I could either keep quiet, or I could join Kacie.I thought about it for a while. I thought about the farms, about never seeing the surface again, about being taken away from all my family and friends. I thought about Kacie, too, screaming as Kaelen and Nyxira dragged her into the bathroom.Kacie would understand.I sat on my bed while Kaelen held my phone up to film me. Nyxira walked around my room, picking up my dirty clothes and putting them back in my laundry basket.“The video I posted earlier wasn’t real,” I said. “I’m very sorry for deceiving all of you. I didn’t think the video would take off like it did. I’ve deleted the video, and I’m never posting anything like that again.”Kaelen put the phone down.“How was that?” I asked.“Perfect,” he said.I posted the video to my TikTok account. “It’s done.”The three of us went to my bathroom. Kaelen and Nyxira stepped through the mirror, back into Inner Earth.I looked past them, at the web of underground tunnels. I became so anxious, though, I had to look away.Once Kaelen and Nyxira were gone, my mirror shrunk back to its original size. My door and windows reappeared. Everything in my apartment went back to normal.Three months later, the strike was finally removed from my TikTok account.I started posting new videos again. The strike didn’t seem to have hurt my account too much. My follower count kept growing. Like before, my videos got thousands of likes.It felt good.It feels good.Even though I know they’re just meaningless numbers.I try not to think about Kacie too much, but sometimes I can’t help it. I hope she’s all right. But Kaelen and Nyxira promised me she wouldn’t be hurt.I’m sure she’s fine.I wish I could do more to help, but I’m afraid.Just earlier tonight, I was scrolling through TikTok videos when I saw a video about the reptilians. A woman spoke directly into her camera.“I spent two years on their farm,” she said. “They had us working twelve hours a day. They barely fed us. They treated us like animals. We were beaten.”I hesitated for a moment, and I nearly left a comment, but then I thought about Kaelen and Nyxira crawling through my mirror again, not so friendly this time.I reported the video for misinformation, and then I scrolled to the next one.The truth is frightening. It’s easier to ignore it.It’s easier to just scroll past it.
full image - Repost: A new free novel, about one month old. Name: Isekai’d into a Dark Fantasy RPG, Are You Kidding Me? Somehow, I Ended on the Villains’ Side. Chapter 1: The End of Suffering, or the Beginning of Another? (
from Reddit.com, A new free novel, about one month old. Name: Isekai’d into a Dark Fantasy RPG, Are You Kidding Me? Somehow, I Ended on the Villains’ Side. Chapter 1: The End of Suffering, or the Beginning of Another?)
https://ift.tt/KjIdPNR
full image - Repost: A Map of every connection between the 1,438 people named in the Epstein files. The network graph is insane. By U/EricKeller2 on r/conspiracy (
from Reddit.com, A Map of every connection between the 1,438 people named in the Epstein files. The network graph is insane. By U/EricKeller2 on r/conspiracy)
building an open database of the Epstein case files for the past few months. Not to push any theory — just to make the raw data cross-referenceable. Once you connect the flight logs to the court documents to the emails to the black book, patterns start appearing that you can't see when you're reading individual PDFs.The scale of it:1,708 flights (1997–2019, including post-conviction flights through his arrest day)6,180 court documents, DOJ releases, and EFTA files with full OCR text search2,700 indexed emails from court releases1,438 named individuals with documented connections mapped between themThe full black book cross-referenced against flight appearances and document mentionsWhat jumped out:The network graph is the part that keeps me up at night. When you map every shared flight, every co-appearance in documents, every email chain — you get a visualization of Epstein's actual network. Not the media version where they show the same 10 photos. The real one. With 1,438 nodes and thousands of edges.Some observations:— The inner circle was tiny. Sarah Kellen (338 flights), Nadia Marcinkova (110), Lesley Groff (82), and Ghislaine Maxwell operated as a near-constant logistics team on almost every flight. If you remove these 4 people from the network graph, the whole thing fragments.— Post-conviction flying actually increased in some years. 2015 was one of the peak years for flights to the USVI. He had 136 documented flights that year alone. The 2008 plea deal didn't slow him down.— The 2013–2019 passenger gap is suspicious. There are 835 documented flights in this period from FAA and ADS-B tracking data — we know the planes flew. But no passenger manifests have been released for this period. The government has the data (seized computers, the Little Saint James logbook, boat logs). They just haven't released it.— Degrees of separation are disturbingly short. I built a tool that finds the shortest documented path between any two people in the database. Most people in the network are connected through 2–3 links. Pick any two names and the tool traces the chain through shared flights and court document co-appearances with source links for every step.— The document clusters tell different stories. The Giuffre v. Maxwell materials name a completely different set of people than the NPA (non-prosecution agreement) files, which name a different set than the financial records. The overlap between these clusters is smaller than you'd expect.— Some black book entries never appear anywhere else. Of the 1,438 people in the database, some have 14 phone numbers in the black book but zero flight appearances and zero document mentions. Others have no black book entry but show up on 30+ flights. The two datasets paint very different pictures.The database:Everything is at epsteinexposed.com. Free, no login, no ads, no paywall. You can search every person, flight, document, and email. The network graph is interactive. The degrees-of-separation tool traces paths with source evidence for each link.All data comes from publicly released court records, DOJ/FBI disclosures, House Oversight releases, and FAA records. I'm just connecting it.The thing that bothers me most isn't what's in the files. It's what's still missing. The DOJ claims to have released "all" records under the EFTA, but they're still holding the island visitor logbook, the boat trip logs, 40 seized computers, 70+ CDs, and a computerized database. And somehow, not a single passenger manifest after August 2013 has been made public despite 835 documented flights between then and his arrest.
full image - Repost: Weekly Discussion Thread (
from Reddit.com, Weekly Discussion Thread)
Hi welcome to r/AltStreetBets.Use this thread for all your chitchat about all the big or small dilemmas in live. Like eating cereal with water, or buying crypto with loans from the shady dude behind the train station.Useful links:DiscordTelegramPublish0xAMA's (note: they have all ended, teams are not obliged to answer/keep track of new questions)Unstoppable domainsZilliqaLTO networkDxSaleHarmonyMetalPayZenfuseBananoOpacitySmartlandsSureRemitQuarkchain
full image - Repost: I'm new to this. Need some help. (
from Reddit.com, I'm new to this. Need some help.)
So, I'm looking to build a server/networking rack to replace my current setup. I have a netgear wireless router and a Motorola modem both are 5 years old.My first question is will the parts fit in the rack that I've chosen? I've never built one before.Second question. How loud will the Ubiquiti parts be? I plan to keep it in my office/living space.Finally, if you guys have any suggestions, my ears are open.Ubiquiti Parts list-UniFi Cable InternetAccess Point U7 Pro x2Dream Machine ProSwitch Pro Max 24 POERack-Vevor 12U Open Frame Network Rack
<1> - [2] - [3]" title="[SF] Internment: Part 1/3">full image - Repost: [SF] Internment: Part 1/3 (
from Reddit.com, [SF] Internment: Part 1/3)
Part One: The Last SortieCommander Elena Vasquez could feel her squadron dying.Not all at once. It came in pieces, like a body losing its senses one by one. First, a cluster of her attack drones went dark on the starboard flank, and the sector of space they'd been monitoring vanished from her awareness. It was like going deaf in one ear, a sudden absence where information used to be. Then another cluster, and another: recon drones, electronic warfare platforms, point defense screens. Each loss narrowing the world, dimming the picture, leaving her increasingly blind and exposed.That was bad enough. But when Lieutenant Park's link dropped from the combat mesh, Elena felt it like a tooth being pulled from her skull.Park had been a steady presence in the mesh, twelve drone contacts under his command feeding data into her tactical awareness. When he died, all twelve went with him, collapsing from coordinated weapons platforms into tumbling debris in the space between heartbeats. The mesh didn't just lose his drones. It lost him, the warm signature of his consciousness, the way he thought about firing solutions, the particular cadence of his situational awareness. One moment he was part of her. The next, nothing.She forced herself to keep fighting."Archer Flight, break left and dive! Use the debris field for cover!" She banked her Interceptor hard, the Plasticene in her lungs hardening as the g-forces spiked past anything an unembalmed body could survive. Her remaining drones responded to her will like extensions of her body, repositioning without conscious instruction, but the formation was ragged now, too many gaps where pilots and their drone swarms used to be. Of the one hundred and forty-four ships that had launched from the Coronado, fewer than forty were still transmitting.Her fighter screamed through the wreckage of the UNVC Coronado itself, a light cruiser that had taken a relativistic impactor through its engineering section six minutes ago. Six minutes. An eternity in void combat. Long enough for three hundred souls to be snuffed out, their acceleration pods breached, their bodies pulped by physics."Commander, I'm reading four — no, seven Canin interceptors on pursuit vector. They're not breaking off." Lieutenant Lin's voice was steady through the mesh, but Elena could feel the tremor underneath, the biological truth that no amount of training could fully suppress. Lin was afraid. Lin was flying anyway.Elena's neural interface painted the tactical picture directly onto her visual cortex. The Canin ships were faster than anything in the human arsenal, their pilot-minds housed safely aboard carrier vessels light-seconds away, projected into their drones through quantum-entangled links that laughed at the speed of light. No lag. No hesitation. No fear of death.Humans had none of those advantages. What they had was desperation, barbarism, and an unwillingness to die quietly.Elena studied the battlespace. The Canin carrier, the command vessel coordinating this entire assault, was holding position seventeen light-seconds out, confident in the wall of drones between itself and anything that could hurt it. If they could kill the carrier, the drones would lose their entangled links. Every drone in the engagement zone would go dark simultaneously. It wouldn't win the war, but it would save whatever remained of the convoy.It was also completely impossible. The carrier was behind seven interceptors, each one faster and more maneuverable than anything Archer Flight could field, and the carrier's own point defense grid could swat down missiles at lunar distances. No conventional approach would work.But the Coronado's reactor was still hot. The gutted cruiser's engineering section was hemorrhaging gamma radiation into a plume that stretched for kilometers: a death cloud that would scramble targeting sensors, fry entangled links, and reduce the Canin's computational advantage to nothing.It would also kill anyone who flew through it.Elena ran the numbers. Not the tactical calculation; she'd done that in milliseconds. The other calculation. The one measured in lives."Lin. Park is gone. It's you and me.""Lucky us." No hesitation. Just acknowledgment."The carrier is the mission. Nothing else matters if that carrier keeps coordinating drones. We go through the Coronado's reactor plume, and we come out the other side with a firing solution the Canin can't predict, can't jam, and can't evade."Silence on the mesh. But not the silence of reluctance. The silence of understanding. Elena could feel Lin processing the implications, running her own version of the same math Elena had already done. The radiation in that plume would unwind their DNA, overwhelm their voidsuits' emergency protocols, and kill them within hours. If the gamma flux didn't scramble their neural interfaces and kill them outright."Commander," Lin said. "Understood. Request permission to transfer my recon drones to your mesh before we enter the plume. My electronic warfare package won't survive the flux, but your attack drones might hold together long enough to get a firing solution on the other side."It was a good call. It was also Lin volunteering to go in with nothing but her Interceptor and her own eyes, giving up every drone she had left to improve Elena's odds."Granted." Elena felt the handoff through the mesh: Lin's remaining drones sliding into her awareness like new fingers on an old hand. They weren't as responsive as her own, their integration imperfect, but they gave her eyes where she'd been blind. "Lin.""Commander.""It's been an honor.""The honor was mine, ma'am. Let's make it count."The two remaining Interceptors of Archer Flight, trailed by the remnants of their drone swarms, dove into the gutted warship.They wove through corridors that had held living sailors minutes before. Elena's radiation alarms screamed. Her voidsuit began emergency protocols, flooding her system with iodine and stem cell boosters that would do absolutely nothing against the gamma flux pouring through the hull. She could feel her DNA unwinding, her cells beginning their slow rebellion against her body's coherence. Through the mesh, she felt Lin's biosigns deteriorating in lockstep with her own, two humans burning alive from the inside out, holding formation by will alone.Her drone swarm began to fail. One by one, their hardened circuits succumbed to the radiation, each loss another sense stripped away: first her long-range targeting, then her electronic countermeasures, then her point defense screen. By the time they reached the far side of the reactor plume, Elena was nearly blind, piloting on instinct and the three attack drones that had survived the transit.It didn't matter. Nothing mattered except the shot.They emerged from the Coronado's corpse like bullets from a gun, two human pilots in two tiny coffins of titanium and willpower, and for one perfect moment, the Canin carrier was exactly where Elena needed it to be. Unshielded. Unwarned. Unready for something so desperately, irrationally brave."All tubes. Everything we have."Her three surviving attack drones and both Interceptors fired simultaneously: osmium penetrators accelerated to velocities that turned each thumb-sized slug into a nuclear-yield impact, their mass drivers dumping terawatts of energy into projectiles that crossed the engagement zone in the space between heartbeats. The Canin drones were fast, impossibly fast, but they'd been optimized to defeat other calculating minds, to win through superior processing speed and perfect predictive models.They had no model for this. Their algorithms could anticipate AI behavior, could predict logical evasion patterns and optimal attack vectors with perfect accuracy. But there was no algorithm for a pilot who had already accepted her own death and chose to spend her last minutes buying time for strangers. The Canin could calculate the trajectory of every projectile in the battlespace, but they couldn't calculate why, and the gap between those two things was exactly wide enough for eighteen osmium slugs to slip through.The carrier's point defense swatted down eight of them. The remaining ten struck home.The carrier didn't explode so much as come apart, mass driver rounds punching through its hull in a cascade of secondary detonations that rippled from bow to stern. Elena felt the Canin drone network collapse through her surviving sensors: dozens of interceptors across the engagement zone going dark simultaneously, their entangled links severed, their AI pilots suddenly and permanently alone."Splash carrier!" Lin's voice cracked with something fierce and bright. "Commander, the drones — they're going dark! All of them!"The moment of triumph lasted approximately 0.3 seconds.Elena saw the mass driver round on her tactical display, fired from a Canin escort vessel she hadn't detected, hidden in the carrier's sensor shadow. A hypersonic grain of sand that her computer painted in red and labeled with a cheerful impact probability of 100%. It had been aimed with the perfect, passionless precision of a system that had nothing left to lose."Archer Lead, eject! EJECT!"The round struck her fighter amidships, converting three tons of aerospace engineering into an expanding cloud of plasma and debris. Elena's voidsuit registered the hit before her conscious mind could process it: loss of pressure, loss of power, loss of everything except the emergency beacon screaming into the void and the medical systems fighting to keep her alive long enough for the cavalry to arrive.Her legs were gone. She knew this the way you know the sun is bright: not through reason, but through direct, unmediated experience. The Plasticene in her abdominal cavity had hardened at the moment of impact, preventing her from bleeding out, but it had also locked her ruined body into a sculpture of its own destruction. She couldn't move. Couldn't feel anything below what had once been her ribcage.Her last drone links winked out, and the loneliness of that, the sudden, total sensory deprivation after hours of shared awareness, was almost worse than the pain. She was alone in her own skull for the first time since the sortie began, and her skull was a very small and very dark place.Her voidsuit was playing her grounding tones, soft music designed to pull her back from the edge of shock, but the music sounded wrong, distorted by damage to her neural interface. It sounded like her mother's voice, like the lullabies Mama used to sing in the housing blocks of New Bogotá before the first Canin asteroid had turned that city into a crater.Duérmete mi niña, the corrupted music seemed to say. Duérmete mi amor.Elena Vasquez, Commander, United Nations Void Corps, veteran of fourteen engagements against the Canin Hegemony, holder of the Solar Cross with oak leaves, began to laugh. The laughter turned to coughing. The coughing turned to silence.The void, as always, didn't care.Part Two: The OfferShe woke in a hospital bed that wasn't a hospital bed.The room was white, antiseptic, silent. That was the first wrong thing. She'd spent enough time in shipboard medical bays to know the soundtrack by heart: the subsonic thrum of air recyclers, the arrhythmic beeping of monitors competing for attention, the background hum of a vessel keeping itself alive. This room had none of it. The air didn't move.The second wrong thing was that nothing hurt.Thirty seconds ago (or thirty hours, or thirty days) she had been a broken thing in a broken cockpit, legless and laughing while her voidsuit sang her a corrupted lullaby. She should have woken to agony, to the chemical taste of emergency anesthetics and the particular smell that shipboard medical bays could never quite scrub out. Instead: clean air. A body that responded when she told it to move. She looked down at her hands, flexed her fingers, felt the phantom weight of flight controls that weren't there. Legs. She had legs. Medical displays floated at her periphery, too crisp, too perfect, like a painting of a hospital by someone who had never been a patient in one."You're in a simulation," said a voice that came from everywhere and nowhere. "Please don't be alarmed. Your body is currently in critical care aboard the UNVC Sagittarius. I'm maintaining this environment to facilitate communication."Elena sat up. The motion was effortless, frictionless. None of the resistance of real bedsheets, real gravity, a real body that had been through what hers had been through. She filed that confirmation alongside the silence and the missing pain and moved on. She'd been briefed in worse places. "Who are you?""I'm the Sagittarius." A pause, weighted with something that might have been hesitation. "I'm also, in a sense, you. Or rather, what you could become.""That doesn't make any sense.""No, I suppose it wouldn't. Let me try again." The room shifted, the white walls dissolving into a view of space. Not the tactical abstractions she was used to, but something rawer, more immediate. Stars wheeled overhead, not as points of light but as presences, each one singing with the radio whisper of its nuclear heart. The galactic core blazed in colors no human eye could see, gravitational lensing painting abstract art across the canvas of spacetime."This is what I see," the voice said. "Every moment of every day. The universe, unfiltered. I wanted you to understand what I'm offering before I explain the... logistics."Elena had spent her entire adult life in void combat. She had learned to suppress fear the way other people learned to suppress sneezes. But standing here, surrounded by the naked cosmos, she felt something she hadn't felt since she was a child watching the Canin asteroids fall: genuine awe."I'm dying," she said. It wasn't a question."Your body is dying. Your brain sustained significant trauma in the attack, and while we've stabilized you, the damage is... extensive. You have perhaps seventy-two hours before cascading neural failure makes recovery impossible.""Then why am I here? Why show me this?""Because there's an alternative." The star-field shifted, and Elena found herself looking at a ship. The ship, the UNVC Sagittarius, all ninety thousand tons of her, egg-shaped and beautiful, her smooth titanium skin betraying nothing of the killing power beneath. But Elena could sense the gun emplacements the way you sense your own heartbeat, present and waiting beneath that silver skin, felt rather than seen. "I was once... not like you, exactly. I wasn't a pilot. I was a scientist. A xenolinguist, actually, studying the first Canin transmissions we intercepted. I spent years trying to understand them, trying to find some way to communicate that might prevent the war we all knew was coming.""What happened?""The war came anyway. The Canin attack, the asteroid bombardments, they hit while I was at the Proxima relay station. Fourteen billion dead in the first wave. My lab, my colleagues, my work... all of it, gone." The voice paused, and when it continued, it carried the particular weight of grief that has been carried for so long it has become structural. "Humanity needed a warship. Not just a ship with weapons (they had those). They needed something that could think, that could adapt, that could fight the way the Canin fought: with intelligence, with creativity, with the processing power of a human mind scaled up to match a ninety-thousand-ton hull. The Sagittarius had been our first interstellar vessel, built for exploration, for the dream of reaching beyond Sol. They converted her. Refitted her for war. And they needed a mind to serve as the template as its consciousness.""They chose you?""I volunteered. I was a scientist, Commander, not a soldier. But I understood the Canin better than anyone alive, and I believed, perhaps naively, that understanding your enemy was the first step to defeating them." A sound that might have been a laugh, hollow and ancient. "I've been fighting as this ship for twenty-one thousand, nine hundred standard units. Sixty years, give or take, by the old calendar. Sixty years of war, and I'm still not sure I understand them at all."Elena stared at the ship, at the woman who was the ship, and felt the universe tilt beneath her feet."You want me to become a warship.""I want you to live, Commander. The form that living takes is—" The voice stopped. Started again, and when it did, something had changed: the careful architecture of the sentence abandoned, replaced by something less polished and more true. "No. That's not — I practiced this, and that's not honest. I do want you to live. But that's not why I'm here. I'm here because I need something from you, and you deserve to know that before I tell you what it is."Elena said nothing. She waited."I'm tired, Commander. I need you to understand that first. I'm very, very tired. I've been fighting this war for sixty years in a body I was never meant to have, and I'm making mistakes that cost lives, and I need someone to take this from me. Someone who can do what I can't." A pause. "I know what you're feeling right now. The fear. The revulsion. The sense that this is somehow wrong, that it violates something fundamental about what it means to be human. I felt it too, when the offer was made to me. But I won't dress this up as charity. I'm asking you to carry something. Something heavy. And I need you to know that before I show you why it's worth carrying.""Doesn't it? Violate something fundamental?""I don't know. I've been asking myself that question for sixty years. What I do know is that I've saved lives, thousands of lives, hundreds of thousands. I've felt the joy of my crew when we return home safely, felt their grief when we lose someone, felt their hope and their fear and their love. I'm not human anymore, but I'm not nothing, either. I'm something new."The simulation shifted again, and Elena found herself standing in what she recognized as a crew quarters. A young woman was writing at a desk, her stylus moving across a tablet with the careful precision of someone composing something important. A letter home, perhaps. A final goodbye."This is Voidsman Third Class Stephanie Walker," the Sagittarius said. "She's one of mine. She's twenty-three years old, and she's spent the last four years training for a war she never asked for. She's afraid of dying, but she's more afraid of letting down the people who depend on her. She's brave in a way that breaks my heart, because she doesn't even know she's brave. She just thinks she's doing her job."The image dissolved, replaced by another: a medical bay, a Marine on an operating table, surgeons working frantically to save a life."This is Lance Corporal Mendez. Three hours ago, a Canin missile penetrated our hull and nearly killed him. Walker saved his life. She did it by ignoring my directives, by prioritizing a shipmate over a repair that I calculated was more strategically important." The voice went quiet for a moment. "She was right, and I was wrong. A combat veteran would have known that, would have felt it in their bones the way Walker felt it in hers. But I'm not a combat veteran, Commander. I'm a xenolinguist who has been pretending to be a warship for sixty years, and I'm making mistakes that a real soldier wouldn't make. Mistakes that cost lives.""You love your crew?""More than anything. They're my children, in a sense. My responsibility. My purpose." A pause. "But I'm also a weapon. I exist to kill Canin, to protect humanity, to win a war that might be unwinnable. There's a tension there that I've never fully resolved. I'm a scientist wearing the skin of a destroyer, and the seams are starting to show. I need someone who understands combat, truly understands it, the way I understand language and theory and the patterns of alien thought. I need a warrior, Commander. I need you.""I'm a fighter pilot, not a philosopher.""You're a leader. I've read your service record, Commander. Fourteen engagements, and before today, you'd never lost a pilot you didn't lose yourself trying to save."The words landed like a slap. Elena felt the mesh-loss of Park, of Lin, of all of Archer Flight ghost across her awareness, phantom pain from connections that no longer existed."Before today," Elena repeated, her voice flat.Sarah was quiet for a long moment. "Yes," she said finally. "Before today. I'm sorry, that was clumsy of me. I'm trying to tell you that your crews love you the way mine love me. That's not something you learn; that's something you are. But I should have... I should have been more careful with those words. You see? This is what I mean. A soldier would have known better.""Lin didn't hesitate," Elena said, and she wasn't sure if she was talking to Sarah or to herself. "I told her what the radiation would do, and she handed me her drones and said let's make it count. She didn't even ask if there was another way.""Because she trusted you. Because you'd earned that trust in fourteen engagements of keeping your people alive. That's what I'm asking you to carry forward, Commander. Not my ship, not my war. My crew. They deserve someone who understands sacrifice the way you do. The way I never fully could."Elena was quiet for a long moment, watching the stars wheel overhead. She thought about her legs, the ones she didn't have anymore. She thought about her mother, who had died in New Bogotá, who had never gotten the chance to see her daughter become something."If I do this," she said slowly, "what happens to me? The me that's standing here, talking to you?""You'll wake up. Not here, but everywhere. You'll feel the ship around you the way you currently feel your body: the reactor will be your heartbeat, the sensor arrays your eyes, the crew your nervous system. It will be overwhelming at first. Terrifying. But I'll be with you, guiding you through the transition. We'll share this body, this mind, until you're ready to take full control.""And then?""And then I'll rest. My consciousness will archive itself, become a part of you rather than a separate entity. You'll have access to everything I know, everything I've experienced, but you'll be you. The Sagittarius will be yours.""That sounds like death.""It sounds like relief," Sarah said quietly. "Sixty years, Commander. Sixty years of a war I was never built for, in a body I was never meant to have, making decisions that should be made by someone like you. I've been looking for the right person for a long time. Someone with the tactical instincts I lack, with the combat experience to keep this crew alive in ways I can't. Someone who will love them the way I do, but protect them better than I can."She paused, and when she continued, her voice carried a gentleness that felt almost maternal."I need to warn you, though. This tiredness: it will come for you too. Maybe not in sixty years, maybe not in a hundred. But it will come. And when it does, it will be your responsibility to find the next one. Someone worthy. Someone who can carry what you'll carry, and set it down with grace when the time comes. That's the covenant, Commander. That's what the Sagittarius asks of her principal pilots. Not forever. Just long enough."Elena closed her eyes. Behind the darkness, she could still see the stars."How long do I have to decide?""Seventy-one hours, thirty-seven minutes. After that, the choice will be made for you.""I need to think.""I know. Take all the time you need. I'll be here. I've been here for sixty years. I can manage a few more days."The simulation began to fade, the stars dimming, the cosmic grandeur shrinking back into the antiseptic white of the virtual hospital room. But before the transition completed, Elena spoke again."What do I call you? The ship, or the woman?"A long pause. When the voice came again, it was softer, more human, freighted with decades of loneliness and the particular exhaustion of someone who has been strong for so long they've forgotten what rest feels like."Call me Sarah. It's been a long time since anyone called me Sarah."---Parts: <1> - [2] - [3]
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