/ZuHab/gb68m6/expedition-debrief_d7ea.part01.log

 “Good evening, Surveyor #4103f01c-d7ea.”

A poorly synthesized voice filled with grating buzzing artifacts blared from a speaker somewhere close behind me. A tingling sensation rushed down my body as my eyelids started to flutter, slowly bringing the blurry mess of light that surrounded me into focus. I began to look around. I was laying on an unpleasantly firm bed installed in the corner of a long and narrow room, lit from above with blinding white lights and lined with a chaotic web of pipes, colorful wires, and tiny blinking devices. An enormous metal door sealed the end, and a row of storage units of various shapes covered one of the long walls. But what captured my attention most was one of the several small, circular windows dotted along the walls. I laid awkwardly on my side and stared obliviously at the tiny points of light whipping by outside for an embarrassingly long time before a cascade of memories and realizations came rushing back into my head. 

I was barrelling through space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour in a shoddily built company transporter. I worked for the Zuzhensk Habitat Development Company, which had won a contract with the Imus Corporation to construct the latest addition to their portfolio of luxury resorts. And I had been assigned to explore Gibrus 68/M6, one of the planets Imus was considering, and assess its suitability as a location for this resort. This all seemed easy enough, but one thought still lingered in my mind: Just how long had they kept me suspended in this—

“Good evening, Surveyor #4103f01c-d7ea.” The message repeated, completely identical.

“Snooze!” I shouted raspily.

The message started once again. “Good eve—”

“Cancel!” 

“—ning, Surveyor #4103f01c—”

“Shut up!!”

“—d7ea.”

My thoughts thoroughly derailed, I snapped upright in a rage, searching for any way to turn that alarm off. But my head immediately met the bed’s crystal-clear glass shield, which swooped from the wall around to my side, with a resounding “thunk.” Seemingly detecting my touch, it immediately hissed away into the depths of the wall. I stumbled towards a tablet hanging beside one of the lockers, yanked it down off its docking port, and stabbed at some blinking button on the screen until the voice cut out halfway through another repetition of its message. I blinked a few times. Now it was showing a 3D map of Gibrus: a massive, rough, cloudless, dark-brown planet with tiny, faintly glowing yellow and purple specks all across its surface. It took several seconds of zooming out before I saw the marker for my ship. There was still over an hour left before I would arrive.

It was just past sunset when I landed. The sky above me, which I hadn’t been able to fully appreciate from inside the ship, was an enchantingly deep shade of purple, with scattered nebulous patches of a more pink color, and innumerable brilliant white stars twinkling from all directions. The air was filled with a faint purple haze, which seemed to be the same substance as the fine, light-colored flecks that were already accumulating on my visor. The ground was made entirely of sharp, grey-brown pebbles of various sizes that made hollow crunching sounds as I turned to survey the landing site, as well as sporadic, tiny plant sprouts that had decayed to the point where the slightest touch from my boot caused them to instantly crumble into flecks of gray dust, which were indistinguishable from the rock surrounding them. 

Also blanketing the landscape were significantly larger rock formations crisscrossed with translucent veins glowing with a warm yellow light, as well as sizable clusters of “trees” with branches tangled into wide nets that spread away from twisted trunks of an unknown material. Behind me, rolling hills unfurled towards the horizon, and a fair distance in front, a deep gash in the terrain hugged the site like the last sliver of a moon, separating me from a vast plain with a distant mesa-like formation sitting at its center. And even farther in the distance, almost obscured by the haze, jagged, layered foothills surrounded the entire region. As I wandered farther from the ship and down a slope bordering the landing site, I started to observe that there were no living creatures of any kind in sight. This was great news for the resort, but combined with the landscape of this place, it was highly unsettling for me.

Eventually, I felt that I had sufficiently mapped and documented the area and decided to return to the ship. As I turned to head back up the hill, I was hit with the sight of a narrow, rocky tunnel that sloped gently down into the terrain and twisted out of view. My instincts immediately started begging me to ignore it and leave. But the terms of my contract and the horrible penalties for failing to report potential dangers discovered on an expedition seemed to push me forward and down anyway.

I followed the tunnel, spiraling around until I was plunged into darkness as the last of the moonlight faded from the walls. I continued to creep forward while pulling my flashlight from its pocket on my chest. My gloved hand had almost won its battle against the tiny, recessed power switch on the side of the device when I glanced up and froze. The light slipped out of my hands and onto the crunchy rocks. Glowing crystals, all about the size of my body, grew in densely packed clusters on every wall of the cavernous chamber I had stumbled into. They filled the space with a purple light that was almost bright enough to read by. I walked further in, completely mesmerized by the slowly shifting brightness of each one of these formations, like a starry sky deep underground. This would make a great tourist attraction… I thought to myself. I stood with my back almost to  the crystal-covered wall and started dictating my findings to my suit computer.

Unfortunately, I was too engrossed in my recording to notice the sizzling noise behind me until it suddenly stopped and a hollow, metallic “clunk” startled me back into reality. I froze. Nothing but my head moved as I turned to see some kind of tiny, rusted machine sitting on the ground, covered in a rapidly evaporating purple liquid from the crystal that had melted to a stump behind it.

I stared at it for what felt like an eternity, but I couldn’t even describe its shape, much less what its function was.

Then it started to slowly lift off the ground.