The Journal of Alan Ledford

Lane 920, Day 244

That was strange.

Now, if you're not a freelance pilot such as myself, you might not recognize the significance of such a statement. You've read through what I've put here so far, and while a great deal of it may be out of your area of expertise, it doesn't seem especially strange. Weirdest thing to happen thus far has been the disappearance of the Ulix, and that didn't even happen on my watch.

Let me just say, I've seen far stranger things than what I've put here. This journal's only covered the last two-thirds of this year, remember. Nothing much has happened, really. To me the strangest thing so far was me getting into Ulix space at all, not the state in which I found it. Before this year... well, let me just say I've seen anomalies that make Yotia look like an amusement park ride. Entire planets made lifeless. And of course we can't forget witnessing the Resonator in its fully powered glory.

So when I say "That was strange", you'd better believe that what just happened to me was really really strange.

I hit the border yesterday. It wasn't marked on my maps - after all, they were too old to even know about the fall of the empire - so I didn't really expect it. It hadn't even been a month since my encounter with the last bizarre ship of a dead species, and I'd honestly thought it'd take me longer to get out of this forsaken place. If, of course, escape was indeed possible. Obviously it is, because I'm out now, but at the time I wasn't quite so sure I was going to make it.

I felt the strange compulsion coming over me about an hour before I hit it. It was like the prospectors who'd tried to enter Ulix space had described, only the compulsion wasn't telling me to turn back, it was telling me to go forward. I suppose this made sense, but it raised the uneasy question in my mind. If indeed the border was still up and functioning like it appeared to be, how had I passed through it in the first place?

That was a long hour. The intense need to leave the area built further and further in my mind, despite the fact that leaving was exactly what I was doing. Apparently the border's effect was a constant one, and didn't adjust itself to the fact that its subject might just be willing to listen to reason. I got up out of my seat and paced the cabin. My ship's a fairly large ship, but almost all of that is dedicated to cargo space. The more livable area is quite small and cramped. Normally this lends it a comfortable atmosphere, but at the moment I wanted out. I realized most of this feeling was the artificial noise of the border drilling itself into my head, but that didn't make it feel any less real. I distinctly hoped that I wasn't going to jettison myself out of the airlock in a vain attempt to escape it. This didn't seem too terribly likely to me, but the way things had been going lately it might be more possible than I cared to think about. I paced to escape both that actual thought and the artificial ones that wouldn't shut the hell up.

Finally, the visual of the stars outside seemed to blur. I sat back down in my seat and held on tightly, hoping that I wouldn't awake to find myself still inside Ulix space with a burning desire to get out. The thought of me endlessly repeating the cycle of being compelled to leave while not being allowed to replaced the airlock image in my list of bad thoughts. Thankfully, just then, the blurring of the stars intensified, and I passed out.

It wasn't a dreamless sleep, either.

I was back on the Messenger from the Past, standing in the dark-sleep chamber where I'd woken up Oorn. Only instead of my large gibberish-speaking homicidal friend, Senior was there.

Back when I'd worked closely with the Ulix - apparently on this very ship without realizing it - there were two of their people whose job it was to keep tabs on us. We'd taken to calling them Junior and Senior. Junior was the friendly outgoing one who would typically give us tours and go out with us after a long day's work. Senior was the serious one that he reported to, the one who would ask for better results if we were slacking. The boss, in other words. Strange that he should be the one in my dream; I liked Junior much better. Then again, either one was an improvement over Oorn.

Senior began one long monologue, and I'm reproducing it here as best I can. Most the quotes I include in this work are paraphrases of the actual thing; my species doesn't have a photographic memory like some, so I make do. In this case, I'm going to try to stay as close to the actual words as possible:

"Things are coming to a head, Ledford." He spoke to me fluently in my language. Why would he need a translator in a dream, after all? "You and yours were spared so you could continue your work, but instead you've spent the time hiding while our people die slowly.

"We brought you back to us in a more direct manner this time. The consensus was that you'd be unable to resist working with the relic and therefore continue where you left off. We underestimated you even in that respect. Instead of confining yourself to the data - as you were strictly instructed to do! - you attempted to steal the artifact itself!"

Senior was angry. There was no way I could read an Ulix expression without the translator, of course, but I could tell anyway.

"And still more of us die! Innocents, now, are dying because of your inaction, your fear. You're being allowed out for one and only one reason: To find the others. To continue the work you made such a horrible mess of decades ago, and this time to do it right! Get the rest of your group together, and when you're ready to come back to this place, press your Random button. We'll do the rest."

I remember wondering how he knew about the button, as I hadn't put it in until long after his kind had left for greener pastures. I was dreaming, so he answered me.

"Nothing's random for you anymore, Ledford. It hasn't been since we saved you the first time. Finish your job. So help me, you'll dream in the dark-sleep before this is over."

That's when I woke up.

The first thing I did was jot that last part down. I wanted to make sure I got all of it for entry here later. The entire conversation had this creepy vibe in it, particularly the last bit of it. In case it didn't translate, the idiom "to dream in the dark-sleep before the end" means, generally, that things are going to get much much worse before they get better, if they're even going to be getting better at all. It's a figure of speech but I couldn't shake the the unnerving feeling that it was meant literally in this case. Now, I'm not one of those wackos who believes that dreams are portents of the future or anything, but my species has a habit of thinking even when we're asleep, and our dreams tend to reflect that. Some part of my mind wanted me to find the rest of the old crew and get back to work, and I wanted to know why.

The second thing I did was to figure out where I was. The entire time I extended my sensor net out I was muttering under my breath 'please not Ulix space' over and over again, and it appeared to have worked. I was on Lane 920. The real 920, this time; navigational buoys informed me that the Ulix Anomaly was ahead and that the lane would be taking a small (unfathomably large, really, but small on a universal scale) detour before nearing the Galaxy-gates. All sorts of information filtered back into my sensors; I'd had their sensitivity cranked up so high while on Lane Ledford that at first they were completely overwhelmed. News feeds, job postings, comm traffic, the essentials of civilization were once again being broadcast throughout space, and I was once again a part of it.

I did a few things before jotting all this down. One was to set a course. I didn't hit the Random button - the dream had left me with a bit of a foreboding about it, so instead I consulted my maps for a location I knew was actually still there and started heading that way. I also made a note to update the maps. I didn't want anymore accidents like that last little excursion. Things like that took a lot of my time for very little profit.

I glanced at the glowing green light on my translator. Well, maybe there would be some profit involved.

Another thing I did was to set up an automated backup service. I know that this journal of mine hasn't been going on for very long, comparatively, but it's an activity that's kept me sane. Writing in it's given me a chance to ignore the rookies, take my mind off of Curly's condition, and rediscover a calm state after psychotic robots attempt to gun me down. I didn't want to lose it to a freak power failure in the computer's storage systems. So I invested in one of the common services it is to do long-term data storage and uploaded this entire work to them. Minus, of course, this bit that I'm entering here. The ship'll automatically take care of keeping the backups from here on out, so I won't even have to worry about it. I paid for it using the interest on my contract money; one of the nice things about hibernating through a long period of time was that your money tended to build up after a while. It's one of the few things that makes galaxy-hopping profitable; it takes long enough that the compound interest on your seed money ended up paying for the whole trip. My contract wasn't worth that much money, so I just paid off the service with it and started looking for a new job.