…Recording initiated. Memory channel stable. If anyone ever hears this — it means I didn’t disappear completely.
My name was Sergey Shmelev. Now —Kairen Shmel. Call sign — “Grey.”
Carrier aviation, heavy carrier cruiser, routine service at the edge of the known world. We still believed the sky was just sky and stars were distant lights, not doors.
Sortie: intruder contact. No ID. No response. Target behavior wrong — neither ballistic nor aerodynamic, as if physics didn’t apply.
Order: intercept. If possible — force compliance and divert.
Deck vibration under launch. Controls familiar in my hands. Operator’s voice calm in my headset, too calm.
Visual contact.
Not a ship. Not an object. More like absence of form with light bending around it. Radar false. Optics false. Eyes barely processing.
Weapons range reached.
Lock attempt — system failure. Target drifted as if erased from reality but still present.
Launch.
Missiles deployed cleanly… then went blind. Tracking lost. Self-destruct. No chance to “realize” anything.
Then I did what is never written in procedures but always exists in silence between pilots.
Ramming.
Closing speed extreme. Space compressing. Distance meaningless. I remember saying, “well… hello.”
Then light.
Not flash. Not explosion. Light that replaces everything. No pain. No fear. Only the sense of being rewritten.
When I woke, I had no body.
A capsule. Fluid. Cables. Interfaces clearer than my own hands once were. And the certainty the ship was me.
They called me capsuleer.
Different world. Stars closer. Death cheap. Resurrection routine. People as players in systems no one fully understands.
I flew.
First to understand where I was. Then to survive. Then to forget.
But memory persists. My anchor was Earth.
I searched for it in endless maps, in pilot stories, in fragments of corporate myth. Sometimes it felt one jump away. Sometimes like it never existed at all.
Ships changed. Alliances changed. Names changed. I died hundreds of times. I returned every time.
But when warp engages and stars stretch into lines, I remember the light.
And I wonder if I survived at all.
Maybe this is the interception.
Only now — I’m the target.
…Recording ends.