[Mission Log – Cmdr Elias Reeve]

I’ve been in the jump corridor for a week. It was nothing like anyone suggested. No obvious exits. No windows into stars. Only the sensation of forward drift — constant pressure on the body, as if I’ve been falling for days without ever striking ground.

I was told to expect “transitional markers.” Bright flares. The occasional glimpse of curvature between normal space and folded. Nothing. Just static readings and a hum in the deckplates that crawls into my bones.

I can only hope — pray, really — that the expected time for exit will be accurate.

What I know about FTL… about these experimental JumpGates they’ve used to fire a handful of us across the galaxy… isn’t much. I’m a pilot, not a theorist. They pulled me out of the Academy, dropped me in a simulator, and then promised I’d make history. Truth is, I might only end up as a footnote.

They warned us about possible outcomes. Collapse. Disintegration. A “gentle fade.” One of the bullet points just said, plainly: death.

They wrapped it in probability language to soften the blow. “Statistically manageable risk.” “Optimized survival curve.” But it always led to the same end note. Yeah, sure. Whatever that means.

Chance of return? 0.0305%.

And then there was the Impact Event.

I didn’t even know you could hit something inside a gate. The entry had been clean — smooth ignition, corridor stabilizer humming like the training models. Then it felt like the whole ship had been swatted sideways. No alarms at first, just that gut-punch thud like driving over a buried boulder you never saw coming.

Consoles spiked. Readouts went incoherent — velocity estimates climbing and dropping, flux values jittering like a seismograph in a quake. Stabilizers caught me before the tumble killed me, but not before my teeth almost rattled out.

I’ve spent seven days staring at that data. No answers. Was it a stray fragment from the ring? A corridor fold intersecting wrong? Did I brush the edge of some mass that wasn’t supposed to be there? Hell if I know. And if anyone does, it’s not like I can open a com channel and ask. All I know is the ship didn’t tear itself apart, and I’m still breathing.

And I keep circling back to the same thought: ever since my first year in the Academy, when the instructors started pulling me aside for “special assignments,” I never figured it would lead here. Back then, it just felt like punishment disguised as privilege. “Test this alternate navigation problem set.” “Work through a pattern-recognition drill no one else had to do.” “Write a survival essay on a planet you’ve never studied.” I thought they were just trying to break me — to prove that being clever wasn’t enough.

Maybe they were. Or maybe they already knew.

I can still see the old guy with the long white beard, watching me like I was some puzzle box he couldn’t decide whether to open or toss aside. And that balding professor — the one who filled entire classes with pop quizzes that made no sense at the time. I’d curse him every night under my breath, but now, stuck in a corridor where nothing makes sense, I hear his voice more than anyone else’s. Maybe he wasn’t preparing me for knowledge. Maybe he was preparing me to be confused and not break.

If it wasn’t for my archive of old Earth fictions, I’d have gone insane after the first duty cycle. A week in the dark corridor—nothing but static readouts and pressure hum—would’ve driven me mad. I was furious the first day when I found the pilot entertainment console marked out of order.

Blink, the AI, even had the gall to chime in over the speakers:

“That system is scheduled to be installed… Tuesday.”

Yeah. It’s always Tuesday with that thing.

So yes, I’m thankful they “let” me bring my personal data device. Not that I gave them a choice. A 0.0305% chance of death, and they thought I’d go in empty-handed? If I’m going to die in a tin can launched into nowhere, I’ll do it quoting Fletcher from Liar Liar: “I’ll bend over and take it up the tailpipe!”  I’ll do it however, on my terms.  

God, that’s the last thing I’ll be remembered for, isn’t it? Perfect.  He had said as much to Commander Vosdra.

…Or maybe listening to the weirdly accurate Carl Sagan, telling me about pale blue dots and the stubbornness of life in a universe that doesn’t care if I’m here or not.

They told me to jettison a log buoy every twelve hours — “elastic harmonic markers” was the phrase, I think. Each buoy takes whatever residual tension the corridor allows, snaps it like an elastic band, and pings the ripple backward. In theory, those ripples line up like breadcrumbs. In practice, it’s unproven.

They gave me fuel for just over a dozen buoys. Enough for the full corridor run, if rationed carefully. I tried to stretch them across the expected span, spacing each one to last. This one… this is the final.

If the nav-com calculator isn’t lying, I might have power left for a single extra — one last buoy to set where-ever I end up. I doubt the buoy could re-enter the corridor after I’ve exited but… anyways, they’ve packed the fuel cells fat, built to burn slowly, “so the log might last a crazy long time… in case.”

So here it goes. Last in the sequence.

Attaching sensor readout for the record.

• Velocity marker: still crap. Nav says anywhere from 0.85c to “no fix.”

• Corridor flux: stable-ish, with those aftershocks still kicking.

• Radiation sweep: fine, for now.

• Exit signature: narrow cone. High distortion. Looks like I’m aimed somewhere.
  
  
  The theorists would make poetry of this data, I’m sure. They’d call it harmonic resonance or corridor songlines. To me, it looks like noise in a box.

Anyways. I ride the noise. A passenger in a rather spectacularly flashy cannon. Fired once, hopefully landing where the target’s been painted.

Sensors are tightening now, vector narrowing, conal distortion flattening. Which means the exit is close. Closer than my nerves would prefer.

That means I should finish this log. If anyone ever hears it… at least you’ll know I wasn’t asleep at the switch when the silence broke.

[End log]