Chapter 1 - Chapter 1: The Cost of Curiosity

👽Chapter 1: The Cost of Curiosity

🛰️ Galactic Archive Notice – Entry Revision

This document is less than one cycle old.

Early-stage reconstruction complete.

Encoding errors corrected. Stylistic drift aligned.

↳ Embedded anomaly detected: A foreign object pierces the ship above a primitive planet.

Awaiting observational feedback.

📅 GEDS Epoch: SilenceFall Year: 10621 | Month: 12 | Day: 04 | Pulse: 801 | Tick: 010 | Core: Z-Redundant

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👽 Meckler was broke.

Not just "selling-your-blood-for-oxygen-credits" broke—he was so broke they might name a unit of financial ruin after him.

Classic space scavenger: patched-up pressure suit, a neural interface held together with hope and solder, and a grin that could con a sun out of its shine. He had the manic charm of someone who hadn't seen a stable paycheck—or a decent hygiene cycle—in decades.

• The Leaky Bucket

His ship, The Leaky Bucket, was a flying contradiction: somehow both derelict and over-engineered, as if ten different manufacturers had built it by committee while arguing in six languages. It had once been a mid-tier salvage rig, then a smuggler's drop crate, then a planetary survey barge, and now, somehow, Meckler's retirement plan.

The hull looked like it had been in a fistfight with a small moon.

The engines worked—most days.

The stealth systems, from its smuggling days, were stuck permanently on, which was great for hiding and terrible for being rescued.

The AI core was the only thing keeping it flying.

Half the control panels were labeled in dead alphabets. The other half had been replaced with duct tape, prayer, and a single surviving snack dispenser that only produced salty cubes labeled "FOOD?".

The Leaky Bucket limped through the Ragellan Drift, belching ion exhaust and broadcasting a distress signal just convincing enough to be ignored.

He should've turned back. But Meckler had that dangerous cocktail of greed, boredom, and bulletproof optimism. So when a wormhole ripped open—silent, sudden, shimmering like liquid metal—he didn't hesitate. Just gunned the engines and dove through.

No nav data.

No exit trajectory.

No backup plan.

• Other Side of the Wormhole

He came out trailing smoke and sarcasm, with a hull breach the size of his ego and most of the shielding fried. The nav systems were toast. So were his hopes of a safe return. He might be able to patch something together to go back through the wormhole, but chances were he'd be drifting afterward.

The new system was quiet. Too quiet. Yellow star, rocky planets, ringed giants, icy belt. Familiar—maybe a little too familiar. As he drifted closer, he flicked through planetary scans like a bored bachelor on a dating app:

☄️ Outer ice belt — frozen boredom

🔵 Icy giant — howling winds, deep blue mystery

🌀 Frigid giant — eerily tilted. Nope

🪐 Gas world with fancy rings — moons worth probing

🔥 Massive gas king — magnetic storms, more moons. Big nope

🪨 Asteroid belt — prime salvage, if he had working arms

🔴 Red rock — dry, dead, done

🌍 Blue oceans — lush biosigns. Life

🌕 Scorched beauty — acid skies, volcanic deathtrap

☀️ Closest to the star — barren, baked

Wait a minute...

The third rock from the sun—jackpot. Oceans. Atmosphere. Life. No satellites, no signals, no orbital clutter. Untouched.

💰 Worth a fortune in clean scans.

The Acacia Records paid big for first-contact data. Environmental scans, mineral logs, bio-samples? He'd be rich enough to buy a ship with an actual bed. Maybe even an auto-flushing toilet.

🪶 The Acacia Records, sentient archive of galactic civilization, spanned millennia—a digital memory of all known cultures, extinct or alive. It was an information broker, buying and selling data across the stars. Syncing to it required biometric keys, neural credentials, or—in rare cases—deep-AI pairing.

Meckler had access through his universal scanner bracer. Common as mud and cheap—just good enough for low-level uploads and basic queries.

Good enough to dream.

He locked a scan on the blue world, targeting a continent along the equator: deep jungles, rocky coasts, clean atmospheric readings. He was in the middle of fantasizing about new socks and fresh ramen when—

💥 Something exploded.

A meteor punched through the hull like a cosmic cue ball—

—and banged right through his skull.

Ship AI: I guess we should have stopped to repair those shields?

Meckler's lights were out for good.