Eli Gaultney

“Almost two centuries of starflight since the dawn of exploration and you’ll still find these early Dumb-Thrusters drifting out there in the void. Engines dark. Nav corrupted. No supplies, or some critical flight system with zero back-up damaged beyond repair. All the records from those first hundred years are corrupted from the plague and so whatever you can find out about these drifters won’t be in the Secure Archives on Sigma Prime. So… you dig into the ship, document what personal items you can, and have the drones scan all the serial and parts numbers. No one cares and half the salvagers out there are just looking for what they can sell to the private collectors. But… Syndicate Archives will pay for the flight and trouble if you get captures on all the data. So we spent three days out there on that ship, scanning. On the last day… it was J8a who insisted we take care of him. She was right. We gently removed him from the pilot’s chair so carefully it must have been like the first time his mother held him. We wrapped him tight for transport, and then… as we stood there with no real idea who he was or where he was from… or what adventures he’d had out here in the dark, what stars he’d seen, what worlds he’d tried, we thanked him for doing his best to get humanity, us, out here. Among the stars. He didn’t make it. But we did. And he was part of us.