Full Text of the journal entries (continued in comment): [Entry #1 It looked like a wound on the world. Crimson and ragged-edged, like something that once lived but was then torn asunder. I should have stayed away. Had I the senses to taste the air of this planet, I imagine it would have reeked with some kind of alien fetor, but nothing could stall my curiosity.
Was it dead? Where I touched it, the surface was moist and yielding. It seemed to become motile then, crawling on a mat of slow cilia, moving from me. I should have left it alone.'
Entry #2 I glimpsed the crimson orb between the clouds. A vast and baleful eye, unblinking and monstrous. Fear turned the blood in my veins to ice. I was so afraid it would see me, but then the clouds moved and it was gone. I was no longer certain if it had ever been real.
Perhaps the fungal deposits from the last world I visited are still clogging my exosuit vents. Affecting my cognition somehow. I have cleaned my filters six times now. But I still feel it inside me.'
Entry #3 I found a body. It's unlike anything I have ever seen. If there's a species like it, then I hope they're all dead like this one. At first I thought it some tragic remnant of a matter-transfer tech malfunction: a cage of bones and flesh studded with random patterns of crooked teeth and rheumy, lidless eyes. But no.
Some horror of twisted evolution, warped by cruel nature. I can't help but picture what it would have looked like alive. I cannot help but fear that it will live again.'
Entry #4 The oceans here are blood. Nothing lives in them; they are alive themselves. Great protean life forms as large as continents... or perhaps there is only one of them. What does such a thing consume, I ask myself? The answer seems to be everything.
I found evidence of past life here, but no signs of it. Does the native flora and fauna hibernate when it comes to eat them, then return and repopulate once it retreats? I can feel it moving inside my brain, whispering. It wants me to discard my suit and swim.'
Entry #5 I awoke from a dream where I was drowning in something thick and glutinous. It filled my pores and suffocated me. I want to believe that this is my tired mind playing tricks. I have been so long without deep sleep.
The crimson sphere shimmers at the corner of my eye whenever I try to rest. I cannot comprehend how it tracks my spoor from world to world. Or is it that I am following it? The orb cannot be in all places at once. That cannot be.'
Entry #6 Is this what we become? At each turn on my journey I find only more to taint my spirit and my flesh. The fanged maws erupt around me when my back is turned. I hear them chattering and spitting. Sometimes they scream sounds that may be words. Perhaps my name.
I haven't removed my exosuit in many cycles. I'm afraid to look at my own skin. I know it will be seething, pus-wet and pitted. I have become a vector of infection. The corruption of something ruinous lives in my flesh. Don't come looking for me.'
Entry #7 What are the Sentinels? They appear on countless worlds without summons or warning, they traverse the galaxy unopposed and enforce their will upon every sentient being they encounter. Who made them? Who gave them the will to police the stars and demand that we bow to their silent rules?
The goal of the experiment was to learn the answers to these questions. It began on an uncharted world beneath a blue-white sun, far from the axis of civilization. The first drone screamed when it was cut open.'
Entry #8 Where do the Sentinels come from? No ships are ever seen arriving to deposit them, yet we know they have spatial drives and can appear on any planet. Do they build themselves from resources on the worlds that they infest? Like a mechanoid virus, drawing on the host body to metastasize new matter?
Korvax science speaks of metals in their makeup that should not exist in our age of the universe. No-one has ever seen them built. They are simply here, as if the universe expresses them into existence.'
Entry #9 There is a world – turned to dust long before the rise of the Vy'keen – where the natives turned against the Sentinels. They chafed under the omnipresent eyes of the machines. Resentment begat violence. Drones were destroyed.
More natives fought, and so came the bipeds, the quadrupeds, the interceptors in the sky. These and more. Soon there was war; and still the machines came, in exponential growth until at last they ended a species as a punishment. Still, the Galaxy refused to learn from this...'
Entry #10 Is there a connection between the monoliths and the Sentinels? The origins of these ancient structures seem to predate all known civilization, although over time they have become imbued with the beliefs and the histories of the creatures that evolved around them.
What if there was a precursor species that came before us all? Imagine one of such infinite knowledge and interstellar power that even after extinction has erased their traces, their tools remain for us to pore over, like an infant confronted with a fusion reactor.'
Entry #11 When there is no explanation for a phenomena, it is a natural progress for intelligent beings to fill in the missing parts of their experience. On some worlds, the Sentinels are still worshipped as avatars of an all-seeing deity. Drones are considered sacred, sent by an unseen God to ensure that they live in enforced harmony with the environment around them.
There is a disturbing commonality to many elements of their theologies; a recurring visual symbol of a crimson sphere and the promise of an end time soon to unfold.'
Entry #12 The experiment's final phase emerged from frustration. We wanted to learn something new. We wanted to know how they worked. We wanted to see inside them. An untested dimensional-warping process was used, one we believed would allow us to capture a drone intact. We would cage it, keep it docile. It was our error to believe we could.
The machines co-opted the warp-tech and turned it upon us. In the horror of it all, our flesh was merged with their metal. Our questions were finally answered.' ](#s)