04JUL3025

Here’s something no one tells you about staring into an alien psychic orb that might be harvesting your memories: it’s not the visual hallucinations that get you.

It’s the recognition.

It’s seeing something impossible and thinking,

“Oh. That makes sense.”

Survival Rule #15: If You Understand It, Run Faster

The orb in the center of the station kept changing colors—each shift brought a new image, each image brought a new feeling. Not memories. Not quite dreams.

Impressions.
Like echoes of other lives, overlapping mine.

One second I was a pilot crashing into atmosphere.
The next, I was drifting in deep space in a hull shaped like a crescent moon, watching stars die.
Then I was… something else. Something tall. Wrong. Looking through a curved window into another dimension.

Every time I blinked, I felt less like me.
Like Scootch was just one of many… versions.

And somewhere in the haze, a voice said:

“You are the fragment.”
“You are the seed.”
“You are not whole.”

The Identity Loop

I backed away from the orb, but the room didn’t get smaller.
The station bent around me, subtly shifting corridors, smoothing angles, closing doors behind me.

It wasn’t trapping me.
It was… shaping me.

Every console I passed flickered on.
Each one showed a different version of me.

• Scootch the bandit, holding a stolen rifle with Dex’s blood on his boots.

• Scootch the survivor, laughing in the Rust Rat galley like nothing could touch him.

• Scootch the pilot, whispering coordinates in a language made of color.

• Scootch the husk, floating in the void with no suit, no ship, no face.

And behind each version, one constant:

The ship.

Different shapes, different names, but always there.
Watching.

And then I heard it again—my own voice, on every screen at once:

“None of this was yours. You just happened to wake up first.”

The Shatter Point

I found a final door.
Larger than the others. Cold to the touch. It felt like… metal that didn’t want to be touched.

It opened before I could decide whether I should walk away.

Inside:
A long room.
A cryopod.

And me.

Lying in it.
Hooked to a neural matrix.
Heart rate steady.
Unmoving.

I walked to the edge and stared down at myself.

And for the first time in weeks—maybe months—I didn’t say anything.

Not a joke.
Not a curse.
Not even “what the hell.”

Just silence.

What Happens Now?

I don’t know.
If that’s me, then who’s writing this?
If I’m still on that bandit ship… why do I remember everything that’s happened in the Rust Rat since Dex left?

Unless…

This was all part of it.
A survival loop.
A memory net.
A test.

And I’m just the first version clever—or stupid—enough to realize it’s a loop.

Maybe this wasn’t a dream.
Maybe the dream was that I ever left the pod.

• Scootch?

Quote of the Day:
"You don’t escape the loop. You just learn to walk it differently."