30MAY3025

Let me paint you a picture.

It’s 0300 ship time. The Rust Rat smells like melted wiring and burned-out dignity. I’m running on stale caffeine pills and recycled air. The ship’s gravity generator keeps flickering like a dying campfire, which means every third step turns into a short, humiliating float-drift-fall cycle.

In short: Everything is going great.

I’ve officially entered what I’m calling Stage Four of Deep-Space Psychological Decompensation:

Stage One: Panic
Stage Two: Denial
Stage Three: Sarcastic acceptance
Stage Four: Trying to reason with the weirdness like it’s a bad roommate

I’m currently somewhere between “Hey, Kevin, do you have to hum at 4 a.m.?” and “Gary, can you please stop rearranging my internal sensor data to show a gravestone?”

Survival Rule #9: If the Ship Starts Changing, Don’t Mention It

So, um…
The Rust Rat is changing.

Not in the "wow, I think I fixed the engine" kind of way.
No. I mean in the layout-is-no-longer-consistent, doors-lead-to-different-places-every-time kind of way.

Yesterday, I went to grab a tool kit from the lower maintenance bay. That takes me down the aft corridor, past the storage lockers, down a short ladder. I’ve walked that path a hundred times.

Except yesterday… it opened into the crew quarters.

Not my crew quarters.

On a ship I never served on.

There was a nameplate by the bunk that said “Captain R. Velos.”
I don’t know who that is.
But I sat on the edge of the bed like I belonged there. Like I’d done it before.

And when I stood up, I was back in the maintenance bay, tool kit in hand.

I did not open that door again.

Survival Rule #10: If a Log Starts Playing by Itself, Just Let It Finish

Later that day (or night? Space makes time stupid), one of my old audio logs played without my input. I didn’t activate it, didn’t select it, didn’t even know it was still saved.

It was a recording from my first solo run after ditching the bandits.

I sounded younger. Hopeful. I was talking about how I was gonna “make something of myself” and “earn a clean rep.” I even said the phrase:

“Nothing out here is scarier than what I left behind.”

Present-day me, sitting in a dimly lit cockpit with hallucinated roommates, impossible corridors, and a ghost ship watching me from the dark, actually laughed out loud.

The log ended with a weird burst of static—almost like it had been overwritten. Just one line at the very end, in a voice that was definitely not mine:

“You were wrong.”

Where This Leaves Us

So here’s my new theory:

Either the ship is infected with some kind of spatial-temporal corruption, or I’ve officially entered a mental feedback loop so strong it's warping my environment.

Either way, I’m committed to riding this wave as long as I can.

Because the alternative is screaming into the void. And honestly, I’ve tried that. The void screamed back.

• Scootch

Quote of the Day:
"If the hallway’s different than you remember, just assume you were wrong. Not reality. That’s safer."