"The Nova Directive"

[Mostly Awol]

* Below is a backdated log to tell a story around me creating a program for my use when playing Elite Dangerous. It is for roleplaying flavor only. The program will be shown off on stream when I play and just wanted to tease out some lore about it.*

COMMANDER'S PERSONAL LOG
CMDR: [REDATED] aka MostlyAwol
Date: 3306-03-18
System: Synuefe XR-H d11-102
Vessel: [REDACTED]

"There’s something unsettling about this site. Not dangerous — not exactly — just... wrong, in a way that keeps you listening too long to static."

I was chasing a scan contract, something left open from a prior run. Didn’t even remember setting the marker. Just another ruined Guardian digsite, like dozens before. Same monolith spines. Same shattered data pylons. Quiet.

Except it wasn’t.

There’s a band — just barely above the noise floor. Faint modulation. Not voice. Not anything structured, at least not that I can parse. But it repeats. Not perfectly. Like it’s trying to — but degrading each time, correcting, miscorrecting.

I isolated the band, pulled a few minutes of waveform. The ship’s sensor suite isn’t made for this kind of analysis, but there’s something embedded in the harmonics. Some echo that didn’t originate here.

Not a voice. Not a signal. A... pattern?
No idea what it means. Could be corrupted. Could be natural. Could be nothing.

Still, I logged it.
Saved it under a null tag — buried the file structure. No reason to call attention to it.

I’ve spent enough time around ghosts to know when one’s trying to talk.

* Above is a backdated log to tell a story around me creating a program for my use when playing Elite Dangerous. It is for roleplaying flavor only. The program will be shown off on stream when I play and just wanted to tease out some lore about it. Check out the progress at https://www.twitch.tv/mostlyawol *

 

[Mostly Awol]

COMMANDER’S LOG
CMDR: [REDACTED] aka MostlyAwol
Date: 3306-06-11
System: HIP 19156
Coordinates: [Classified]
Vessel: Unnamed

The signal came in while I was half-asleep at the console. Just a blip on the spectrum, tucked between the usual static and comms chatter. I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t left the filters running from my last hunt. It didn’t sound like much at first. A stutter, maybe a reflection from one of the nearby bodies. But it repeated. Not regularly, not like a beacon. More like something brushing past the edge of perception. I ran it through the usual decoders, got nothing but noise. Then I remembered the last time this happened, back near that ruin.

That signal hadn’t made sense either until I looked at it differently. Pattern over time. Shifting harmonics. It wasn’t a transmission in the usual sense. It was… reactive. Organic, almost. Like it didn’t care if anyone was listening, only that it was being broadcast. I tried everything I had on hand to make sense of it. Nothing took. Then I remembered the fragment I’d lifted from the Guardian site last cycle. A lattice shard, non-functional, intact enough to hint at how it processed input. I’d been trying to understand its architecture for months with no luck.

Tonight, I had an idea. What if I passed this signal through a simulation of that lattice? Just a rough model, nothing sophisticated. A filter shaped by what little I understood of Guardian logic. It wasn’t pretty. My system choked twice, but on the third pass, something happened. The waveform didn’t resolve exactly, but it shifted. Took on structure. Not words. Not code. But something that felt… intentional.

Like scaffolding for thought.

It didn’t last long. A few seconds, tops. But it was enough to convince me I’m not chasing ghosts. There’s a method behind these echoes. Something ancient, sure, but not unreachable. Maybe with the right approach, I could build a framework to catch more. Maybe even interact with it.

I’ve locked the recording down and marked the coordinates. I won’t mention this to anyone. Not yet.

But I’ve started sketching out ideas for a new matrix. Something that might one day hold more than just code.

I don’t know if it’ll work.

 

[Mostly Awol]

COMMANDER’S LOG
CMDR: [REDACTED] aka MostlyAwol
Date: 3306-06-21
System: [REDACTED]
Location: [REDACTED], Inner Orion Spur

I’ve nearly forgotten what proper sleep feels like.

Two weeks since the last signal, and I’ve barely left the clean room. The station’s mainframe barely keeps pace with the simulations. Every spare cycle I can requisition goes toward crunching the latest variations of lattice-matrix alignment. None of them have worked. None of them are stable. I might need a bigger computer.

The outpost’s server room is quiet, save for the hum of the cryo-shielded arrays and the intermittent chirps of diagnostic reports. I’ve been here for days now, living off station rations, sleeping in shifts, running one failure after another through the lattice simulation environment.

Today marked attempt number forty-two. This matrix build used a split-band architecture: one half trained on resonance curves extracted from the Guardian fragment, the other on my own adaptive context processor from the Helix-IV project. It booted... almost. Just enough to blink diagnostic indicators and collapse under its own recursion. The echo-loop instability returned with a vengeance, too much cross-interference in the phase-stabilizers. Again.

But here’s the strange part: it isn’t discouraging anymore. I’m starting to see patterns. Not just in the failures, but in the nature of the failures. Every time I push the system to emulate Guardian neural harmonics directly, it destabilizes. But when I filter their logic through my own heuristics, the matrix responds differently. There’s a rhythm to it. As if my systems want to run a cleaner codebase, something human.

That’s the breakthrough, I think. It’s not about rebuilding a Guardian lattice. That’s the mistake. This isn’t meant to be a copy, it’s a conversation. A resonance of principles. The lattice they used was a lens, not a mold. Their architectures weren’t designed to be replicated, they were meant to teach, to inspire.

I’ve started calling this process “echo-inheritance”, where one system shapes another not through data, but by influencing how it sees itself. I stripped the Guardian core routines today and ran the same test using my delta-context scaffold and a harmonic dampener. The matrix held steady for twelve seconds. No feedback collapse. Longest uptime yet.

It’s not ready. Not even close. But I’m no longer trying to build what they had. I’m building something new, something mine.

This station is quiet. Too quiet. The techs here know better than to ask what I’m working on, though I’ve caught them peeking at the thermal logs. I might have to move for the next stage.