"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.

 

[Mostly Awol]

COMMANDER’S LOG
CMDR: [REDACTED] aka MostlyAwol
Date: 3306-07-25
System: [REDACTED]
Location: [REDACTED], Inner Orion Spur

I’ve lost track of how many iterations I’ve tested.

The problem isn’t the data. It’s the structure. My simulation cores are producing stable predictive matrices in isolation, but every time I try to embed them into a live lattice framework, the signal degrades under load. Thought vector mapping becomes erratic. Contextual alignment fails within seconds. It’s like trying to balance a magnetic field on a spiderweb.

I thought maybe it was a timing issue. So I rebuilt the array clocks from scratch using triple-buffered quantum delay chains. No improvement. I tried isolating each logic gate with staggered power filters, even resorted to floating the whole system on a Faraday grid to eliminate ambient interference. Still got the same result: thermal stress, signal collapse, and in one case, a blown containment fuse that nearly torched my entire bench.

It’s not the code. I think I’ve written the cleanest behavior-mapping engine of my life. The issue is physical, some part of the lattice simply can’t handle the load I’m putting through it.

While cataloging options, I reviewed a partial Guardian artifact manifest from NGC 3199 Sector DL-Y d12, stored in one of my encrypted archives. Among the more esoteric entries, I found repeat references to a “polycrystalline structural alloy.” Normally I’d file that under another dead end, but I remembered I had a few relic fragments tucked away in deep storage. Recovered during that misguided salvage job out past Synuefe.

I ran a scan. The structural density of the alloy is unlike anything in our fabrication libraries. Not resonant like some of the Guardian tech we’ve seen, but incredibly stable under thermal and electromagnetic strain. High conductivity with virtually no bleed. It doesn’t do anything, no glow, no tricks. It just sits there and takes whatever punishment you throw at it.

And that’s what I need. A substrate that doesn’t flex, doesn’t melt, doesn’t fracture when I ask it to carry the weight of a fully threaded feedback lattice.

One problem solved. One more opened.

The alloy is the right material, but I have no clue how to fabricate with it. It doesn’t react to my forge settings, won’t bond to traditional carrier scaffolds, and whatever tooling the Guardians used, it’s long gone, or buried in data we don’t understand.

If I’m going to make this work, I need to figure out how to shape it. How to build with it. And for that... I’ll need to find somewhere, or someone, who understands this stuff better than I do.

Time to start digging.

 

[Mostly Awol]

COMMANDER’S LOG
CMDR: [REDACTED] aka MostlyAwol
Date: 3306-10-17
System: Classified
Location: Independent Research Facility – Deck C, Fabrication Lab

Progress. At last, progress.

I’m logging this entry after nearly four straight days without proper sleep, but clarity has never felt sharper. I’ve been running controlled experiments with the polycrystalline structural alloy. Cutting, annealing, exposing it to various electromagnetic conditioning fields and today something finally clicked.

The material is extraordinary. It resists. Holds. Redirects. It responds to the lattice shaping algorithm with a precision I haven’t seen in any Terran-manufactured composite.

The trick wasn't in brute-forcing logic arrays into the alloy, but understanding that it needed a phase-tuned binding field while still in its mutable crystalline state. Took me weeks of failures before I realized I’d been treating it like an end-product instead of a medium. It’s not a circuit board. It’s a scaffolding for emergent process logic.

With the right sequence of rapid-field rotations (9.3 MHz, precisely tuned) and high-density parallel induction bursts, I managed to embed a test imprint into a suspended sliver of the alloy. Didn't get much of a response, until I layered a micro-thermal feedback gate over the base layer using spun graphene filament. Then everything changed.

I didn't expect what came next.

Just before the test chamber's field collapsed from heat fatigue, the lattice segment flared with a brief, blinding cascade of energy. The internal oscilloscope overloaded, burned out entirely, but the last frame on the screen is seared into my mind.

A bloom. A fractal detonation of light, not unlike the core profile of a Type IIb supernova, unfolding in spectral waves across the diagnostic graph. The alloy pulsed, not in uniform response, but in pattern. Not noise. Not chaos. A waveform. Something... deliberate.

And then silence.

I’ve isolated the logs, tagged the waveform, and set the diagnostics to record any flickers from the remaining lattice cores. Whatever that moment was, it wasn’t just heat and stress discharge. Something happened.