The Steve

Reported by: Jedikiah Drake

It came as a profound surprise to me when I discovered the well-preserved remains of legendary pilot Steve "The Steve" Kowalski during an exploration of the Jettison Scar. I had been unaware that that personage had been the pilot of the Garrulous: indeed, that fact appears to have been carefully deleted from the records of that flight for reasons which are still unclear.

What I found, to be precise, was a reconfigured escape pod among the wreckage of cargo holds. The disjointed remnants of a voice-based log in the pod seem to indicate that The Steve performed the violent mass transfer maneuver in defiance of the increasingly unstable Captain McMahon for reasons not entirely made clear in the recording. More startling was the manner in which the pod was reconfigured: instead of breathable atmosphere, it was full of inert gasses, and maintained at sub-freezing temperatures up to when I found it.

My initial suspicion was that The Steve anticipated revival, and the modifications were an attempt at cryogenics. This was belied by the nature of the wounds which caused his death, however: his brain and entire central nervous system had been liquefied, by a self-inflicted electric current adminstered by a Polveran device. This device, along with several others involved in Polveran Rituals, were present beside the corpse. They were recently used, with traces of apparently long-ago-frozen Polveran DNA still clinging to some of the working edges, and alongside them were instructions to use them, during the next Zeta Conjunction.

Time was short, with the conjunction imminent and no assurance that the body would remain preserved through the next one if this opportunity were missed. In the name of science, and for the prospect of communion with unimaginably advanced Higher Powers, I took it upon myself to fulfill The Steve's final expressed wishes.

See Also:
Jettison Scar
Ritualized Cannibalism
Zeta Conjunction


This is a TUV article in the Polvera Lexicon

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