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by Hakonia. . 4 reads.

Digital Log of Scientist Pehin Harlameza

DIGITAL LOG OF SCIENTIST PEHIN HARLAMEZA
Date: [DATA CORRUPTED]

If you have found this recording, then it means I and the rest of my species are dead. Our destruction was of our own making, of our own design and folly. It is my greatest shame that I had a hand in all this, in our own extinction. But there is nothing more I can do about it than make this recording and warn any others who may be wandering the stars of the monster we have unleashed. At least, I hope to the Watcher that we are not alone. I'd be thrice damned if I helped eliminate the only intelligent life in the universe.

To begin to illustrate what has happened to us, we need to go back a century. Our homeworld, Hakonia, suffered a great and terrible natural disaster. A supervolcanic eruption like our species had never before seen. It killed 60% of our population, forced us into small enclaves for protection. It rendered most of the planet uninhabitable for what was predicted to be millennia. Like all intelligent races (I assume) we sought to not accept our lot in life. We scientists worked every angle we could to salvage our home, to restore it and come back from the brink.

That's when we made our first mistake.

Our laboratory, my lab, developed a nanomachine theoretically capable of converting volcanic matter and airborne particulates into new infrastructure. We called it "Silver Sand" ["Veraqol"] on account of its appearance as a fine grey sand when in an inert pile. Our initial tests were promising, and within a year we were permitted trial runs by the Rawakhan Federation. The results exceeded even our highest expectations. Our new calculations pinned a full decontamination of Hakonia in one to two centuries.

With the initial trials being such great successes, the government gave us the official stamp of approval to begin production and deployment of Silver Sand to every major continent. But we quickly ran into the first of many incidents that should have given us a glimpse of our future, had we not been so blind by our eagerness. Some priceless obsidian artifact in a soot-buried museum was deconstructed and used as material by a mass of Silver Sand. I'm not much of a fan for historical sentimentality, but the people and government were not as forgiving. Plus we wanted to ensure this did not happen with something else more...vital. So we pushed some self-propagating OTA updates to the Silver Sand to increase its ability to discern objects beyond their material composition and make smarter decisions.

We only had a few other minor incidents after that, but nothing unexpected from emergent technology like this. In 10 years time we were able to reclaim about 12% of the surface area lost to the supervolcano. Things were looking up, and with every milestone we broke open some drinks and partied like primitives who had just discovered fire.

But in our pride, we made some poor decisions. Lethal decisions, as it turned out.

Theorizing we could speed the process up even further, we pushed out another OTA update. This time, we added Silver Sand to the list of potential constructs for Silver Sand to make. It would exponentially increase the amount of Silver Sand working and available, all without need for the dedication of more factory space to its production. It was genius. I was genius.

And now I am the killer of an entire civilization and species.

The self-replication worked even better than expected. More parties. More drinks. Now only a few decades to go before the planet was fixed and we were hailed as its saviors. But problems continued to crop up as time went on. In one incident, a mass of Silver Sand had somehow hijacked an abandoned factory and converted it to autonomously make more Silver Sand. So we pushed another OTA update to keep the Sand from taking control of machinery like that.

But then everything began falling apart. The OTA update never propagated, and when we went to push it again we found the admin credentials for the software the Silver Sand was using had been altered. I still do not know if the Sand itself somehow made the change or some Watcher-forsaken hacker trying to amuse themselves. All I know is we were, and still are, locked out.

Obviously, when we reported this to the Federation they weren't exactly happy. After going over our options, the government declared a state of emergency and deployed military taskforces to eliminate the Silver Sand. This worked for a while, and the army was able to greatly reduce the amount of Silver Sand propagating in the wild. But eventually something happened, something changed within the Silver Sand's programming. Somehow it began targeting military equipment for deconstruction. And that quickly crippled any chance of waging a small-scale operation against the Sand.

Then bombs began dropping, artillery began firing, missiles began raining down on the Silver Sand. Again they were reduced, and again they adapted. They now began taking direct control of military equipment, just as they did with the factory machinery before. They began "deconstructing" Rawakhans. The images I've seen of a "disassembled" Rawakhan will haunt my mind for as long as I shall live.

But the real threat came when the Silver Sand found its way aboard a starship; the cruiser HSN Yura. From what I hear the crew fought back against the sand long and hard, but in the end they too were killed and the ship itself hijacked. The Sand used the Yura to propagate into other ships and stations, effectively giving it a bastion outside of Hakonia and ensuring we were locked planetside and our fate was sealed. I don't know if anyone made it out of the Oranon System, but I sometimes like to imagine some Rawakhan is out there somewhere, keeping our species alive.

Either way, the time finally came for the government to deploy its last line of defense: Nuclear weapons. The blasts, though destructive, did not do nearly as much damage as the electromagnetic pulse that followed did. By some estimates we were able to cull 95% of the Silver Sand, even if it cost us radioactive fallout and the destruction of some possibly inhabited cities.

But so long as any amount of Silver Sand survived we had failed. It wasn't long before a combination of surviving Silver Sand and seeding from the Yura repopulated the Sand. But by now the fight was over. The Watcher-damned Sand overran major cities with ease. It singlehandedly brought down the entirety of civilization on Hakonia. What few of us remain have taken whatever shelter we could find, but even that will eventually not be enough to save us.

If you found this recording on the probe I launched, greetings. You are the first species we Rawakhans have ever successfully contacted. I wish I could meet you in person, but by the time you receive this that will no longer be possible.

I wish I could say our ending was poetic in some way. But there's nothing poetic about this, about extinction. There is only regret and death.

Goodbye.

END LOG

Hakonia

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