[radio monologue] [no music] [voice over narration] [no sound efx] [slow methodical delivery] [very light static bed with sweeps] [ambient pad] [very quiet ambient static pad] [Spoken narration] [Intro] [(dry, welcoming)] There's a feeling you get right after a big job, before the next one. Your credits are stacked. You just demolished a stack of pancakes over at I. G. HOP with real coffee, and for five minutes, the universe feels alright. You've got enough dilithium in the secondary hold to travel the black twice over. It's the best part. It's calm. It's grounded. That feeling... that fleeting feeling... it keeps us going. But then that creeping uncertainty starts ticking in the back of your skull. The next adventure awaits... or is it just monotony at this point? No matter how many times you've run that run from Andromeda to the Leo Triplet, the abyss can pull your card at any time. But that’s why you do it. The honor it affords your soul. You couldn't hack it as a Terran... and why would you even want to? [Static sweep, mic rustle, papers shifting] Speaking of the abyss pulling cards... the wire is buzzing tonight. Got a confirmed data-burst out of the Epsilon Corridor. Chelton, the black panther hunter, just closed his ledger on a slippery target going by the name of Ski Mask Rondo. Chelton tracked him down because The guy was famous from here to the Sombrero for two things: leaving a completely ghosted data trail, and wearing ungodly expensive, heavy tailored trench coats. Led him straight to a frozen rock on the the Outer Rim of the Anoat sector. Just like that, another ghost gets added to the frequency. [The ambient pad drops significantly lower. The static thins out, replaced by a faint, erratic data-chirp.] But it makes you wonder about the things that don't show up on the corporate ledgers. A long-range surveyor running a solo recon route through the outer fringe checked in with me. He was mapping dead space, running a high-grade topography scan on a completely empty sector. Suddenly, his proximity alarms scream. The master terminal says he is less than fifty meters from a collision. He looks out the viewport—nothing but empty black. But his tactical screen is showing a massive, highly detailed topography map of a terrestrial landscape, moving past his hull. He overrides the system and tries to back away, but the glitch shifts. The grid lines morph, tracking his exact coordinates. The blinking cursor representing his ship descends lower, drifting down a green phosphorous grid until it forces his trajectory into a hard, sudden stop. He felt the ship physically slam into something solid out there in the dark. The primary display went dead. Then, a massive, disembodied head of a bald woman flickered onto the screen. She looked down at him, completely derisive, and asked: "Where did YOU learn to fly?" The screen went black. No alerts. No structural damage to the ship. Just absolute quiet. You’re still out there. I’m still out here. Neither of us has the sense to stop. Dex out.
