49 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
49 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
```QEC REPORT
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HONEYSUCKLE
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1: SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT
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```
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I'm sending this out after it's already done. I'm sitting in my
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hotel room now, waiting for the police to arrive. They should be
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here any moment. I'll make this quick.
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I'm setting the record straight. I did some bad things. But, I
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wasn't alone in doing them. I want you to know that. Whoever you
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are.
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Six months ago, my ship docked at the Cilix outpost on Europa. It
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was some kind of cruise ship. The budget kind.
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It was my first time in outer space. I was young, I wanted to see
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the solar system. I was naive. I probably deserved what happened
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for even stepping foot on a cruise ship in the first place.
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I got to see outer space alright. The starry heavens above. It
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wasn't much. There were vast stretches of nothin' and long periods
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of hypersleep, interlaced with brief jaunts on exotic-but-desolate
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locations scattered throughout the solar system. I felt like
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nothin' when I was out there too. I felt like a nobody, like what I
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did didn't really matter. Sort of the opposite of how you imagine
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space feeling. There was no glory, no majesty, only air-conditioned
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resorts, and they didn't even look all that different from the
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resorts back home.
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The people were different, sure. People in those places live like
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there's no morals, no governments. Mostly because there aren't any.
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I'd like to say that I did what I did because I was a simple
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Earth-boy corrupted by these outlying societies, but that's not
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true. I've always had a tendency to flirt with the wrong side of
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the law. I want to be clear though, nothin' I ever did back on
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Earth ever harmed anybody. I was small-time. That changed on
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Europa. It changed with a woman.
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I first saw her on the second day of our one-week stop at Europa.
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She looked like the real thing. Beautiful, young, smelling of
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honeysuckles.
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I soon found out she wasn't the real thing at all. Far from it.
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She was an android. Her name was Judy.
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