"Day 11. I came out here to die. But instead of overdosing at Wyatt's cottage, I went out walking along the water. I was standing right here when the idea hit me, and the moment it did... I knew I had to do it."
I came here with a duffle full of drugs after I found out about the plague. I had a plan, a simple one. I figured I'd spend a few days getting high, then OD on Overcast.
I guess I was still furious at Wyatt for aiding and abetting your silence. If everything had gone according to plan, my corpse would've lay rotting in the cottage for who knows how long. He would've needed to lease catastrophic cleaning bots just to scrape me off the floor. A skeletal middle finger from beyond the grave.
But things didn't go to plan. For some reason, I went out walking before I got high.
I trudged along the shore, thinking of all the times we walked and talked here. How I'd changed over the years: how you'd stayed the same. Whether I was a high schooler jabbering about AP classes or a university student gossiping about my professors or a FAS engineer pontificating about payload yields, you were always there, always listening, always interested. And always encouraging me, of course, spurring me on. Onwards and upwards...
But now here I was, an abject failure, standing alone on this beach... as all around me, children chasing play-bots across the sand, sun-bathers basked, families splashed in the water or zipped past on old-timey boats, utterly oblivious to the mechanical terrors that would soon consume them.
Brief moments in the sun, doomed to end in horror and amount to nothing.
All your love and devotion, all the sacrifices you made to support my success... what had that come to? Failure. And at such cost. We never even got a chance to say goodbye.
But even if I hadn't failed, if I'd gone on "succeeding," would that have been any better? The whole time I was clawing my way up the ladder at FAS, the company's military division was creating the tech that would end the world. I served the same master.
Success was a ladder to nowhere. It just took falling off and landing on the Vantage project to see it.
I didn't know, but the irony of that had never hit me until I was standing on this beach.
That it was only because I'd failed and been assigned to Vantage - an abandoned time capsule project - that I'd found out the world was ending.
Irony? More like a cosmic joke.
Why, then, did the realization hit me like an inspiration?
I had access to the tech. I knew I could do it.
Sure, in the end, it would probably all just come to nothing... like everything else. But for 50,000 years or more, whatever data I left behind would still be there.
It wouldn't be much. But it wouldn't be nothing, either.
I went back to the cottage, stashed the drugs, called a LiftSpin into town. If I was going to make an end-of-the-world tour, I figured I might as well do it in style, so I leased a Sabara and rode that to FAS. I let myself into the lab, signed out twelve Vantage spikes for "testing" put them in the trunk of the Sabara- and the rest is history.
When I started the tour, I figured I'd come back here and pick up where I left off. Get high, then dead. But the first thing I did when I got back was incinerate the drugs - all 2.5 months of salary worth - so that bridge to oblivion has literally been burned.
I don't know how I'm going to die, but I can't be like that. I know how you felt about me and drugs. However it happens, I can at least promise you this: I will die clean.
I still have one last Spike to sink. One final stop on the grand mystery tour.
I'll see you there."
―Bashar Mati
Trivia[]
The location shown in the Lake Powell vantage point matches the real world location of Lake Powell in the state of Utah.[1]
Gallery[]
References[]
↑This location was determined by the name of this vantage point
