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[TRANSMISSION-PROTOCOL-VERSION: 8.5-3]
[TRANSMISSION-FROM: DO-28631-S-89594]
[TRANSMISSION-TO: *]
[TRANSMISSION-LOCAL-DATE: 11.78356]
[TRANSMISSION-ID: F2BE5036-3958-4056-B2DF-6C2CA9CD5F21]

I've been alone, all by myself, on this bare and uninhabitable rock, for two
months now. It's all I wanted it to be, but sometimes the loneliness grates
against my soul, striking a dissonant chord of existential doubt. A very
personal instantiation of the thought experiment that asks 'if a tree falls in a
forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?' Or, in fact, like
Schroedinger's cat. Am I in a weird superposition of being alive and dead
simultaneously by the lack of observers collapsing my quantum state?

No, of course not. Everyone knows such quantum-physical phenomena don't apply at
the macro level. I know. But still. I wonder. Do I exist?

The former occupants of this abandoned research station left at least a century
ago. There is not much to research around here. The local stellar neighbourhood
is as boring as watching sub-atomic handlers assemble one mol of trimetylxantin.

My last hop before I set foot on this asteroid was an anonymous space station
with the designation DO-28631-P-1. Old and decrepit itself, it is home to a
small community of bohemian hermits -- if such a thing could exist. Cosmic
squatters who made it their home. Too crowded still for me.

Do those on the station remember me? Or have I already faded from their
drug-infused memories? Will they still be around twelve years from now, when
this rock completes a full circuit around the dim sun it and the station orbit?
Or will they have perished, their maintenance debt finally caught up with their
ability to keep the systems going?

They took me here in their freighter, the Slacker III, old an cranky as well,
only two months after I terminated my fruitful career in cybernetics. It all
felt meaningless, the work, the goals. Even though I dedicated 30 years of my
life to the field. Excelled at it. I'm broke now, spent all my money to buy this
forgotten habitat orbiting DO-28631 in a wide elliptic orbit together with
whatever supplies I may need to keep it and myself going for at least 60 years.
Not that I expect to live that long, but just to be on the safe side.

So now I am here all alone, out of reach from galactic civilisation.

There is still a lot to do. So far, I've managed to revive the ancient
air-scrubbers. I have one of four units up and running, at minimal capacity.
Which is enough for the one person it has to support now. The others I will
cannibalize for spare parts, although I did bring an ample supply of spares with
me in the cargo containers dropped nearby. I have yet to go out and carry their
contents in to the main storage cavern.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Forgive me, I tend to do this a lot lately. I even
sometimes talk out aloud to myself, going on and on. Which is why I decided to
try and fire up the old QEC. I knew of it from the inventory list attached to
the sales prospect brochure. I didn't pay much attention to its presence though,
thinking I would have no use for such a lifeline. I'd rather perish than ask for
help in case of catastrophic systems failure. I don't know, it strikes me as
poetic somehow.

When I turned the device on for the first time, a few of the coils burnt, and
the electro-optic transducer exploded. The explosion was minor though, and
quantum entanglement seems to have survived both it and the long cold years it
has spent turned off.

The transmission circuitry checks out. All signal paths diagnose within spec. I
didn't bother with the receiving end of the circuitry. I am not interested in
your ramblings, your current affairs and your political excrement. I came here
to be alone. I have no fear of missing out. But still, there is that existential
grating, the worry that if I am not heard, I do not exist except in my own mind.
So, therefore, I send these messages to the hub far far away, in the hope that
someone sometime will stumble upon them and know I am here and validates my
existence.

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