Everyone woke up without a hitch. The crew switchover was seamless. I did not get the sense anything too remarkable had occurred during Alpha team’s shift. Our wake up and warm welcome made us feel at ease. We had prepared during training for anything. Even if we may be woken up from our stasis nap and the ship was on fire we had checklists. So many checklists. But none of that was needed. With a “thanks for putting on a pot of coffee”, we put the Alpha team to bed. 

My Bravo team had been awake for roughly five weeks. As expected, time feels really irrelevant. The passage of time feels real but the numbers mean nothing. The science crew seems to be in the best spirits out of anyone - after all, this is their thing. That’s become pretty clear to me now. The rest of us are just babysitting. Making sure nothing goes wrong. Doing all of the space shit. Making sure no one dies. The hardest part is over. Everyone is awake. The sleeping Alpha team has perfect vitals across the board.

It is odd to live in a space once occupied by a different group of people who now sleep in a room that no one goes to except for one medical staff member. Some of the guys swear their bunk smells irreparably of the previous occupant’s stench. It has now been ten weeks. Possibly it took Alpha team a little while to acclimate. The novelty seems to have already worn off for the scientists. My crew seems to be rethinking their life choices. 

So we had our first physical altercation but it took a backseat to what happened next. I don’t claim to know the details of what these scientists are doing but I know one part of it is looking for anomalies along the Earth’s orbit. Well I would say we found one. It looked like any tiny space rock floating out there but as it was scanned it became clear that this was something different. This was something. A being. Frozen at 273 below, drifting through space. And our ship crossed its path. The probability of that happening makes me reconsider religion. After mixed opinions we slowed the ship down to a crawl and kept scanning as the image became clearer and closer. This was not a rock or ice or man made space debris - this was a once living thing. Well, I hope it’s dead anyway. I’ve had about all the shock I can take for the day. 

No one wanted to admit it aloud but the reason we slowed the ship down was not simply to get a closer look at this thing. It was to bring it inside. I know this because I gave the order to slow the ship down, almost as if I was possessed - like my actions were happening before I chose them. Now that we were basically parked I regretted it. Even though this very well may be the most significant discovery in all human history I could see an argument for driving right on by it. All of the scientists were on team "bring it inside", with varying levels of protocol concern. Despite all of the checklists and all of the training scenarios they left out making first contact with a fucking alien. 

So we brought him inside. All concept of protocol is gone. No one can make good sense of it. How long had he been floating out there. Why was he dressed like something ancient? Why was he… like us? I think I would have preferred him to be an alien. I dunno. Anything other than… what he is. Human. Undeniably. Dead but undeniable. All the way out here. And there's still two years left.

Various tests conducted by the scientists and medical officers revealed what we already knew but didn’t want to admit - this was indeed a human being that we found. A male, approximately in his 40s or 50s, wearing a mishmash of clothing spanning from the 19th and 20th centuries. No space suit or helmet, just drifting through the void in normal civilian clothing from hundreds of years ago. His cause of death was rapid decompression in a vacuum. Like he was tossed out of an airlock but there are no records of a space flight for civilians way out here and certainly not from this man’s era. 

We defrosted the guest in as controlled an environment as we could. We could not find any identification on his person. The only identifying items were a strange metal key like object we found in his jacket pocket, a tattoo, and an unrecognized symbol on his jacket’s right arm. If it is a company or group’s insignia we cannot find its source anywhere. The Internet is slow out this far with Earth being nearly 180 million miles away - it takes nearly 18 minutes to transmit a query and another 18 to receive a response. I have to exercise patience. 

So far the metal object is the most confusing. It looks like a large key of sorts, like a gaudy prop in a film. It has very small dials and cogs all over it that can be adjusted and moved but nobody can figure out what it does or means.

The symbol on the jacket was another bust but the jacket itself had a few leads. It was a dark green casual United States army jacket, likely acquired from an “army surplus store” in the 1980s. The jacket was in actual use by the army decades prior. We’ve reached out to mission control to try and get us more information on this. 

The tattoo is interesting but provides more questions than answers. At a glance it seems to be a popular motif - an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. Inside the snake’s loop are roman numerals I through XII, with what look like clock hands. It’s hard to say for certain but it may be pointing at 12:03? More confusion. 

Getting somewhere now. I discovered an archive of countless preserved writings and recordings from the 20th century. Validity and authenticity of said writings and recordings are “user verified” through a voting system. 

One that caught my interest was an aspiring journalist in the 1980s who specialized in unsolved crime and cold cases. He was in his twenties and lived in the Appalachia area in the United States. Most of his investigations seemed like wild speculations and cheesy goose chases that were more likely for exciting an audience than addressing actual fact. 

It wasn’t until I saw two images that my heart started to skip a beat. One was a blurry but unmistakable rendering of our guest’s ouroboros clock tattoo and the other was the unknown organization company logo from the jacket. I have searched far and wide looking for any reference to this logo and have found nothing. And so far this was the only instance of either one I could find on the internet. There are seemingly endless notes, recordings, and pages written by the journalist. It’ll take awhile to go through. 

Meanwhile my team couldn’t be more on edge. Most are convinced that bringing this human inside and defrosting him was a terrible breach of protocol and we all deserve to be killed by some disease the corpse may be carrying. The speculation and sense of wonder is driving the majority of the science and medical crews mad. One had to be restrained and put in a makeshift brig due to his unrelenting cries that this was the second coming of Christ. We’re debating putting him to sleep in a spare sleeping pod. We’ve also debated waking up team alpha but I shut early notions of this down immediately - there simply isn’t enough reserve supplies and food for us all to be awake at the same time.

Things have definitely gone from bad to worse. More crew members have resigned themselves to going insane - the religion of our guest has spread, with at least five crew claiming to now only take orders from the mystery human, or God’s return vessel as they are now dubbing him. Even one of the scientists joined their ranks. Dr. Rylan quickly turned to God when his science and numbers had failed to explain this. I think I’m about to lose control of the ship.

We are now in a mutiny. I have lost control of the ship’s crew and now very few people are listening to my orders. I was restrained while Dr. Rylan and his new Knights of the Ouroboros woke up the Alpha Team, dooming us all. Earlier I attempted to declare an emergency to mission control but someone destroyed all of the comms systems, even the more obscure redundant backup systems so it was someone from my crew. We now can’t talk to anyone. These logs will no longer automatically sync with the servers back home and may never be found or read. It destroyed my only way of accessing data from back home. I had the foresight to store everything I had found already. I’m going to go through more of it now. It’s not like I can sleep and what else is there to do now.

Unsurprisingly Alpha Team did not take it too well that their relief crew had mostly gone insane and woken them up several years early. To make matters worse Dr. Rylan immediately took it upon himself to recruit new members of his cult out of the groggy and confused members of Alpha Team. After the first four members refused or did not respond in a way the good doctor had wanted he ordered his men to execute them with medical scalpels. Me and others intervened but it was too late. Alpha Team had been woken up by crazies, some of them murdered, and quickly realized the ship was in total chaos and there was not going to be even close to enough resources for everyone. Needless to say, they didn’t trust me or anyone else from Bravo Team, even those of us that had held on to some of our sanity. 

The bodies were jettisoned out of the airlock. I don’t know when but someone had sabotaged the sleeping pods and most of the flight controls. There was now no way for anyone to go back to sleep for a potential emergency journey home - and even if there was - there was now no way to pilot the ship. My only chance is to discover something about our guest that these people will believe or make them snap out of it so we can go home. If we managed to get the ship close to idling we may be able to just wait awhile and Earth will catch back up to us and reel us in.

I found out the journalist’s name was Simon. He was investigating a string of unsolved murders throughout the 20th century all over Earth. The story was a sensation at first that seemed to grasp the public interest, but interest started to wane in the 1970s when no new leads were found in the cases and serial killers began to be all the rage instead. 

The reason it captured a lot of attention was the murders spanned over 100 years and the MO was always the same. The victims were very young, often infants or toddlers. Almost all of them were male but there were a few cases of infant girls being slain. Victims were drowned in shallow water. A bathtub, a sink, a swimming pool, a lake, sometimes even a toilet. 

The kicker is, they were also all branded with the ouroboros clock image with the clock pointing to different times for each victim. The second kicker is, some of these victims date back to the mid 1800s. Common sense would dictate the same killer could not have done this. According to Simon the details of the case were not exposed to the public so there is simply no way that a copycat had been using this strange tableau to continue these strange killings. Maybe it was a family of generational killers, a father passing down his evil ways and so on. Or maybe Simon is full of shit. As the writing goes on I could tell his mental state was getting as frantic as mine lately. 

I dont talk to anyone anymore. I tried to reason with Dr. Rylan about the growing odor of their God. Since he was thawed out his body is now undergoing what any body not in a vacuum would - it’s rotting. It’s fitting that this ship is starting to smell like a tomb since that’s all it’ll likely ever be. 

Simon ramped up his investigation and started actively looking for a man with a green army jacket and mysterious symbol. He interviewed through hikers and everyone he could out hiking the Appalachian Trail. Simon recorded his interviews and his other ramblings using a cassette recorder. It seemed like he was dubbing over an old cassette used for some other purpose… like brief messages of people looking to speak with someone. An answering machine. Before everyone had Artificial Person Personal Assistants (APPAs) to take their messages I suppose people just spoke into the void. I guess with no way to sync any of this back with Earth I am doing the same.

Unknown: We used to see him around, when we were hiking out on the trails and we just thought he was a local. So many people pass through this town. All types of stories. All different backgrounds. You run into dozens of people hiking for a few hours. Most people don’t ask “I wonder how many of these people live around here?”. I imagine it does not even cross someone’s mind that one of these people may live up here, in these woods. It makes sense when you hear the stories later. I just thought he was a little weird, an old soul perhaps. I didn’t think anything of it but the first time my friend and I met him we asked if he could take our picture. He awkwardly agreed but it was obvious he’d never held a smart phone in his life. Like a time traveler or something. But from the future or the past? 

Simon: What was his name? Or his trail name even?

Unknown: I don’t know

Simon: You never asked his name?

Unknown: I didn’t think to ask 

I’m starting to think it could all be nonsense. The interviewee mentioned a “smart phone”. Another device from the time period, except invented about 20 years later than the original recordings on the cassette tape. Why would there be someone recording voices and interviews on a medium that surely was obsolete by the time smart phones were around. Was he nostalgic? Was this all just a hoax? Is it the same as how people on Earth now became obsessed with 2150s culture? It can’t be a hoax. The symbol on the jacket, the tattoo, it’s the same. I’m going to forget about the anachronisms for now, either way this shit is still almost 200 years old. 

Well I think I’ve been had. The story is just too disjointed, too ridiculous now. Simon now believes he has located the mysterious man in the jacket. Way off the beaten path he claims the man lives in a makeshift cabin. He claims he watched the man lower himself into an ancient looking well and disappear. Simon entered the man’s cabin. The man was very clearly a trained outdoorsman. But also seemed to dabble in astrophysics. An odd combo for certain. Simon claimed he took pictures of all the man’s journals and writings but those were conveniently absent from everything else I could find. 

According to Simon there were also piles of information on some of the drowned victims. Addresses, birth certificates and birth information, pictures. Some of the birth certificates and other dated materials had dates long past the 1980s or even the 2080s. 

So a bullshitter who is leaving behind mysterious materials for future archaeologists to find is also finding mysterious materials himself. Aint that a fucking pickle. I’m sorry for swearing so much. I know if this is ever found it’ll go into the national archives forever like all of our deep space flight logs. I’m sorry future students or whoever is reading this. I’m just a little frustrated that my deranged crew is actively trying to break down my door to sacrifice me and all I have to show for it is another crazy goose chase from a forgotten era. 

I was never a morning person, always a night owl. So was my mother. It’s genetic. It’s evolution. Some people had to remain awake and watch over the tribe at night. The firekeepers my mother called them. Of course that doesn’t have much meaning out here. Is it weird that I am starting to hear rain inside the ship? Even a soft old piano at times. Is this my mind’s way of calming me? Is it coming from the ship? Maybe it always has been. Anyway, it’s pretty. Soon it’ll be nothing but ghosts to listen to it though. 

Simon believes this man to be the killer of all these infants. Yes, even the ones from the 1800s. How do you rationalize that? Well, he’s also a time traveler. A time traveling serial killer. The well operated as his vessel, his time machine. From what Simon could deduce from things he found in the cabin this man was from the future. Sent back in time to try and fix an apparently doomed future timeline. He targeted victims in their infancy because the claim was these people would grow up to do some terrible things or be part of a long sequence of events that would destroy the future, so called butterfly effect. 

I could think of a few people in history that this guy may have missed. Stalin. Hitler. What did it take to get put on humanity's future hit list? Simon dug into the victims’ families relentlessly. Doctors, Lawyers, Politicians. Some parents of the victims did seem to have important roles in society. Seems like bullshit to me though. Cause and effect and all that. Though some deaths did seem to have more acute effects. One father who lost his son to the time traveling killer (lets just call him TTK) abandoned his promising cancer research and drank himself to death. Another was a politician in the middle east who ended up not running for reelection which eventually caused an entirely new progressive government to form and the abandonment of their nuclear program. Huh. Okay maybe there is something to this. If I’m going to lose the rest of my mind and be bludgeoned to death by my loyal crew I at least want a cool story. 

So Simon became obsessed with TTK. He tried to figure out how the well worked but did not seem to get anywhere. It looked like a normal well. He hitched a rope to a tree and lowered himself down into it, finding nothing. All he knew was TTK wasn’t down there and he watched him crawl into it weeks ago and never crawl back out. Simon rigged a few cameras up, trained on the well and one inside TTK’s cabin. While possible, these cameras didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would be practical or affordable in the 1980s. This had to be later. I don’t know anymore. This story skips around in time too much to be completely comprehensible.

A year passed and finally Simon got what he was looking for. On one of his cameras he caught TTK crawling out of the well. In fact it was exactly a year later to the minute. 12:03. That’s cute. Inside the cabin TTK appeared to be almost drunk for a few hours. Time travel looked rough on the body. After some time he settled in and seemed to meticulously study his papers, perhaps planning for his next victim. He would come and go over the next few weeks to the cabin but eventually crawled back into the well and disappeared again. Until five years later when he crawled back out of the well at exactly 12:03 on the same calendar day that he crawled down there.

Simon’s writing had become almost incomprehensible in nature, the ramblings of a madman. I suppose it would suck to have to wait for TTK’s return in real time. I suppose TTK does not age all that much, maybe two weeks here and there. That sounds frustrating for our boy Simon. 

Sorry, I am kind of loopy now. I found that if you collect enough of it, some of the condensate from certain systems contained in the wall panels can get you high. It feels like a dirty high, like getting drunk off of rubbing alcohol, but it helps me concentrate on our guest and not the lunatics outside my room. I guess I’ll just go ahead and say it at this point, is that TTK in our ship? Rotting away now while being worshipped by once esteemed men? 

Don’t get me wrong - I understand the irony here. I am mocking my crew for this religious backstory they’ve dubbed on our guest while promoting my own theory that he’s a time traveling killer. Is this how the scientologists felt? Pissed that people would believe in virgins giving birth and raining frogs but wouldn’t believe their thing? 

I got to the end of everything I had saved. I’ll play back some more recordings soon. Simon seemed concerned that TTK had caught on to his presence. His theory was that TTK traveled through time via the well, but had to have a special object on his person for it to work. Simon also theorized that the time travel mechanism only allowed TTK to travel in year increments. His theory was that TTK could only move through time and not space. If he wanted to travel to say three months ahead he couldn’t because the Earth would not be in the same place and theoretically he would blink into space albeit three months later and immediately regret it. 

The trail camera footage was blurry and hard to make out any finer details. Most of what was available was TTK coming or going to the cabin and subsequently down or out of the well. Occasionally Simon himself would appear on his footage, probably checking out the cabin for more clues. The last footage available was another one of TTK emerging from the well, however this time he wasn’t alone. As soon as TTK pulled himself out of the well he was ambushed by another man. I couldn’t make out if it was Simon or not but the two men did appear… mostly identical. The man attacking TTK had on the same green jacket with the same odd symbol. The two men wrestled on the ground, the assailant desperately trying to take the strange key-like object from TTK’s hands. 

Unfortunately between the scuffle, low quality video, and matching outfits,  I am not even sure who won that fight and who ultimately ended up with the key. The video cuts out to what seems like another day. It’s raining and it looks like twilight, like early morning or evening. Not the sunny high noon of the other videos. At one point the two men exit the cabin. Well, one exits dragging the other across the ground before propping him up against the side of the well. The incapacitated man comes to and starts to fight but is ultimately overpowered and thrown down the well. 

That’s the last of the footage, recordings, and Simon’s writings. I wish I could go and inspect our guest just a little bit more but he’s probably badly decomposed by now. I told the fanatics that we should freeze him before he turns to mush but this might as well have been akin to saying I want to nail him to a cross. I’m going to try to make one more recording to transmit to Earth if I can bring any of the backup comms online. The trouble is, I need some things from outside my room. I’ve run out of rations anyway. It’s now or never. They have to sleep sometime. 

I probably don't have long. Nor does anyone else. Nobody trusts anybody. I went digging up anything I could think of to try and identify our guest. I found an old audio recording of a 20th century tape. I'm going to play it for you now. 

Simon: I got a little too close but I found him. He might know I'm on to him by now. I'll tell you what I know and hopefully this tape can stand the test of time. Time… That's the key to all of this, remember that. He can only move through time but not space. That's why he appears on the same day when he returns. Or when he leaves. Who knows what direction he's going. What would happen if he was off by a few days? Months? I've got to know who he is. What is the symbol on his jacket? How does he-

Unknown: Again this is Dr. Chronokey from the fertility clinic calling with good news please call me back at 

I'm out of time, they are coming in. The rest is in the ship's log file 2179. I hope there is someone left to read it. This is the captain, signing off. 

We’ve relieved the captain of his command. Unfortunately he did not grasp that we, all of us, the mission itself, is part of a higher purpose. We were sent to find any anomalies in Earth’s orbit around the Sun but we found much more than that. Perhaps it was ordained by God himself that we find him. No one is going to stop us now from hearing God’s words. His human body was only a vessel, a container. While it may rot away, we will hear his voice soon. I hope he accepts the captain’s body as an acceptable sacrifice, for he was the last of the non-believers. No one deserves God’s everlasting grace more than those that remain. And we need you, dearest God, for we have no food left. If you could just give the most loyal of us a sign, anything. Maybe even just me, my fair God, just give me a sign, your loyal disciple. I have been with you since the beginning. Please bring me home.

WARNING. AUTOMATED BACKUP COMM SYSTEM ACTIVATED.

WARNING. PROBLEM DETECTED IN LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS.

WARNING. VITAL SIGNS OF CREW DROPPING.

WARNING. SHIP ATMOSPHERE CRITICAL.

WARNING. ROUTE APU TO SLEEP BUNKS AND SUSPEND ALL SOULS IMMEDIATELY.

ERROR. CRITICAL ERROR FOUND IN SLEEP BUNKS. 

WARNING. ALL CREW IN JEOPARDY. 

ERROR. LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS CRITICAL FAILURE.

ERROR. APU FAILURE.

&ERROR. &ERROR.

&ERROR. &ERROR.