I have far too many unfinished stories sleeping in my documents folder. With no physical weight, being merely an array of 1's and 0's, they strangely weigh me down. They constantly fly to and fro in the confines of my mind bouncing off the walls, causing an air of aloofness to permeate my countenance. So, I am making a concerted effort to counter the crushing uncertainty and debilitating fear by slowly beginning to finish them one meager step at a time. Denying my natural inclination to post them all to my site in an overwhelming and bewildering array of ambivalence, illustrating the unnecessary quirks which plague me, I am going to attempt to do this one story at a time. Introducing The Chronicles of the Planet Builders.
Part 1
The Chronicles of The Planet Builders, as it has been dubbed by the public, easily, in terms of crypticness, surpasses all other logs ever recovered by missing or deceased military or space fairing individuals. So detailed are the entries recorded by Commander Thomas Dalton of the Deep Space Surveyor manned Shuttlecraft, Heaven 1, that one, being unaware of the reality of the incident could easily upon reading the transcript of his personal entries slip into a fantasy world he or she might presume to be written by his or her favorite novelist.
For nearly ten years Dalton’s personal account of the tragedy he suffered through was kept from the public, reportedly at the request of the his family. Though it is widely believed that Blaze Tech., the independent space firm responsible for the long range manned shuttle craft to Hecate wished to keep the word from spreading about the fantastic nature of Dalton’s last written testimony concerning extra-terrestrial life.
Had the incident not taken the life of this distinguished father, brother, and husband, one might have without hesitation considered the journal entries a brilliant work of fantasy/science fiction. But because of the troubling and bazaar circumstances that surrounded Dalton’s disappearance, and then later the recovery of his body on the deep orbital dwarf planet classified as XT501, or more recently endowed Hecate, the journal remained locked away. After its declassification, NASA officials working in conjunction with Blaze Tech cited the fact that no one in the throes of grief as Dalton’s family surely was could manage to read the log entries without a sense of disturbing surrealism, so they purportedly, on due ground, kept Dalton’s words from the public for reverence to his family in the face of unequivocal frustration and heartache.
How could it be that a man of distinction and discipline, a man as dedicated to the furtherance of science and truth, such as Commander Dalton, a man who prided himself on precision, and a strict observance of the scientific method resort to conjuring up, presumably in full knowledge that he knew what he recorded might be recovered long after his death, wild and fanciful stories in his entries. Even in them, you will see, he appears to be completely coherent and aware that his record may be found one day. So why would he make up such a strange and impossible story to serve as his last testament in describing a new and as yet at the time unknown world.
Many have offered their explanations, some popular ones being that he was delirious from a head trauma, to the planet being of cesspool of hallucinogenic substances, to the more fantastic that he was purposefully creating an elaborate story for some unknown reason, to him simply cracking under extreme mental fatigue and space delirium. Each of these possibilities have waxed and waned in credibility over the decades as new evidence about Hecate is discovered. But there remains one most popular explanation that even the most staunch empirically minded scientist can’t honestly say hasn’t entertained for even just a moment. What is that explanation? The only one where Commander Dalton remains a coherent, honest leader figure. It is the explanation that everything in the logs that he recorded for those 115 days were actually true. What if Commander Dalton was the first known person to interact with an intelligent alien life form that not only defies the conventionally understood ways that life has evolved in the universe, but moreover utterly resembles the myths and ancient lores conjured up by the worlds greatest fantasy writers. What if the universe truly is filled with “more strangeness stacked upon more strangeness” as Dalton puts it himself, than any of us in our generations have ever conceived possible?
It was only when his Grandson Trevor Dalton requested to hear the records for himself that they were eventually released for public evaluation. The Planet Hecate’s Wikipedia page under Dalton’s Chronicles quotes a passage from Dune, the fictional story written by Frank Herbert, “Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic” in an attempt to realize what very well could be, in some eyes the way the universe operates truly. And apparently it might seem that Dalton just happened upon a moment in space and time, like many others before him in less striking but nevertheless mysterious ways, that testifies to the strangeness of the real universe we live in.
A somewhat frustrating fact to be reconciled is, that upon several manned missions back to the planet in recent years, including the one that recovered his body, no evidence has ever been found to validate a single word Dalton wrote. Maybe the most striking element to The Planet Builders were Dalton’s Planet-Men. They, slow moving statue like creatures have been nowhere to be seen, which is somewhat perturbing, especially to those who have passionately pressed the reality of Dalton’s words.
What follows is the unedited transcript of Commander Dalton’s 115 days outside of the Shuttle Heaven 1. The first three entries are recovered audio recordings but after the initial descent into Hecate, all recording devices were presumed destroyed and so he was left only with a single pen and notebook that he was able to procure before his daring attempt to use the ghostly shell of Heaven 1 to enter the planet’s atmosphere—his first entry being nearly one hour after maneuvering his extra-vehicular pod out to perform repairs on the hull of Heaven.