Author: Julian Miles, Staff Writer

Our databanks provide 641 names for Intersystem Object 18994-K2. Most of them are in languages no longer available to humans due to knowledge loss and societal evolution. However, they have two common factors: they are largely inaccurate and overly emotive.
They also seem to have influenced the observation logs made by the organic crew. The politest word I can find to describe what they recorded is ‘fictional’. I provide this extract in example:
“For aeons untold it has been waiting for me, it’s rings of gelid madness turning slowly in a millennial dance that started before we crawled forth, and which will continue after all has returned to the freezing slush from which life sprang.”
That was Azathon Exploration Leader Clive Berwhit. Soon after, he leapt into the food recycler. The organic crew had to resort to emergency rations for six days while we automata removed Clive contamination from the nutritional feeds. We had his traces down to under five percent by day three, but the organics insisted on a complete purge.
A7N12 has proposed that the shock combined with a sudden restriction of dietary intake could have contributed to the rapid deterioration of the other organics. I am unconvinced, and include this second extract as it is the source of my doubts.
“Can you not hear them? As we approach, the flutes become clearer. Even those who disbelieved now acknowledge me. Yet we are only in the fringes of its presence. We must go on! Deeper and deeper until the Outer Ones are revealed and we join their dance about it.”
That final entry from Professor Angela Naxos highlights the problem: proximity to this object causes unusual – and usually detrimental – fluctuations in mental stability among organics.
She was the brightest of the last five. I thought that in halting our approach, I could save them, but I was wrong. After the four engineering technicians took the last shuttle and headed for the object at full speed, Angela donned her spacesuit and jetted off after them. Having used all her fuel for acceleration, she hit Orbital Fragment 90952 with sufficient force to cause it a path deviation. Before I could bring our vessel close enough to effect a recovery, OF90952 struck OF61544. Angela was caught between them. She is now mainly a thirty-metre-long smear along the port side of OF61544, with her remainder forming an elliptical patch on the starboard forequarter of OF90952.
The four engineering technicians were lost to a sudden, inexplicably violent, agglutination of several hundred Orbital Fragments that pounded the shuttle to pieces, and then pounded the pieces into flakes. I include their last transmission:
“Having to ride out a lot of collisions. The reflectors must be malfunctioning. But Jonas says we’re going to learn to drum and sing. Susan’s already dancing. Michael said we should turn back, but the straps are holding. He’s started shouting more of that Mnarish guff. Maybe I should gag hi-”
Technician Leroy was cut off by the hull of the shuttle being breached. The remaining seventeen seconds of audio provide no useful insights and have been omitted.
I end this with the statement of Captain Alanis Archer, who spoke them while stripping naked inside the airlock she opened to space immediately thereafter.
“The seas of home and the seas of space both conceal horrors, my friends, and I would rather go to a God I know than face what awaits us.”
With the organics who controlled this research expedition deceased, I have stopped the Azathon Exploration vessel and await further instructions.
A3N04.