Misanthropic

3.

Day 1. Cycle 23. It was not easy to wake up this time. I feel tired and my mind is a little foggy. Several hours have passed, but I'm not feeling any better. I need to observe it. I can't start the diagnostics yet.

However, there's something that has troubled me the most - a flashing red light in the upper left corner of the control panel. It's a message indicator. I doubt it's from Earth; otherwise, Omni would have already read it and informed me of any news. So, this message must have come from another ship. Such messages are meant to be read only by the captain, which is me.

At first, I wanted to delete it since there was nothing I need to know about another ship's journey. We are united only by our goal, but we are so far apart from each other that it doesn't matter. Why would they need anything from me? According to the schedule, no ship was supposed to reach its destination yet. Perhaps someone is in distress and wants to hear a human voice one last time. I highly doubt it. If I understand misanthropy correctly, and if other captains feel the same way about other people as I do, they definitely wouldn't want to hear a human voice.

Anyway, Omni should have all the information about the status of other ships. It collects and processes all the signals. After all, it devised this mission - it needs to be aware of everything.

"Omni, report the status of all 'Exodus 2.0' mission ships, one by one."

"Access denied."

"Omni, tell me which ship the message came from."

"Ship E."

"Omni, is Ship E staying on course?"

"Affirmative."

It's strange that I can't access the status of all the ships, but on the other hand, why do I need to know about all of them? Ship E is still moving towards its planet and sending me a message. Of course, I could just read it, but I'm not in the mood for that right now. I'm feeling too unwell to contemplate it.

"Omni, administer 0.05 ml of MDEA, prepare black coffee, and activate Deck 7 - I want to take a walk. Maybe it will help me feel better."

I love Deck 7. There's a large viewing window through which I can observe space. It's black, and no palette or device can capture the same depth and richness of blackness of this cold, infinite void. I never felt happy on Earth, but here I realize how insignificant the happiness of one person and their life is on the scale of the universe. The entire human civilization can simply be reduced to a billionth fraction of a number, as something trivial and unimportant, something useless and hollow. Our existence is merely a random coincidence, a statistical error, a foolish joke for which an entire planet had to pay. This mission is an attempt to fix everything when it's already too late. I'm here for that, and although the meaning of my life may seem questionable, I don't need to search for a grand purpose. Life is simply full of irony, and that's even amusing.