Creepy - I Found A Cashed Satellite's Black Box...

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

What would you do with it?***Written by Defragmented-Defect narrated by Jimmy Ferrer***Check out our reward tiers at patreon.com/creepypod***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/creepypod***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is the bloody disgusting podcast network. No. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous, chilling and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or, not simply fabrications, is for you to decide. These stories make... graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised.

Creepy Presents. I found a crashed satellite's black box system and I don't know what to do with the contents. Written by defragmented defect and narrated by Jimmy Ferrer. I live smack dab in the middle of nowhere, South Carolina. And I thought the moment I found a real actual meteor in the woods around my house was going to be the coolest moment in my entire life. If I could put it back, I would.

The crater was around three feet across. I can't really say if I was more or less excited when I saw that it was a piece of a wreckage and not an actual space rock. The black box was an armored canister around the size of a soda can. with a NASA logo and blazing helpfully along one side. Along the other was more sinister warnings, about tampering with government property. Being both insanely curious and extremely bored, I took it in the house.

A few moments worked with the screwdriver got the canister rope, and outfell what looked like a thumb drive, the kind you find for twelve bucks at an office max, except the logos and the plug were both. Weird. It was like about the size of a USB, but the shape of the plugs and pins was odd, unlike anything I've seen on the market yet.

Unfortunately for the secrecy of NASA, I've got a degree in electrical engineering and data storage is my specialty. I was able to jury rig a plug for it and read the data, and the first thing that hit me was a size of, of the thing. Drive contained 3.6 petabytes. This was hundreds of times more than the top-end

desktop solid state drive. And the thumbstick didn't even read as half full. I spent a few minutes just staring at the number before my curiosity got bitter of me and I went deeper. I shouldn't have. It took me months to sort the data to figure out what the oceans of plain text and files with incomprehensible strings of characters for names and folders call things like

D4 underscore Iris underscore MVK 9.8 underscore Europa. A huge portion of it was what I have to assume was spacecraft telemetry data. But I don't do mechanical stuff very much and it was all Greek to me. I finally started to find. find something more comprehensible. I started to recognize the file

in the folder naming conventions. A DB usually meant it contains schematics, but for the laughing me I couldn't figure out what for. There were circuit diagrams. I understood those well enough, but the symbols they used were wrong. Diode, capacitor, resistor, and what the hell was this round, ragged line

supposed to be. I never did find out that part, but the kicker was in the Orion file. The schematics for the file detailed a spacecraft propulsion system. Insanely dangerous. It involved detonating a nuclear weapon against a specialized plate, essentially blowing yourself

towards your destination with an atomic kick. This was nothing new. I heard about this canceled project from back in the 60s. That made me think to check the metadata for the date of the file of creation. The Hansa made me want to start smoking again. The file I had was dated 2563. Weird plug design, the huge capacity, the undecipherable circuit diagrams.

It started to make sense, and I didn't like it. I considered destroying the drive. I wish I had, but... but I wanted to keep digging. I knew I'd never sleep again if I didn't. I wish I'd known I'd never want to sleep again either way. The next thing I uncovered was an audio file. It was a log of sorts transcribed below,

which cemented the fact that what I was reading was not of this earth. And much more concerning, not of this time. It's been six months since I've heard. heard a human voice. Six months of the same thing. Jump to system, send out a radar pulse, check for the earthlikes, and terraformables. Send down a mapping probe to the valuable worlds, jump out. Every couple of hours scoop fuel from the main sequence star. Every couple of days, land on an airless planet and scrounge up some medals for making more fucking probes.

Note where I've been on the star map. Scratch another light on the wall. Jump to the next system. Repeat. Get a little closer to becoming an elite-ranked explorer. I miss dinner of Vakanders. I've seen beautiful things. Strange things.

Things that should not exist. I've seen stars with rings bigger across than the entire planet, Saturn. I've seen worlds inside. nebulae with jade skies of vermilion mountains. I've seen planets with oceans of ammonia and floating islands of untold trillions of microbes. I've seen void-dwelling mushrooms drinking in the radiation of a dying star. I've seen ruins of a civilization older than soul. Pillars made of metal, no laser can scratch. Glowing blue powder. sources still active all these countless millennia later. But all of these have been seen before.

They are entries in the codex. Distant but known. Old discoveries. Pit stops on the way to the unseen. It's been eight months since I've heard a human voice. Eight months are the same thing. Jump in, radar pulse, scan for odd planets, map interesting worlds, fuel my ship. If it needs it. Note the map. Line on the wall. Jump out. I've passed the boundary.

I've been the furthest. I'm where nobody's ever been. My shipcom's voice is starting to grate. Fuel scooping, orbital planet established. Planetary flight engaged. Four, three, two, two. One, engage. Her voice was so calming.

Now I wish I could mute it. There's no personality there. It's not a person. It just reminds me what a voice sounds like. It's been nine months since I've heard a human voice. Nine months of the same thing. Jump in. Pulse.

Scan for stuff. Refuel. Reequip. Not the map. Scratch a line. Jump out. I'm so far out. I can't see Soul.

I can't see Sirius. I can't see Polaris. I can't even see the Spirograph nebula. The Pleiades is a blimp. There are 400 billion stellar systems in the Milky Way. Humans have visited 113,000. visited 113 million. Those numbers don't sound so different. Million, billion. 400, 113. It just all jumbles up sometimes.

If there have been a thousand explorers before me, and each one discovered a thousand systems, that's a million systems. A hundred thousand explorers, a hundred million systems. 200 years since the frame shift drive was invented. 565,000 systems per year, 1,548 systems per day. It would take 1,770 years to visit 1 billion systems at that same rate. To visit one system in every 400, 0.25%. The Great Pyramids were built 6,000 years ago, from stone burial crypts to faster than light travel in 6,000 years.

6,000 more years, and you get 3.3 billion. Systems. Only one in a hundred. One percent. It's been a year since I left the Eradani system, since I said goodbye to the bubble of populated space. It's been a year since I've heard a human voice. The space traffic control system bidding me good luck like you did to every ship that left from a tiny free trader. to a hundred million credit monster of a bounty hunter. One year. One year in the black.

One year of the same. Jump in. Scan. Do the essentials? Scratch the wall. Jump out. I don't understand why they call it the black. It's so bright here.

I'm counted thousands of millions of stars. twinkling lights in a dozen colors fill the canopy. I understand now. I've passed the galactic core. I'm more than halfway across the disk. Even the soul news broadcasts are getting faint. The tiny quantum signals, starting to fade in the backdrop of the stars.

It's not very noticeable. The sole broadcast is all text. It's just easier to send. Just a letter or two is missing, but it reminds me how far out I am. The black, the empty, the alone. It's been 18 months since I've left. I've discovered complex life. Multicellular organisms are so much rarer than microbes.

A year ago, I would have jumped for joy. I found my very own species of silicon-based, Boydweller. A floating two-black affair of delicate branches that catch starlight and dust particles in the wake of a comet. I scanned it, logged in, added the data to my codex and jumped out. I've got hundreds of millions of credits worth of data on my ship computer. I could turn back. I'd be rich.

I'd be elite. I'd be the one. who went the furthest and came back. But I won't. I can't. I need to find something big. I need to have found something worth the trip. Just one more system.

I tell myself that over and over. One more jump and I'll find Romans. I'll find intelligent life. I'll find a spacecraft. I'll find a new energy source. I'll have made a discovery worth remembering. My name will go down in history. Be remembered.

Two and a half years. Two and a half years are the same. Jump, pulse, scan, fuel, land, gather, map, scratch, jump. I've seen so many beautiful things. A newly born planet of molten rock, newly dead star, cold and dark. Black holes swallowing planets scorched black by supernovae. Gentle blue giants swirling like ink. I need to see more.

I want to see it all. Almost a quarter of a million systems all by myself. Probably the most in history. even if I never find my big discovery. Maybe I should go back. Just one more jump. It's been 32 months. I found a signal source today.

It was an Asp explorer. Same kind as mine. This one was cold, dark, dead even. Floating in the black, cargo bay opened to the vacuum. The computer says it was out here for a year. Dead for a year. I wasn't the first. I'll be the first to make it back alive.

It seems like a shame to stop here, though. Just a little farther. A little further than he got. One more jump. I'm out of room on the wall. So many scratches. The star field is starting to get thin. The sole broadcast turns up a blank screen.

Black. In the black. My eyes are... I can see things that I've never saw before. Patterns in the sky. Strange and beautiful patterns that tell stories of love and discovery and blood and death and lust and hope and dreams and fire and ice. and earth, rock and metal, in water and turtles. One more jump.

Wrapping in the cargo bay. From the outside. It's probably nothing. Just one more jump. It keeps happening. There must be someone out there. I should let them in. Yeah.

Let them in before they freeze. Before they freeze in the black. For more information, including pictures, and videos of the stories told on this podcast, please visit creepypod.com. If you'd like to submit a story for consideration or recommend a story, please see our submission page at creepypod.com slash submissions. All stories told on this podcast are done so through creative comments, share-a-like licensing, or with written consent from the authors,

No portion of this podcast may be rebroadcast or otherwise distributed without the express written consent of the creepy podcast production team and the stories author.