Computer, begin personal log. Authorization code kappa-three-five-delta, text entry from console in personal quarters. Add music track; 20th-century artist by the name of Muse, track title “Sing For Absolution”.

God damn it. I don't know how to deal with this...this pain, this anguish, this slow rotting-away of my soul. I'm a throwback, a misfit, someone who's been dislodged from their proper place in the grand scheme of things and set adrift in a world they could have scarcely dreamed of and barely comprehend. Everything seems perfect, nobody has want for anything anymore, I'm working with technology and theories I'd have only dreamed of...

Then it all falls apart in the blink of an eye.

Okay, so it was a little slower than that. There was some lead-up to where I am now. Whoever reads these things when they're unlocked, go ahead and look at the news archives if you have to. Look up the Battle of Antares. Maybe it's called the Massacre of Antares by the time you're reading this, I don't know. All that I know is that it was the first major sign that war had broken out between the Federation and the Galactic Empire.

I thought things would be okay, if a little hectic, aboard the Felix. I thought I'd still have some sort of home. I didn't think the war would affect me too badly. Maybe more work in Engineering, or longer shifts on the bridge, but nothing seriously damaging. Then I got assigned to a repair team sent over to the Ehrlich to help make repairs to a nanite containment unit in their main sickbay without cutting power to it. They caught a lot of fire on the way out of Antares, their engineering crew was overwhelmed, and I was more than happy to work with anything involving nanotechnology. Sure, it was in an indirect fashion, but keep in mind where and when I'm from. It was like someone had just handed me the keys to a brand-new car, house, and a boat all at the same time, while telling me I'd just won fifty million dollars.

Yes, I realize how much I just dated myself with that. Look it up, I won't explain it here.

I was sent over with three of the better engineering ensigns, I'm absolutely positive those records are on file somewhere if you must know their names, and we were about five minutes or so from finishing our repairs when the shit hit the fan. Consoles and conduits exploding, the entire ship was shaking, and it was all I could do to keep power to the nanite containment fields as long as I did. Wound up buying enough time to get everyone that was still alive out of sickbay, and scour the computer's memory for any sort of nanite bio-integration program that was in any shape to be field tested. The way I figured it, the worst case scenario was that I would die slowing down a plague that would've otherwise started a gray-goo scenario.

No, I won't explain that here either. Go look it up. It makes the Borg look positively huggable.

I'm not entirely certain what the best case scenario would've been, but I'm still alive and kicking. The doctors all say I'm some sort of a miracle, that I'm never going to get sick again, that my lifespan is estimated to be somewhere on the order of at least a millennium...

Don't start congratulating me yet. You see, when the Ehrlich was disabled, the Felix tried beaming aboard a team to rescue myself and the three ensigns with me. Bear in mind, transporters require that the ship doing the transporting drops its shields. I learned later that the Ehrlich was the victim of a Cardassian attack fleet, and that the very same fleet took advantage of the Felix dropping shields. She ate a spread of Cardassian photon torpedoes and went up like a cheap box of fireworks.

The ship I'd started to rebuild my life aboard was very suddenly and violently transmuted into an expanding sphere of gas and debris. I'm told that some shuttles and escape pods made it off, and I'm glad for that, but we – That is, the crew of the Oriskany – haven't had a chance to try rescuing anyone yet. I'm holding out for some of my friends from engineering, hoping they managed to get to an escape pod or shuttle, and from there down to Bajor, but I'm the first to admit that their chances are slim.

And I'm the first to admit that I'm scared. Frightened and alone, drifting through space in the care of a fleet that hardly knows what's hit it, wishing desperately for somewhere to call home when the truth is that my home and everyone, everything I knew is gone. Rumors are floating around about Betazed and Vulcan being occupied, more about heavy fighting on Andor, and some of the more pessimistic crew members claiming that Earth is occupied as well.

Call me self-centered if you must, but I could care less about Betazed, Vulcan, or Andor. All I can think of is Earth, the only planet I thought I'd ever see in person, the planet I thought I'd die on without seeing the stars...and my mind wanders to my home, and my family. Every moment I spend dealing with the changes echoing between the stars and shattering the life I'd only just started building for myself, the more I find myself wishing I'd been buried with them all those centuries ago.

I guess it's true what they say. You can't go back.

- Lt. Steve Raymond