Project Shrang

It wasn't until the chair appeared that I started to get an idea of what might be going on. I asked the cube why it needed an interface chair and its response was that it would need to be able to get access to all the information that was available so far. Basically, it wanted what I knew and I had no idea why. I did my best to try to find a way to escape, somehow it knew how to block my translocation and wormhole attempts. The walls resisted everything I threw at them, this thing had been upgraded far beyond the first one I had encountered. The cube asked me to calm down and stop trying to escape, it gave me all the assurance it was capable of that the process would be painless. To this I responded by asking it how it would feel to lose its individuality by having its knowledge sucked out, to be left an empty, pointless shell. I didn't really have much hope of a response to this, it was a machine after all, however it seemed to have some sympathy as it retracted the chair and projected an image of an alien being.

It turned out the alien being was a member of the race that constructed the cubes, they were in direct contact with this particular station due to my presence. They were fully aware of my past experiences with the chair that I had seen and my aversion to losing my memories again. It was the word again that troubled me in the statement. I had no alien knowledge, nothing that I felt didn't really belong to me, what I had was my personal experiences and so I inquired what it meant when it said again. It at first tried to dismiss it, saying it must have been a fluke of translation however I persisted in the question and eventually it began to relate some things that I wasn't supposed to know. Apparently I was part of a project, dubbed Shrang, which has meaning in their native language but there is no way to fully translate it in a way that I would understand. I was basically a manufactured being, which would explain my amnesia when I first arrived at Calypso, they had made a basic shell for me by putting together some DNA and then infusing it with some knowledge, they then deposited it among the wreckage of some of the ships that had been destroyed in the wars. It took some time for it to be discovered and reconstituted but when it did the project began. What the project was it refused to say, it did however say that so far it has been a huge success and the lives of its people might very well improve because of the success, it, however, needed to take the information back in order to complete the project, which is why it needed the contents of my head. This still didn't quite explain the again part and so I pressed further. That was when I learned that I wasn't completely manufactured, I was old, ancient, I had been taken long before by these beings to be studied and they had emptied my head of knowledge when they were creating the shell for me to inhabit. Basically, there was no way for me to know who I really was, my old self had been destroyed so that they could give a soul to their experiment. I was nothing more than a lab rat to them, a thing to study and learn from and they wanted to start the process over again to continue learning more. They were expecting me to understand given all that I had done so far, sacrificing many for the greater good, trying to create life to learn from it, to use it to my own ends. Manipulating what I didn't create so that I could survive. They were right, I was very similar to them in my actions, but I didn't enjoy the things I had done and this made us very different.