“The Nova Directive” Part 5

COMMANDER’S LOG
CMDR: [REDACTED] aka MostlyAwol
Date: 3306-10-17
System: Classified
Location: Independent Research Facility – Deck C, Fabrication Lab

Progress. At last, progress.

I’m logging this entry after nearly four straight days without proper sleep, but clarity has never felt sharper. I’ve been running controlled experiments with the polycrystalline structural alloy. Cutting, annealing, exposing it to various electromagnetic conditioning fields and today something finally clicked.

The material is extraordinary. It resists. Holds. Redirects. It responds to the lattice shaping algorithm with a precision I haven’t seen in any Terran-manufactured composite.

The trick wasn’t in brute-forcing logic arrays into the alloy, but understanding that it needed a phase-tuned binding field while still in its mutable crystalline state. Took me weeks of failures before I realized I’d been treating it like an end-product instead of a medium. It’s not a circuit board. It’s a scaffolding for emergent process logic.

With the right sequence of rapid-field rotations (9.3 MHz, precisely tuned) and high-density parallel induction bursts, I managed to embed a test imprint into a suspended sliver of the alloy. Didn’t get much of a response, until I layered a micro-thermal feedback gate over the base layer using spun graphene filament. Then everything changed.

I didn’t expect what came next.

Just before the test chamber’s field collapsed from heat fatigue, the lattice segment flared with a brief, blinding cascade of energy. The internal oscilloscope overloaded, burned out entirely, but the last frame on the screen is seared into my mind.

A bloom. A fractal detonation of light, not unlike the core profile of a Type IIb supernova, unfolding in spectral waves across the diagnostic graph. The alloy pulsed, not in uniform response, but in pattern. Not noise. Not chaos. A waveform. Something… deliberate.

And then silence.

I’ve isolated the logs, tagged the waveform, and set the diagnostics to record any flickers from the remaining lattice cores. Whatever that moment was, it wasn’t just heat and stress discharge. Something happened.