Confirm sustained recording between long pauses. Lower the lights to 28%. Set entrance display to "Do not disturb".

  The therapy program told me to keep a diary, says it should help with the nerves. I've never been one to dislike the sound of my own voice, so here we go.

  Based on where I attended school you can assume a great deal about my ancestral background. I’ll admit, the weight of a family name like mine is akin to a magical power. I’ve rarely needed to try. I get things that I wish for. That being said, I’m not just some rich asshole. I’m a realist. I’ve done the schooling, I passed the tests I had to take. There’s plenty of wealth for me to inherit, and I need to be wise to continue to live the lifestyle I’ve always portrayed myself as having.

  The lineage also helped with skipping over any embarrassing situations like waiting in line for prestige in the exospheric colonial boom. Five years under my belt, straight out of captain school. My own exospheric colony, the second largest in Earths orbit.

  Things went off without a hitch. In case you were wondering. It’s like I couldn’t do anything wrong. I met my wife, had a kid, had a private island planet side, had a mansion on the moon right outside of the central hub. Nothing got old with me and the wife, had a great relationship with the kid. I was busy, but we had a good thing. It was easy to love them. I knew I had it good, makes it hard for me to be here.

  Before the strike everything for me was heaven. So it makes sense that I’m in hell for what’s left of it.

  I’d only just arrived, there was a major lack of pomp but the staff was only eighty something strong. Something more grand could be afforded upon a successful anniversary of that arrival, I told myself. When I make these halls sing with efficiency I’ll have earned myself a grand reception. I so liked the idea of it. I liked the idea of being the first out here.

  The day of the strike is still fresh in my mind. The janitor was right outside of the window recovering some robot that fell off the side, something gone wrong with the tether. Then it was warning lights and the deck AI glitched out for a second and mentioned that there was a computational analysis subroutine established and priority one was getting the station to the far side of Mars. We were already well on our way by the time it finished explaining to the command crew and myself that Earth had been destroyed, and a shock wave was approaching us rapidly with the potential to cause irreparable damage.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The subroutine was dedicated to solving the matter of what could have caused this destruction, the data our system had access to wasn’t showing anything that made sense. It wasn’t atomic, or volcanic, or the moon falling from the sky. But like the moon falling, there seems to have been a collision. It’s been multiple weeks now and our quantum processor state of the art artificial intelligence can’t seem to calculate the speed at which something would need to be moving to demolish a planet that size with that chemical composition. We’ve had some of our researchers taking a crack at it, the best guess from their end is a physics breaking phenomenon, which terrifyingly the AI swiftly agreed with as being a possible reason for the subroutines delay. The AI mentions this logic regularly now, and I’m wondering when it will declare a new branch of physics was discovered the day some thing vaporized 99.99% of my species.

  I think it was some freak occurrence of course. But I don’t think it’s physics breaking. There must be something wrong with the computers now that they’re cut off from home. These AI didn’t only exist in our space station, we had constant uninterrupted communications with Earth. I was on a call with a friend from college when the strike occurred. One moment we were speaking, and the next moment the line went dead. No sound, no alarm from his end of the call. Just gone in a flash of a closed connection prompt. I'd have tried to call them back if there weren't so many alarms.

  I don’t know much about the finer workings of interplanetary wireless connections but I feel like if the AI lived in a server bank that was probably the size of my island, and then suddenly was down to the server room of this station, which was about the size of a delivery truck, I doubt its as smart as it once was. That may be the equivalent of a lobotomy for all we know. I know it’s still smart, but come on, Earth shattering unimaginably fast moving meteorites? There would have been something more significant picked up by the defense matrix if it were something like that. Don’t you think so?

  End recording, confirm end recording.