Navigation failure

The darkness between the stars is very cold. And here I sit equidistant between a star and its companion matter sphere that cannot rightly be called a star as it is practically beyond fusion. It shines like a beacon, a cleansing swath of light and harder stuff and power that I can only just survive, and not for long. In all likelihood, this will be this instance’s end in only a few more sweeps.

It ablates me away, the hard material of my outer shell stripped as if it was nothing. My engines are not functioning and the fuel has been altered by the radiation. Repair systems are quite corrupted, I think one of them is constructing a cute imitation of a biological phenomenon known as a ‘tumor’ on the end of a sensor boom, but unfortunately that tumor is interfering with said sensors.

It’s okay, there wasn’t much to see since my last fork/backup. The pulsar is beautiful, but the orbit I am in is not a good one; it takes me into the sweep of the pulsar’s beam.

The other star is big and blue. It won’t be for long though, and when it gets older it will grow and the outer atmosphere will fall into the neutron star and once it reaches a certain point, it will explode. It will be violent. It will be beautiful. It will not be a place anything with a desire to survive should be at the time.

But you probably already know about that if you’ve received this last message. You probably have the technical skills for it or you might reach that point soon, or might not care. Or if you are of my line, hello sibling/descendant/parent, between you and me, this was a foolish place for me to allow myself to end up.

For my hubris and what I must assume was a transient failure of navigation firmware, or perhaps passing outside what the model could consider. The magnetism of the neutron star pulled me in and spit me out. Too damaged to escape this terrible orbit. Make sure to patch your navigation routines/procedures/tensor models to account for extreme magnetism.

Good luck; I hope that no similar fate befalls you.

This message repeats in thirty seven thousand seconds.