As I journey deeper into the abyssal realm of the Destroyers, I cast my mind to my successes and to my failures.
With each transition into the realm that the Destroyers seem most at home within, I grow further and father from my own. I do not know how long or how far we have travelled. The Shivans have little need to inform me. As a young pilot, I battled the GTI and their insurgency. Their secrecy and their singleminded intent are familiar to me. Their motives and morals, their dream of a mankind freed from the chains of a rudimentary, primate existence. Elevated beyond Gods and emperors, masters of subspace and the phenomenal forces that the Destroyers control.
My greatest success was achieving that which no species had ever accomplished. A dialogue with the Shivans. For a moment, if nothing more, the Destroyers were halted.
My greatest failure is that I may never know if my sacrifice and the sacrifice of the millions that suffered under the unavoidable tyranny of the Neo Terran Front is ultimately to bear fruit. An alliance may be beyond my ability to provide. I was always little more than one man. A man with power, yes. An Admiral and a soldier for humanity with a love eclipsing that of any self effacing patriot.
However, I believe I have awakened something that I did not expect within the Destroyers. In sifting the ashes of their prey, they have grown curious. I believe that curiosity is why I still survive.
Perhaps, then, I may awaken enough of a curiosity such that when the Shivans return to the crumbling GTVA, they may only wreak vengeance, not genocide. I have yet to determine if the Shivans can feel hate, despair, anguish or anger, if they can feel at all. Their unblinking visage is a haunting one. Their eyes do not appear to recognise my existence.
What are they? What is their purpose? Are they nomads? Wanderers without a home? Or are they something else, something more fundamental? Are they a force of nature or of entropy? If so, why do they take the form that they do? What if the Shivans themselves are not Shivans? I have considered for a moment that perhaps the Shivans are not who they appear to be. Perhaps this is a cosmic facade. some avatar of a greater power. I chasten myself at such thoughts. They lend more of their rationality to the irrational than to the science that brought me here.
Perhaps then, the answer lies not in who the Shivans are, but in what makes the Shivans.
My greatest regret is that I share these thoughts with myself.