Chapter 3.17 - Epilogue
~Epilogue~
Melisse: T.C. 4667. I can still remember the events of that year as though it were yesterday.
Voyager disappeared from the network that night. The Federation Police announced that the serial killer was special investigator Erich Weber. As the only witness, I had to testify day and night, until I was sent into rehabilitation on grounds of extreme mental distress a week later. Here's the thing… no one believed my story.
Lactis was recalled to Vector because of a ‘defect’ in his central nervous system. Even now I don’t know the real reason for the recall. But, the last time I saw his face, he didn’t seem to me like a realian with an abnormality in his brain.
As for the Captain…
The fact that I couldn’t stop the suicide of Jan Sauer haunts me even now. However, I never thought for a moment that his reasons for what he did were wrong. Maybe instead of wanting him to survive, I really just hoped that he would defy Erich. The Captain’s body was quickly recovered. After he was registered at the body bank, the biomedical company Ziggurat Industries came and took him for... recycling.
News of the Zohar’s activation caused the entire star system to become interested in owning it. Because of that, the Federation’s salvators took it forcefully from the holy land of Abraxas. Before long, riots had broken out, until on Yuriev’s counsel the Federation imposed a military sanction on the Immigrant Fleet. Patriarch Sergius XIV went on the network to publicly blame the Federation. The careful relationship that Patriarch Julius forged between the Galaxy Federation and the Immigrant Fleet amounted to nothing.
As for Yuriev, he appears to have left the political stage to found an institute to research U-DO.
Also, Planet Abraxas was renamed to Michtam and put under strict surveillance by the Federation.
I’ve come to think that the awesome technologies of the U.M.N. are nothing more than useless dead weight. I’ve learned that finding truth in all the information there is like finding a needle in a haystack. Alexei from Veritas taught me this.
I wanted to know the truth, so I decided to leave the Federation police and Alexei took me in. I realized that I had settled into my new role at Veritas. Eventually I succeeded in organizing a full-blown anti-U.M.N. resistance, and I became the strong leader that I always wanted to be.
I called this new organization “Scientia”. The truth will set you free… however, I learned a lot from this whole affair. Before you look for salvation in truth, you must question what truth really is.
It’s a strange story… Once, I was a member of the Federation police, but now I command a resistance movement of millions of people across the star system.
I wonder what Erich was looking for. What was the “end of the world” that he saw? Was he a preacher, like Alexei and the others said? Is the moral of the story that... we didn’t pay him what he deserved, so he became the pied piper of Hamelin? Where has he taken me? Maybe the Captain’s soul, which so resolutely refused the sound of that flute, is roaming somewhere too. If so… I want to prepare a better world for when his heart is freed from that bewitching sound, and he returns to us. I think that’s what everyone would have wanted.
T.C. 4669
--Melisse Ortus
Ziggurat 8 is activated.
The End