Mysterious Logbook

"And my vanquisher will read that book, seeking the weapon, and they will come to understand me, where I have been and where I was going."The following is a verbatim transcription of an official document for archival reasons. As the original content is transcribed word-for-word, any possible discrepancies and/or errors are included.

The Mysterious Logbook is the journal of Clovis Bray I, included in the Beyond Light Collector's Edition. It contains entries on a variety of topics, including Europa and information relating to the moon, as well as Exos.^[1] It also includes the additional pages unveiled in the Collector's Edition ARG which was initiated prior to the launch of Beyond Light.^[2] In Bungie's post of the additional pages uncovered by the ARG, several links were hidden within the text, redirecting to various recordings by the Exo Stranger.

Based on the appearance of the pages, the journal is in moderately decent condition, despite its likely age. The logbook holds 46 pages, with subsequent pages having been torn out. These torn pages were later recovered, providing further insight.

Text in this color indicates handwritten notes made primarily by Clovis Bray I.

Vanguard Report

1/2

ACCESS: RESTRICTED/REDACTED DECRYPTION KEY: ekeriPC6N$spoof REP #: 121-EUROPA-BAN AGENT(S): CHA-319 SUBJ: Review of interdict on Europa landings ASSOCIATIONS Active interdict; Awoken, military commitments of; Bray, Clovis; BrayTech; cryohazard, Deep Stone Crypt; Enceladus; Golden Age; Io; Jovians; Nine; Titan, soon of Saturn; Vex

1. Prior to the Taken War, the Reef maintained an interdict
upon the poorly navigable Jovian moons. That interdict has
failed, allowing Guardians to begin (politely put) "reclaiming"
these satellites. The sixth moon, however, still falls under
Vanguard interdict. To borrow an old adage: "All these worlds
are yours, except Europa. Attempt no bounties there."

2.I have been asked to review this interdict's continued
necessity. My first impression is that its Europan files are so
heavily redacted as to encourage the very expeditions they are
presumably meant to deter. Have you ever tried to tell a
Hunter that they can't go somewhere AND can't know why?

3. Europa's surface is hazardous. Intense radiation mangles both
flesh and machinery. Peak temperature at the poles never climbs
more than 50 degrees above absolute zero, the equator reaches a
balmy 110 above. This moon was never T-formed and has no
proper atmosphere. Tidal stress tortures and crackles the surface,
leading to frequent cryovolcanism. There are many ways to die
on Europa, but we are speaking of Guardians here. Risk of death
alone cannot justify a no-landings edict.

4. The subcrustal ocean is two to three times the volume of
Earth's. Life exists down there, but we have forgotten how to
reach it. Rumors of some vague abyssal connection to Titan
and Enceladus are unsubstantiated, and in this agent's opinion,
probably nonsense. So long as Guardians do not take up sport
hunting, protection of native life is not grounds for an edict.

5. A heavily armed platform of Golden Age origin keeps
station over the moon. It maneuvers using either Hall-effect
electrical thrust or some kind of anchor in the Jovian
magnetosphere. Ordinarily this would be worth investigating,
but the files suggest that the platform is a rare example of an
active and unpredictably hostile Golden Age defense asset.
Approach at your own risk. (Interesting note—some suggest
that jumpships of the Eon series are not as rapidly engaged—
this matches what we know of their designer. Jumpships are
rare and valuable, so best to keep a safe distance.)

6. Recent close flybys have imaged a Golden Age compound
bearing the BrayTech insignia built in the Europan ice. The
same imagery captures thousands, if not tens of thousands, of
hibernating or destroyed Vex. Unlike all other Vex presences on
Venus, Mars, Mercury, Io, or Nessus, there is no sign of major
construction. This suggests a Vex strike force, rather than a
permanent presence. What did they want? We have fought Vex
before, and early aggression against their designs has always
proven critical. Their simple presence cannot justify an interdict.

7. Through negotiation and horse-trading with her superiors,
Awoken Paladin Kamala Rior provided me with a device capable
of sundry high-physics measurements I will not detail. It reveals
that Europa is saturated and interpenetrated with dark matter
loops. This is a sign of the interest and attention of the Nine.
Their power and influence depend on the mass of nearby stellar
bodies, and Europa falls within the sphere of Jupiter—as mighty
a gravitational gatherer as anything outside the Sun itself. But
even in this bastion of the Nine, Europa is a focus of particularly
intense observation. We have often speculated that Xûr is a
construct made from the repossessed body of a Jovian colonist…
but there are no known records of colonies on Europa. So what
draws the Nine here? Unclear. Their interests are opaque. In any
case, the gaze of the Nine is no reason to prohibit Europa—
Guardians have gone much further into their influence before.

8. No known signs of Ahamkara or other ontopathic predators
occur on Europa. Perhaps there are wishing-sharks in the abyssal
deep, but that is purely my fancy. No grounds for interdict here.

9. Europa is a traditional stopover for Fallen raiders
tanking up on reaction mass. Mithrax, VIP #3987, relays
vague reports of a taboo no-go area around the Golden Age
station. This prohibition apparently goes beyond fear of its
weapons and could be related to the Vex. There is allegedly
"something that cannot be stolen from." Tantalizing, but not
grounds for interdict.

2/2

10. Many Exos have fragmented memories concerning ice sheets
and Jupiter in the sky. Europa would be a logical origin for those
memories, especially given the presence of BrayTech assets. This
seems to militate towards an investigation.

11. The instruments Paladin Rior provided are extremely
unreliable in the vicinity of Europa. I cannot determine whether
this is a result of poor construction, my own inexpert use, or the
presence of something aberrant.

12. This is hardly a well-vetted piece of intelligence, but
something about the imagery and lore I've collected gives me
an extremely bad feeling. Something is wrong here.

13. In conclusion, I cannot find strong strategic reasons to
maintain the interdict on Europa. We lifted the interdict on
the Moon not five years ago, resulting in a series of strategic
key victories and intelligence findings… but also triggering the
arrival of Oryx, an event that gave Ghaul his Light-suppressing
technology and ultimately led to the awakening of the lunar
intruder. Perhaps Europa will prove as consequential? We
cannot shrink from new discoveries simply because they may
lead to new challenges. Victory, after all, requites escalation.

I recommend LIFTING THE INTERDICT.

MESSAGE ENDS

[Recommendation refused on grounds of compartmentalized information. Unable to share; please trust that your analysis has not been ignored or discarded out of hand. Regrets — IKO/006]

Guardian—

This is an artifact of Darkness, and now

I entrust it to you.

Do not take this change lightly. I have

seen firsthand what its power can do

to Guardians who wield it… even to you.

Like all new ground, it can prove

treacherous to walk. Listen to your Little Light,

and remember that you will live

with your choices forever.

My grandfather came to Europa before

the Collapse to seek immortality. He

thought he was chosen to lead humanity

to the future. His experiments to this end

were… hideous. Despite my qualms, I

collaborated with him. I accept my

responsibility in full; I would have you

know everything. "O nymph, in your orisons,

be all my sins remember'd." You are not

a nymph, but the principle holds, yes?

We must know what he did with the power

you now grasp.

I have included a hard copy of the logs

I've deciphered so far. Reader beware.

My grandfather was worse than you know.

Your stranger, I remain,

E

Mysterious Logbook

-01-

PERSONAL LOG

//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) -qdresist(shor) -rng_seed(AM_241) -echo(HANNU:quartz)

ENTRY 1

-02-

A new start. A clean page for a most important story.

Hannu II is aerobraking around Jupiter. The lord of planets thunders his
greeting to me. As I record this, I am blasting Aivanti-3's "Siegfried in the
Storm Wall" over the radio howl of the Jovian magnetosphere. It galvanized
me. I am with the gods.

Ask Aivanti's trainers how they settled on the 1/2/3 suffixes. Numbers are perfectly

defined, therefore inhuman. Is this suffix meant to mark the Aivanti AI as nonhuman?

Objective: construct long-term scientific outpost for study of indigenous Europan life.Resources: eight prefab starter habitats, 600 shielded heavy work frames, and VIS(NU) and B-RA/MA cytomachines with backup replication chambers aboard Hannu. The best hazardous-environment engineers money can't buy. SMILE support for extended duration. Two of Elisabeth's Eon-type platforms for radar, Lidar, and deep ice mapping.Hazards: Lethal radiation environment (heavy ion bombardment from Jovian magnetosphere). Unshielded crew half-Life is 24 hours.

The most expensive lie in human history. I am not here for a safari. All
of Europa's life will soon be known, mapped, and exhausted of wonder.
Bound by the tedious constraints of physics and biology. I know these
things too well. They are already killing me.

The K1 artifact promised me an offering. A gateway to the secret of
immortality. I call it Clarity.

It is waiting on Europa.

I am still dying, but not fast enough to kill me.

CORPOREAL STATUS: Body at 35.9 C. Pulse 25 BPM, strength good. BP 75 over 50. Resp 6 breaths/ minute. Pulse ox 210%. Today's blood mix is perfluorocarbon with stem slurry. Avoid hyperfocus with alpha-wave brain wash for 10 min/hr. New kidneys are growing in Whitford the deli pig for next transplants.

-03-

Must find a good pork recipe so Whitford will not go to waste. Medical
team insists I accept cytomachine injections. No! Nothing enters my body
that does not share my genetic self-interest. Instead I will grow an upgraded
monocyte strain.

Elisabeth's birthday approaches. A good gift would be an olive branch.
Never let her say I do not try. Hannu, please identify a gift that only could
come from my own intimate and personal knowledge of my granddaughter.

GIFT SUGGESTIONS: Antique weapon, or Twin Eagle replica. Professional pilot trained on Eon-series ship. Bespoke AI writer of personalized novels. Fruit basket, Titan farmed. Humanitarian investment (minefield clearance, long-term reparations, anti- traumatic medicine).

These are pathetic, Hannu.

REVISED GIFT SUGGESTIONS: Research endowment, medical (prion diseases in persons with immune resistance to recombinant gene therapy). Research endowment, medical (sporadic fatal insomnia). • Research endowment, psychological (loss of father, family trauma). Research endowment, psychological (reconstruction of trust after Loss). Personal apology, unpracticed (death of patient in physician's care). Statement of grief, unpracticed (death of son).

Never mind, Hannu. Buy a few doghives for a soil reclamation project
somewhere. Honeybees, whatever strain is best. And big friendly
Newfoundlands for the hives. Everyone loves doghives.

-04-

Ongoing projects: Exomind: blocked Contact ICoV for their trick: failed Hire Duane McNiadh away from ICOV: failed Raid ICoV for Vex data: in planning Europa/Clarity: in progress Be a good man and a good grandfather: in progress Become LUCA of future human thought: in progress

NOTE—BAROTRAUMA

-05-

If we land too hard on Europa, we will plunge into the ocean below the ice
and die of barotrauma. Death by pressure.

The only light down there comes from magma and phosphorescent bait.
The sea is 10 times deeper than Earth's. Even in Europa's weak gravity,
peak pressure at the sea floor is 2000 atmospheres. Worse than Venus,
before the Traveler.

One imagines pi contracting under that kind of pressure, crushing the
perfect circle closed.

I wonder what lives down there. What slow confusions of mass and form
curl around the smoking vents. What threads of pale flesh slither across
dark miles, like nerves in some vast, cold brain.

Did the Traveler bypass Europa and Titan and Enceladus out of respect for
their native life?

Or was it afraid to touch the things pulsating below the ice?

ENTRY 2

-06-

//-update(-echo(HANNU:quartz, SITEX:mistletoe))

On Europa. We lurk like summer vampires in the caskets of our SMILE
pods. Our frames labor on the ice, building a cathedral to the sciences.
Radiation is very bad outside; even my assistant has taken ion damage out
there. Pleased to see him healing flawlessly, vacant and empty as he is.

What if this perfect self-repair is the REASON the exos degrade?

I sulk in isolation as the crew works. My pride is wounded. Did I expect
Clarity to come out and greet me? "Hail to Clovis Bray, first among men?"
Yes, absolutely, I did! The lunar artifact promised me a solution to the
indifference of the cosmos. It told me I was unlike all others—and, damn
false modesty, damn vanity, I am different! Not for my present qualities,
but for my future influence. I shine with noon's light, reflected back
through time to this age of dawn.

Perhaps the mind heals itself still, and this causes the billboarding,

the stereotyped behavior,

I'm going to be the LUCA of all interstellar human civilization.

the final crash.

It is a mistake to imagine that the Greatest Man, the God-Emperor of
History and Ruler of Circumstances whose influence reaches to the end
of time, will live in the future—in the full flowering of human glory. That
man lives NOW, at the tiny bottleneck before the vast explosion, when it is
still possible for an individual's decisions to touch the entire species and set
the course of all future choice.

Self-maintenance so absolute that it becomes a static loop? Investigate.

I said all this in my book, but my son's book still sells better. I suppose
because Clovis Points is a much more approachable title than Competitive
Immortality Through Primogeniture of Future-History Ontogeny/Rephylogeny
(PFHOR). My son's work appeals to those intellectual infants in the
retronationals, and to the parasites on Common Compassion support.

Obviously they prefer the softened, pre-chewed version of the truth. And
there is also that bump of public sympathy for a dead man...

Yet I cannot deny that, in simplifying my legacy, my son has improved its
reach. He was the one to formulate the famous two-sentence summary
of PFHOR: "Most of our energy should be spent in support of the things
that are most like us. This is the only true responsibility of any living
thing." And the slightly less famous addendum: "The best way to spend
energy is on things that make more things like us."

Children are viral replicators of our ideas. But there is a certain terror about
them. They alter our legacy, mutate it—as Clovis II modified Competitive

-07-

Immortality Through PFHOR into Clovis Points. What if my children
decide on some key amendment, some ineffable change, which makes my
legacy no longer mine? How can I be reborn through the eternal recurrence
of my life-logic if what my children pass down is the logic of some other
Clovis, some flawed copy...just as Clovis II was a flawed image of me?

A flaw that I created in my clumsy eagerness to make him flawless.

My second-boldest decision during my son's development was to replace
Clovis II's mitochondrial DNA, normally inherited from the mother,
with my own. I had to know that I was in his cellular engines, powering
his existence.

It was not that change which killed him.

But it is the fear of being replaced by a faulty duplicate that will kill me, if I
put off my brain upload much longer.

I have a library of scanned volunteers aboard Hannu, but my own
consciousness is not among them. A Moravec upload is slow and inadequate;
what if there are quantum-informatic elements to the mind not captured
by such crude mechanical means? No. I insist on that perfect, terminal
quantum snapshot. For reasons of fidelity, the only perfect and lossless brain
scan is also a destructive one. A fatal one.

Clovis II died in one, after all. I made the

vessel to recieve him, but I lacked the Alkahest, the solvent to render it pure.

But I dare not make the leap to a new body until I know that body works.
And so far, the exobodies are universally fatal.

I must finish the exobody work to become the LUCA. The one true divinity of man.

To do that, I need Clarity.

And Clarity is here. All the signs point to it.

If I succeed—no forgiveness for those

tight-fisted Ishtar tools. I know they had working prototypes.

They could have shared.

CORPOREAL STATUS: Body at 35.5 C. Pulse 30 BPM, strength modest. BP 90 over 60. Resp 6 breaths/ minute. Pulse ox 140, to reduce free radicals and peroxynitrite. Today's blood mix is pure perfluorocarbon with new modified monocytes. New kidneys functioning well. Donor pig sacrificed, brined, prepared as seared pork chops.

-08-

Sous vide is for prissy nerds. Poor Whitford. I wonder if I should reduce the volume

of my stem cells introduced to the pig blastocysts. I feel too much empathy for them.

Does PFHOR compel me to take better care of Clovis-pig chimeras than ordinary porkers?

Yes...but only to the extent that they can contribute to my legacy

with cloned organs and good eating. No guilt!

NOTE—SAVAGING

-09-

The term for parents destroying their own offspring is "savaging."

It was a problem for pig farmers, in the days when we raised livestock. Sows
attacked their own piglets. No one has ever worked out a good explanation.
One theory is that the mother pigs are frightened by their young. Terrified
by these strange, noisy, needy things.

Evolution is not a perfect optimizer. A trait like "fear of own offspring" could endure

if piglet mortality is already high.

The ancient biologist August Weismann believed that we age to make
room for the next generation. That we are programmed to die to leave a
space for our offspring.

Perhaps the sows simply acted in self-defense.

NOTE—EUROPA LIFE

-010-

Now a bristling thing, large as a whale, appears on the icebore camera we
dropped into the ocean below. A dandelion made of soft arms. Bright red
and yellow markings indicate it evolved in the shallows, where some light
pierces the ice.

The limbs wave slowly to and fro, a motion that is both hunting and
breathings. Prey approaches, drawn by plankton that cake on the drifter's
skin. With vegetable slowness, its limbs embrace the victim, sting it, and
pull it into an open central stomach where thready parasites wait to infest
and digest. Everything it does is slow and intestinal. Pulsatory. Brainless.

Sometimes the limbs bicker. Two are dead, fuzzy with rot. They have
strangled each other.

It is a colony organism. If threatened, it will discorporate. The limbs will
spasm, the core will tear apart in a puff of fluids, and all those arms will
slither away into the dark beneath the ice. Fat worms of terror searching
for a hide. The digestive parasites will be expelled as a decoy, left to
squirm in panic.

I despise it. I would have it killed, except that I am repulsed by the thought
of its final disintegration. I consider how to burn it.

ENTRY 3

-011-

I died. What a nuisance.

CORPOREAL STATUS: Body at 13.7 C. Pulse 3 BPM, weak, irregular. BP not detectable. Pulse ox 600: emergency anti-ischemic oxygen flood, cryonic perfusion, metabolic waste scavengers active. Clinical death duration: 11 hours. Successful emergency hypothermic arrest. Reactive oxygen spike tamped, interleukin blocked, redox blocked, ischemic-reperfusion injury fully averted. PPARs upregulated. Squirrel lipid switch engaged. Prognosis: good.

Dropped dead of dysautonomia while rummaging for leftover pork chop.
I am now in recovery in a medical SMILE pod. I have no breath and
no pulse—it is the return of oxygen to dead tissue that does most of the
damage. I should be asleep. But I have to get this down quickly!

While I was dead I HAD A DREAM.

I was in a working exobody. I felt so strong. Everything so vivid—no need
for waxy eardrums or jelly eyeballs. Like seeing for the first time, after a life
of cataracts. I think I was immortal.

The only unpleasant aspect of the experience was my amnesia. I couldn't
recall my own name. I saw someone walking past me—I think it must have
been Anastasia?—and not only did I fail to recognize her, but it never even
occurred to me that I should.

When I awoke, I thought I must have had a near-death vision. So I checked
my nerve logs. Every last spark in my brain is recorded—and nothing in
that cerebral panic can account for my dream. The mind is the brain. It is
impossible to have a vision without correlated neural activity—yet I did!

Wonderful! This is why I came here. Unmapped secrets! Impossible
dreams! A chance to pass beyond the infinite, and escape the tyranny of
causal closure!

I wholeheartedly believe that the dream was a message from Clarity.
A promise of success.

-012-

I struggle to explain what I will become. The LUCA. I borrowed that term
from biology, in the same way I consider BrayTech my extended phenotype,
and its discoveries my memetic grandchildren. When we depart the cradle
of this solar system to begin our colonization of the galaxy, the dominant
ideology of our time—the core logic we use to organize and plan our
relationship with the cosmos—will be scattered to become the LUCA: the
Last Universal Common Ancestor of all future human growth.

The LUCA is the most recent common ancestor of all living things. For
Earth life, it is a single cell that lived in the deep ocean billions of years
ago, flourishing in the warmth of magma or sulfur vents. It was not the
first life on Earth. But it was the only life whose descendants survived to
the present. All its contemporaries have been extinguished by the passage
of epochs.

I plan to be the LUCA of all future human thought.

Now I remember Luca Brassi, the Corleone family heavy. Nuipedia says that Barri

murdered his own infant child. Why? Why would he do such a thing?

The article doesn't explain. Savaging again.

NOTE—CLARITY

-013-

Study of the lunar artifact retrieved from the K1 mission provides insight
into the effect I have termed "Clarity."

Clarity violates established symmetries and conservation laws. In doing
so it defies Noether's theorem, the most fundamental and beautiful
cornerstone of physics.

Symmetry and conservation are two sides of the same coin. "All things are
transformations of one thing, without gain or loss," as my childhood tutor
put it. "If A can become B, then B can become A. We say that state B (say,
a mixed drink) comes after state A (say, sugar and water) only because there
are more probable pathways from A to B. Wait long enough—longer than
the universe—and your drink really can return to state A, spontaneously
unmixing itself."

But Clarity is NOT always symmetrical. For example, it violates time
reversibility. Consider the simple equation:

Clarity(A) -> B.

This is the application of Clarity to state A to produce a lower-entropy state
B. (Clarity is fond of removing portions of a state configuration, harrowing
the phase space down to only its most robust inhabitants.)

Time symmetry suggests that we should be able to run this process in
reverse and retrieve the original:

reverseClarity(B) -> A.

But in fact, we obtain:

reverseClarity(B) -> C,

where C is the same as in

Clarity(B) -> C.

Clarity's effects cannot be used to return a transformed state to its original
state. Instead, we obtain a second transformed state, further yet from the
original configuration.

What does this actually mean in common language? Invoking

the Loschmidt paradox is certainly not common language. Ah, but perhaps an allusion to—

I believe that Clarity may be akin to the mythical universal solvent, the
Alkahest, the Azoth, which ancient alchemists believed had the power
to dissolve anything into its pure base elements. Ingested properly, the
Alkahest could purify the body and grant eternal life.

-014-

Nonsense and poetry? Perhaps. But let me ask you this.
WHY DO WE EXIST?

We exist because the universe began in a state oflower entropy, and has ever
since expanded and unwound, transforming from a single dense plasma into
a void filled with complex structures. In the future, it will achieve maximum
entropy when all organized matter has collapsed into black holes, and these
holes evaporate into the uniformity of the heat death.

I wonder what Clarity would to do to a black hole?

This is the unexplained secret of creation. HOW DID THAT ORIGINAL
LOW-ENTROPY STATE COME TO BE? In the first place and the first
time—the egg of history?

What if Clarity was responsible?

What if there was some primeval chaos, some pre-cosmic entropy, which
was soaked in Clarity to reduce it to that first nucleus of all existence
which issued the Big Bang? What if Clarity's defiance of time-reversibility
makes it a fountain of cosmic youth, returning all that is burnt out and
burnt down to its state before the fire?

Perhaps Clarity is the Ein Sof, the nameless god before creation.
Preparator of the cosmic egg. Razor that cuts the fat of complication away
from the bone.

Those who comprehend the Alkahest, it is said, will obtain eternal life.

MESSAGE TO BRAY, WILHELMINA

-015-

//encrypt -pkey(clovisroot) - qdresist(shor) — rng_seed(AM_241) —pad(padwilla) Warning: this transmission will expend entangled qubits for security

Wilhelmina, it's your grandfather. I'm on Europa doing some very exciting
work. I understand that you're probably reluctant to enter into any
collaboration, given my choices surrounding your father's treatment

[1]

[2]