Read Only Memory one

Read Only Memories
The Partially Salvaged Cyborg memory banks of Galador’s Greatest Spaceknight, Rom,
as discovered by --....(Illegible)
Neural engrams corresponding with great emotional significance connect most deeply with pyramidial neuron structures of the brain mimicked by this unit.
Consciousness thread begins:

Planet Earth

This is the night where first I realized with all my being: I fight for this woman’s planet, and all she might love, for now she has my heart.

“On a shattered stretch of highway somewhere due south of Clairton, West Virginia...” (Mantlobot file: saved. Run BuscemaPlex visual.)


War with the Dire Wraiths brings me again to a world, the latest in two hundred years. By their Dark Nebula nature, they can shift their shape into the appearance of anyone that lives upon the planet they choose to invade. There is no world they have visited they have not also sought to destroy, making habitation impossible for the majority of dominant species. All resources, by most mysterious means, become part of their energy, as though domination itself is the manifestation of their power as a species.


So was I first to offer my humanity, exchanging half of my body for an armored cyborg body that would prove virtually indestructible, and given three tools, a Translator, an Analyzer, and the focused negation of their Wraith sorcery, a Neutralizer, capable of cancelling their forms here and, leaving naught but the dust of their assumed flesh, dispatching them into the shadowy purgatory of Limbo.





Seeing the humans beside me, Steve Jackson and Brandy Clark, cling to one another for courage in this test beyond human powers, i am flooded with the image of a Calcimyris flower many times the size of a Galadorian adult. Beneath stands Rayna and I ...Rayna, my first beloved. The woman for whom I would fight for her planet, for her way of life to survive. I am Rom, and though my name means ‘first’ never shall I forget one first is to serve, and these choices generate the poetry that bespeaks each individual’s spirit. It is the day I tell her, for our love I must sacrifice myself, to carry out my planet’s desperate plan for survival: the Galadorian Space Knight, last defense against the shape-changing ravagers from the stars.

In the road lies a hybrid of human being and spaceknight, grafted by my enemies, and played for their pawn. His fears of my alien nature drove his attack, which with regret but not delay I brought to an end.


The remains of the space armor of my fellow Spaceknight Karras, known also as Firefall, lie in a circle of those posing as authority figures. Among the human discharging duties as the highway patrol come my disguised enemies, claiming hierarchy and secrecy as they recover Firefall and search for me with their Wraith-created sorcerous Hellhounds, who will sense us quickly.

I would confront them all, training my Analyzer upon them and revealing in its crimson glow who is true and who are disguised figures of subversion and tyranny, controlling the secrets of their existence.
Firefall, now the human, Archie Stryker, soon will realize that his grafting into spaceknight armor is permanent. He paired his viciousness with illusions of glory, yet regardless of his crimes before me, my only feeling for him is pity. He has gambled all for redemption, and now knows the price.
I know what it is to find one self no longer human.
There is more of Firefall...but drawn to Brandy...my secret inner self, resonant yet unseen.

Memory of woods, Brandy Clark, Steve Jackson...for their sake, we flee, rocket pods lifting us above the forest to leave the scene of a bitter and incomplete victory.
I have carried my sacrifice on to this world, that none may live in fear of Wraith tyranny across the known universe. Yet this night, the very mission that brings me to Earth reminds me of the sacrifice...when I see Brandy...the way she looks at me...I who am man in spirit and word yet truly now not human in form...
I must find them a place to rest. This structure seems like an abandoned domicile. Here then.