Some anon translated all the current entries:
P.D.323.07.28
Record Start
A coworker, Franco, died just now.
I wouldn't say we were close, but we used to eat together in the cafeteria.
He was kicking the brats back on their feet in the frontline, driving up the logistic support, but then he got hit right in the head by a round from a mobile worker. He was the only regular to die then, just pure bad luck. I'll pass on kicking the bucket in this rathole planet along with brats, thanks. It suits me better to make a living right here in the base like I'm doing now instead of riding a mobile worker and getting shot. Better to force the hard stuff on the kids.
Still, with this thing about Chryse becoming independent, there's this weird vibe around. Mars has been Earth's colony from the start, but rather than easing up the pressure they're clamping down even harder now. Even decent food is a pain to get. Protests are on the rise and word is that Gjallarhorn is keeping a close eye.
If the brass screws up and we catch Gjallarhorn's eye, CGS is just a PMC, we won't stand a chance. A regular employee like me can only pray that our dumbass boss Maruba makes the right call.
Ever since I was born - no, ever since the Calamity War it's been an age where you can't know what will happen. Franco's death, Chryse's independence movement... I don't want to get involved into any of that, but at least I'd like to leave behind a record of what I lived, I think.
So I'll do something I wouldn't do and start writing this diary.
I have no idea what will be left behind.
P.D. 323.08.10
War Images Record
I've heard lots of the brats died in the last mission. I wonder how many? I guess that's why I'm seeing Human Debris punks that I didn't know before in the base now. But then I guess that means more days of implanting Whiskers on the new brats. More nights without sleep for me. Just thinking of having those injected in the body without any anaesthesia makes the back of my neck shiver. I wonder how many will survive.
Finally I get some rest and have no more reason to stare at the faces of annoying punks. I gave a good reason to go to Chryse City, but truth is that I have no real goal in mind. I went to a junk dealer in the back alleys and found an interesting thing while browsing. It was some sort of media that the dealer didn't know how to use. I don't know what's recorded inside, but if it still has some use, then it might have some valuable information, maybe. It'll be great if that data is worth money, but even if it isn't it'll make for a good timewaster.
I brought it back to CGS on the double for analysis, but most of the data was damaged and couldn't even be opened. Damn that old man! "Rare media that can still be used" my ass. I really got played. This was just a piece of junk. But I guess my goal was really to waste some time. No difference from a puzzle with a cash reward. So I let the data recovery and analysis work at its own pace and ended up with a number of image scans.
The images were really old. From what age? There seemed to be characters, but I couldn't read what's written on them. What the hell? The images were rough, I couldn't get a good look...
Mobile suits? I felt like I had seen those somewhere. CGS shouldn't have anything as valuable as a mobile suit even by selling all of its mobile workers... where did I see that...
In the end, the images were all that could be recovered even after several hours. There's still a lot of data left. Still more interesting data left in this thing.
P.D.323.08.14
Valuable Goods
The old media I found in one of Chryse's backalleys. Ever since I started working on the analysis of the ages old data inside, I've taken to eating with Jasper the crank.
'Chow' time is usually a boring hour to grumble at crummy food, but now it was different. Everything was about the media: that the analysis speed for the broken data is slow, that the recorded images look like this or that. It's still interesting. The images and recordings that we managed to parse are beyond what we knew. Maybe that's the fun of being an archaeologist. We don't have that kind of studies, though, so we're just having fun with it.
The image Jasper brought this day was very interesting.
"Stan, look. A-a new image. The owner is loaded."
I was getting impatient with Jasper's disconnected chatter, but the images he showed me on the tablet terminal caught my attention. The writing was unreadable as always, but there was a shabby looking building, and something like a room. The buidling itself was an old and ordinary thing, but the room looked really nice and tidy.
But you could go downtown to see a buidling like this, and the room itself wasn't that special. None of this smelled like money. I pondered on this while staring at the images, and then Jasper grinned and with that odious face of his he tapped on the tablet.
"Here, here. Paper. Lots of paper."
I took another look and sure enough, there was a large stash of paper! Paper is super valuable, and I had never seen so much in my life. And probably would never get to see so much later. The rich people in Earth have these things called books that they make with paper, something people like us would never see.
P.D.323.08.31
A Mobile Suit in the Old Record
I found a weird image.
Some time had passed since I found that media in the backalleys of Chryse and started analysing it and recovering its data. The media was an old curio, so obviously what data it contained was old as well. I learned from the data I managed to recover that this was older than the Calamity War, from some far gone age. It's because of that conjecture that the image I recovered last night is so weird.
The image is a picture of a mobile suit.
Mobile suits are expensive things, with high construction and maintenance costs. In these days, even owning one is difficult unless you're one of the really big groups. That's why I knew next to nothing about mobile suits, but even I can wonder if mobile suits existed in the old era. Just how old is this media?
I sat down casually in a corner of the mobile worker hangar. I didn't have any hard work to do and the hangar isn't particularly popular. So it's the best place to sit down and think things over.
That was definitely a mobile suit in the picture shown by the tablet, but the image was rough and I couldn't tell how old it was. Just looking at it made my eyes tired.
I took my eyes off the picture and looked at one of the mobile workers. After looking at the mobile suit I had this weird sense of unease. I could deal with fighting other mobile workers, but against an Ahab reactor equipped mobile suit those 30mm rifles might as well be peashooters. The nano-laminate armor that covers mobile suits makes firearms unable to score decisive hits. All a projectile does is shaving off a small piece of it. And CGS' mobile workers are older than the ones in the market now, so I didn't fancy my chances when taking on a mobile suit.
P.D.323.10.08
Those Things Called Mobile Suits
I kept at the data recovery during breaks from work, and came up with many images. Some of them were like the one with the mobile suit.
The one that drew my atention had a mobile suit in a dark and gloomy place. It was a rough image and you couldn't make out the details, but there were something like blueprints and you could see the internal frame with the armor stripped.
I didn't know how old the data was, but the mobile suit used a frame system just like the ones of these days. I knew that various frames were used in the Calamity War era, but now only people like Gjallarhorn can build a mobile suit from scratch. In fact, I've heard that their main deployment unit, the Graze type, was built with the latest type of frame.
While I was thinking of that, Jasper - coming from the garbage disposal site - showed up behind me and spied on my tablet. I hid it right away and tried to shoo him off, but then he recognized the image I was looking at and started blubbering without stopping.
Jasper said that the mobile suit resembled a Gundam Frame type. I asked what that was, and he asked in return if I knew anything about our power generator. CGS' power source was a mobile suit a former company chief dug out of the desert back when. He didn't know its name. Without its cockpit, it is useless as a mobile suit, but with its Ahab reactor alive it works as a power generator. Going by his words, this thing was also something like a Gundam frame. "Like" it, because Gundam frames were built in some number at the very end of the Calamity War and played a major role in there, as Jasper kept blabbering about. In this age where mobile suits were so precious, building them in great numbers was nothing more than a fairy tale.
And yet, how did Jasper know all of this? Some of my doubts must have shown in my face, as Jasper got the idea, and disappeared somewhere along with his piece of junk.
P.D.323.10.09
Brat Trouble
I hate brats.
You yell at them, they get scared. You hit them, they cry. And yet swarms of the dirty little jerks are in CGS. The boss said "even rats have a purpose," but I see no purpose to them other than using them as a punching bag.
There are two types of brats here in CGS. The ones that grow up well, and theones that don't. The big guys end up in mock battles in mobile workers, and the tiny little punks get mostly saddled with pointless duties. Pile up sandbags one day, clear the ground the next. The ones I supervise are these little guys. It takes a lot of time in the best of days, and if you take your eyes off them for a second they stop working and go gawk at the mock battles.
Looking at those unpleasant brats, I remembered the reconstructed data. The data I never knew what age it was from. The kids in those pictures had nothing to do with the ones around me: a neat, clean, mud-free bunch. Maybe rich punks from Earth, who knows. Thinking on that, another type of unpleasantness came closer.
CGS is a private military company, but when necessary we do some rough stuff. The kids we send to the battlefield get exhausted and end up eating bullets. So the company also buys kids for money. They wear red lines in their clothes to make it easier to tell at a distance.
I hate them most of all.
I can't tell if the sold kids get along, but they're usually gathered together. You can't tell if they're plotting something, ready to spring a trap at some moment. It just gives an eerie feeling.
If you ask me, we shouldn't buy any more kids, but dumbass boss Maruba keeps doing it to prop up the front line. Well, they cost about as much as scrap iron, so maybe it's necessary.
I don't know who named them like that, but they're called Human Debris, worth as much as the scrap that gathers in space.
I think that's a perfect name.
