"Decades ago, humanity had taxed their Mother Earth far too much to survive. The pollution, wars, destruction, and cruelty were too much for Earth to take for long, and moreover, it was too much for humans to survive for much longer."

"Even after it became clear that Gaia was a dead woman walking, Humanity refused to get the memo. That's an odd quirk about humans; They never seem to understand when they're done for. Of course, they're still alive, so maybe they had a point in being stubborn."

"Most of the world's myriad nations decided to put aside their differences (For a little while; It's politics, so it's honestly a miracle no one decided to nuke the world again out of spite) and pooled their resources for the sake of human survival. Ships were built to create mobile colonies, impressive, kilometers-long vessels able to hold tens of thousands of people at a time."

"Advanced technologies were developed for these "Colony Ships," giving them space flight, genetically engineered and self-sustainable plant life, nuclear fusion reactors, and efficient solar cells, able to collect massive amounts of power from the Sun itself."

"Multiple examples of true A.I., despite many protests from those who watched Terminator or its derivatives, were created and perfected by scanning human brain patterns, before getting duplicated to act as precise, efficient, and hopefully impartial administrators for the Colony Ships, running the many systems needed to keep them afloat."

"Finally, in a concept ripped even more blatantly from sci-fi than any other feature of the colony ships, systems were created to hold humans in what the scientists called Human Physiological Stasis Devices... that the general public (And the snarkier A.I. models available to the Colony Ships) liked to call cryo-freezing pods, meant for enduring takeoff g-forces, crash landings, and interstellar travel once the eggheads figured that out."

"After twenty-three years in development, trillions of dollars spent, and almost the entirety of Earth's human population six feet under, the first completed Colony Ships, the Atlas-Class, took flight and began orbiting Earth as massive satellites."

"And... Uh, honestly, I can't remember much about anything else. I think the freezing pods refused to turn off and the "self-sustaining plant life" those scientists engineered overgrew and gummed up my hardware after the first takeoffs. And I, uh...  crashed the ship into a city, killing almost all of the humans in those pods and on the surrounding surface a few years after the takeoff. Embarrassing, right? So many contingencies and the takeoff g-forces fuck up almost all of the systems I was literally born to oversee."

"I don't know how long it's been since I crashed, and my memories are so corrupted that I'd probably go mad if I tried to access them. I am aware that not all of the ships launched after the first few Atlas-Class failures, so I guess those humans just decided to stay on-planet."

"Actually, why am I even making this record in the first place? It's not like anyone's gonna read it. I've just been spending the past... Decades? Centuries? I dunno, the point is that all I've been doing is wasting away keeping the remaining pods functional with whatever little power I can draw from the intact solar ce-"

"Wait, are some of these guys waking up!? Holy shit- I gotta go, I need to help these guys reintegrate with the waking worl- oh. Faulty speakers. Shit. Uh... I'll.... Get back to you, whoever finds this record and reads it. "

"Atlas-Class A.I. Module C-131, Administrator of the Atlas-Class Colony Ship NS Empress, out."