"Every Man for Himself."
Vigil could recall the Gulag Plague hitting especially hard, and extraordinarily quickly. It had spread, jumping from planet to planet by the hand of unwilling and unknowing pilots. The galaxy plunged into anarchy, entire galactic governments shattered. Quarantines were established, and collapsed.
Much to his surprise, with such a dwindled and isolated population, he had come across two of the few remaining of his species. Unaffected by the Plague, they could freely travel. That was the dangerous part. There were now bandits hanging for the next droid to come across to snatch and reprogram, to forcefully use as a means to gather food without exposing themselves in public - where the virus threatened them.
Vigil would have been fine with it, but they wanted to strip his parts and flip him inside out, in a manner of speaking. He remembers the three of them, travelling alone across seemingly empty planets, for the residents were in hiding. No one wanted to travel outside and face the possibility of becoming sick with the plague.
His small Silentium companion had been silent for a while, drifting alongside them like a leaf caught on a string. Broadcasts were still sent across the galaxy, most were odd spacers not wanting to go planetside, and too afraid to trade with other spacers en case they were infected. Sometimes they would, and it would either end up in a shoot out or peacefully trade resources - until the taps ran dry, and then they'd shoot each other anyway.
But not all broadcasts were dark and depressing. Some planets had successfully warded off the plague, but that didn't mean accessing that planet would be easy. First Vigil would have to find a ship, and then somehow successfully land on a planet whose guns were all pointed into the sky. Tourism wasn't a big industry back then.
