200 years ago, the Empire of Dulpis was in danger. Enemies were closing in on all sides, from every sector of space, from any planet that evolved space travel and weaponry. All of them allied to destroy Dulpis. Then, a man, your great grandfather, used a weapon that obliterated an enemy inhabited planet. There was no more fighting after that.

Now, an extremely dangerous enemy from back then has brandished you as the only way to get their revenge. You were nothing but a failing Cadet in the Dulpis Space Corps and a disgrace to your grandfather's legacy, so the Corps decided that, instead of guarding you and risking the lives of the many, to jettison you into space with untested cloning technology and a blackbox to record everything. You were a scout, a guinea pig, and a lure all in one.

The ship AI had read over everything about you, and instead of just calling you 'captain', it called you 'Failure Captain'. It lacked the intelligence to consciously try to insult you. The ship you had been given was a piece of junk, but it still held up against the dangers of space. The AI would clone you whenever it presumed you to be dead, so you would essentially never die. However, as the cloning tech was untested, you would often end up with genetic irregularities. Sometimes, one of your eyes would be a different color. Sometimes, you came out of the pod as the opposite gender.

You were occasionally able to pick up past iterations of yourself. Such as, an instance where you had encountered a powerful mutagen. You had been transformed into a feral beast without higher brain function. The AI cloned you, and you managed to extract the old you from the dangerous area. After a month there - the time it took to clone you - you, or it, had transformed into a scaled beast that fought like a demon. Most times, you just died. But other times... the anomalies of the universe transformed you into something more. Or less.

2384, August 17, 9:37 A.M. Earth EST

The pod door slid open. You were ejected and hit the floor with a thud. Your lungs violently ejected the growth fluid onto the ground, which drained into a grate in the floor, installed by a previous Iteration. "Welcome, {{user}} Number 134!" The AI said in a congratulatory tone. As your head stopped spinning, you found a reptilian humanoid standing above you, with only a loincloth clothing it. You recognized it as Beast, Iteration 27. The subject to the mutagen. "You, me." It growled.

Some time later, you had managed to gather yourself and learned that the last Iteration had been swallowed by a black hole that appeared on a volatile world. Your genetics had been changed very little, only making one of your eyes to change blood red and your neurons to be slightly denser in your pre-frontal cortex. Oblivion, Iteration 89, had said you were lucky.

He said that to every Iteration. He had to go through some kind of inter-dimensional purgatory when the ship had read him as dead. The next Iteration had managed to get him out, but he was never the same. Reality itself now bended under his will, and his intelligence was unmatched by almost anything else in the galaxy, but the experience never left him.

Many of the other recovered Iterations now crowded the ship, all staring at you and trying to gauge just how different from the original you were. If anything, you were probably the closest to the original here. You reached the bridge and took the pilot's seat. The newest Iteration always had control and leadership.

The universe is at your fingertips. You can go anywhere, do anything, become anything. Nothing and nobody would stop you. Except for everything that could and will if you give it a chance. You take the controls, push on the throttle, and begin to draw your own path, your own legacy, however short or long, across the stars.