Cosmic Rifts and Spacetime Distortions

 

'On a long enough timeline, the survival rate drops to zero'

Overheard in a bar in Kandashi Station in M2-CF1

At some point in the deep past, the area of space that we now call the Syndicate was an unusually violent place - in a cosmic sense, not in terms of the behaviour of its inhabitants. Evidence of that past is demonstrated by three 'landmarks' located here, all of them within a few light-years of each other.

The Cloud Ring Nebula is unmissable of course; proven to be a supernova remnant by Intaki astronomer Alnadil Jouber many years ago, it has always been my favourite piece of cosmic architecture in all of New Eden. If you're in visual range of it, then more than any other nebula in the cluster, you can establish your position in the North-West Quadrant just by looking at it, and I've spent many hours during quiet duty periods in the Cathedral's tactical command centre doing just that.

Cloud Ring from Black Rise

Cloud Ring from Outer Ring

Cloud Ring from Placid

Cloud Ring from Syndicate

The odd thing is if you go to the region named after the Cloud Ring, you're in the centre of the nebula and completely surrounded by it so the effect is not so dramatic, but anyway this is about stuff going on in Syndicate.

There are two other 'things' going on here that are far more dangerous and far less visible, so you can only view them from the systems that are closest to them, but the presence of one of them is given away by the large void in the centre of the stargate map of Syndicate. The network appears to loop around something.

It's called Cord of the Elements.

This is a flaw in spacetime that stretches much further than we can see; the only part of it that is visible from a stargate-connected system - the D-B7YK system - is just a fraction of its total area. You can easily guess the extent of it just by looking at that void in the map, as it forms a natural barrier between the Fed and large parts of the Syndicate.

To travel to D-B7YK from my home system of XS-XAY means traversing the perimeter of that void, some 22 stargate jumps. In reality, XS-XAY is closer to D-B7YK than Poitot is. 

From browsing the scientific literature on the Cord of the Elements, it seems to be similar to the EVE Gate in that it is a massive rift in spacetime that emits extravagantly lethal levels of hard radiation and gravity waves, preventing any close analysis or any transit of it. Probes have gone in there and never come out. Like the EVE Gate, the portion of the Cord we can see is still several light-years away from the closest system; and like the EVE Gate, the sight of it activates a primal fear in the observer. It does in me, anyway.

The residents and guests of the Intaki Syndicate Executive Retreat probably beg to differ. 

Capsuleers are not permitted to dock in this station; it's built exclusively for the owners, directors, heads, CEOs, and ruling families of the various 'city state' stations that form the Intaki Syndicate in all its cosmopolitan diversity. Maybe Silphy herself has a permanent suite here. I would expect her to.

Whatever deals get done here - I tried to look for evidence of a recent Caldari presence re: DS-M4Q - and whatever after-parties take place in those Pleasure Hubs, it is before a stunning vista formed of an incredibly violent cosmic phenomenon that cannot be explained definitively or explored without great personal risk, kind of like a metaphor for the affairs of the Intaki Syndicate itself.

When I took a trip out here, after checking out the Intaki station and confirming that I was in fact not allowed to dock in it, I took up a position in a 'safe' and observed the Cord of the Elements for a while. My sensors were all over the place, it was obviously as deadly as a magnetar in Anoikis. The D-B7YK system is a 'dead-end', uninhabited and unremarkable except for its proximity to this thing, which is, if you consider its sheer size and extent, a far more violent and threatening phenomenon than even the EVE Gate; and yet hardly anybody outside the Syndicate knows about it. Even fewer have visited it, just because it is in deep nullsec. 

 

* * *

The other cosmic phenomenon in this part of space isn't actually in Syndicate, it's in Solitude, a few light-years to the 'south'. I took some licence there, I know, but since the regions of New Eden are entirely a political invention and are mostly determined by the stargate network, the distinction is redundant because the regions of Syndicate and Solitude actually vertically overlap each other with respect to True Galactic North.

So this thing, called Trace Cosmos, is not really in a 'different region' at all. It's just down the road, in a cosmic sense.

Trace Cosmos is a field of miniature black holes visible from the Gererique system. It moves, with pulses of visible light and gravitational shockwaves ripping through clouds of dust and hot plasma . The Fed has built an installation in the Gererique system to monitor it. The Duvolle Gravitational Wave Observatory is here to do serious science; it is not a holiday resort like the place in Syndicate. 

Like the Cord, and like the EVE Gate, you can't get anywhere near the Trace Cosmos for the same reasons: deadly radiation and gravity fluctuations. There are about nine or ten black hole accretion discs visible from Gererique, bright enough in visible wavelengths, but by far the brightest things in the sky in x-rays and gamma rays; but God knows how many of those things there are in there in total, because the Trace Cosmos is like the Cord in that it covers a sufficiently large area of space that the layout of the stargate network has to take it into account. It is the reason why access to Solitude in general is so difficult and why there is another large void in the map between Solitude, Genesis and Aridia.

It's a remarkable coincidence that four violent unstable gravitational phenomena - the Cloud Ring supernova remnant, the Cord of the Elements, the Trace Cosmos and the EVE Gate are all located within about 17 light-years of each other, here in this sector of New Eden.

As to their creation, the Nebula is entirely natural; the Trace probably is too; the EVE Gate almost certainly is not; and as for the Cord, some outlandish fringe theorists have even postulated an artificial, alien origin, like an industrial or scientific accident that occurred aeons ago. That would actually place it on a par with the EVE Gate, if that's what the collapsed EVE Gate was. If aliens caused the Cord of the Elements, we'd see other evidence of their existence somewhere else in New Eden. We have more obvious evidence of our human ancestors in the form of relics from the epochs of the Talocan, Yan Jung etc. Nobody, nothing intelligent appears to have pre-dated human presence in New Eden.

If that wild theory about the Cord is even remotely true then history, from the universe's perspective, keeps on repeating itself, because just a few years ago the W477-P system in Jove space was the location of a catastrophic event that might one day produce something similar to these phenomena, millennia from now.

Then just last year my own Amarrian 'superiors' nearly caused the collapse of a star and the destruction of the Turnur system while attempting to replicate Triglavian technology. And then of course that lot are the only ones seemingly capable of mastering that much power, but to what end?

History does indeed repeat itself all the time, and it is only a matter of time before something happens, or more accurately we cause something to happen, that will, aeons from now, make our descendants build monuments and stations to its aftermath, and they will marvel at its stark cosmic beauty.

That is if we don't wipe ourselves out in the process.

An Inquiry Into The Jove Observatory In The New Eden System

Another Jovian Enigma

Well over a year ago, somebody in New Eden's scientific community discovered that an Entosis Link could be used to probe the inner workings of a Jove Observatory, those massive fluted columns of mystery that those institutionally-bald, passionless, D-deficient, hermaphroditic freaks seeded throughout New Eden centuries ago and have been using to monitor us ever since.

Capsuleers have since reported Entosising a variety of Observatories, going on to release the results into the public domain. It seems the Entosis Link has the ability to effectively hack into whatever passes for the Observatory's mainframe and download a small part of its data cache. It's not an elegant method by the looks of it; something like using a torch to explore a dark cellar or fishing with explosives - there's no control over the end result. Those published results indicate a level of sameness in the potential download, and that the download is invariably full of short, terse and sometimes cryptic references to key events in New Eden politics.

The commonality between an Entosis Link and an Observatory is, in Jove-speak, logical, because they're both derived from the same sources. In my growing collection of exotic artifacts in Zoohen, I have a piece of the 'Antikythera Element' that you need to construct an Entosis Link, and it's frankly terrifying. I keep it in a box at all times. It really does vibrate and emit sound at a kind of subaural level that you feel rather than hear. I can't tell you what colour it is definitively because it changes, as if it has moods. Worse, it smells. Not unpleasant, mind, but it definitely smells. Of the future.

Drifters...

Backstory: ages ago I looted an intact set of blueprints for a Minmatar Burst frigate from the wreckage of some unfortunate down in Khanid (note to Mynxee: this was during my tenure with my previous outfit, so I wasn't subject to the credo back then).

I built the Bursts, sold most of them, but kept one just for the hell of it. I didn't do much with it except use it as a shuttle for transiting between our stations in the Khanid Lowsec Pipe. Most of the time I left it docked, because it's typical Minmatar dreck.

Over the last year or so, I read about the findings of capsuleers who had used an Entosis Link on an Observatory, most notably the IKAME survey and the attempts by others to correlate the downloaded data with historical events by delving into the news archives. A common theme in the downloaded results is that the Observatories appear to have a collective opinion, which sometimes manifests as condescending and judgemental. Typically Jovian. We know they are not crewed by a Jovian, so there must be either a networked AI based somewhere in Jove space that acts as a single entity controlling them all, or they each have their own AI that communicates with all the others and shares information, which is why you sometimes see the same result from multiple Observatories.

I decided to check out the Observatories for myself, so I equipped the Burst with an Entosis Link and tried it out a few times. Then I joined Signal Cartel and got heavily into my new job, so the Burst was sidelined again. Recently I've had more time on my hands, so I recommissioned the Burst and put into action an idea I'd been brewing for a while: to run an Entosis Link on the only Observatory that matters. The Jove Observatory in the New Eden system.

The Jove Observatory that observes the EVE Gate.

Is It The Face of God, Or The Embodiment of Pure Evil?

The New Eden system is not far from Zoohen, and I've done the 'climb' up through the lowsec pipe to the EVE constellation often enough to know it is mostly deserted.

As I get closer to the New Eden system, I always get a sense of foreboding and portent as I pass through this largely abandoned part of space that still contains relics of that optimistic pre-Dark Ages era: dead stargates, colony ship remnants, empty station hulks. The EVE constellation itself carries system names that were monuments to a golden age and now reek of pathos: Promised Land, Gateway, Central Point, New Eden etc.

While passing through (the) Promised Land, I took a side-trip over to the system's innermost planet to check out the persistent wormhole that is purported to be Sansha's Nation's first attempt at facilitating Incursions through wormhole generation.

Whatever parameters it was 'designed' with, this wormhole is extremely compact, and small enough to pass very close to the orbiting customs station without perturbing it. You can't get anywhere near it because of the hard radiation, and it never evaporates. Tremendous power, in entirely the wrong hands. What a bunch of scumbags.

The EVE Gate

When I arrived in New Eden, I did the thing I always do first when I come here: I said hello to the EVE Gate. I feel like you have to acknowledge it and show it respect. It exerts a power over all of us, sitting all the way up there to the galactic north and at the 'end of the road'. Empress Jamyl was on record saying she used to view it through a telescope from Sarum Prime. Now I sat here, cocooned in my capsule and yet not feeling even remotely safe, looking at it through cam drones as it outshines the New Eden primary a hundredfold yet is still 3.3 light-years further away. In great contrast, the giant billboard by the system's stargate was displaying those new corporation recruitment adverts. One of them was highly apposite:

My Overview indicated a new presence in the system: [SFRIM]'s citadel. This was a welcome new development. Before this was built, New Eden's status as a cosmic backwater meant that it was devoid of all resources relevant to the capsuleer. No maintenance facilities, nowhere to dock, no safe havens, nothing. Your ship was statistically unlikely to come to any harm here, but if it did, you were finished. The most sensible course of action was to self-destruct and take the pod express.

Not any more.

'The Farthest Shore'

Mynxee had informed us through the corp channel that [SFRIM] were now 'blue' to Signal Cartel, so I had docking rights here. There was a good reason why I might have to make use of that, so I flew over to it to check it out. Imagine living here and waking up to that sight every morning. Would it be never-endingly awesome or would it drive you mad?

Then I headed over to the Jove Observatory and got to work. I was alone in the system so it was now or never.

The Jove Observatories have always played a significant part in my capsuleer career, only because I finished my initial capsuleer training at Hedion University at the end of YC116, around the time of the Caroline's Star event and shortly afterwards when the Observatories first started to reveal themselves through malfunction.

I remember the seismic shockwaves among the capsuleer community as people couldn't believe what they were seeing - the sheer size of them was mind-boggling. One of the first things I did when I got my new Impairor was check out the one in the Mora system right next door to Hedion University. I spent hours there just looking at it, listening to its emissions over the audio channel speaking of deep time.

I had the idea that this one, here in New Eden, had a singular perspective on the cosmos because of its proximity to the EVE Gate. Jovians can't possibly have placed this Observatory here for any other reason than to observe it; so my theory was that it might have some extra, unique set of observations in it: something on the EVE Gate itself, something that I could report to the scientific community and cause total devastation, demolishing years of established doctrine etc. etc.

Of course the rational scientist in me knew this was virtually impossible; that nothing I was doing was new, and that there was no way somebody won't have had the same idea and done the same thing as me already. In fact if [SFRIM] has a permanent facility here then they should already know everything there is to know about this Observatory and be studying it continuously at the subatomic level.

Nevertheless I gave it a shot. I targeted the huge structure and activated the Entosis Link, at which point I became a sitting duck as the Entosis did its thing and locked out my ship's navigational capacity for the five-minute duration of its uninterruptible cycle.  

This is where the Sleeper presence became a problem.

Those Sleeper drone cruiser things are known for their willingness to defend a Jove Observatory. If a flight of them happens to be in the vicinity of one when you show up and get too close to it, they will turn on you.

There is a persistent Sleeper presence in the New Eden system because I've seen them before. They weren't here at the Observatory right now, but if they showed up I wouldn't be able to do anything about it because of the nav system lockout. I wouldn't even be able to warp out until the Entosis was done. This is why I'd fitted extra armour to the Burst and was relying on 'speed-tanking', but I doubt it would have made any difference even if making repairs at the citadel was now an option.

This five minutes wasn't good for my nerves at all. 

Now as it happened, for this first pass I had karma on my side and nobody bothered me, not even the other capsuleer who entered the system during the five-minute cycle and who would have found me easily with just a token amount of D-scanning.

When the cycle completed and the Entosis Link stopped interrogating the Observatory, I looked at my 'take':

Most of this stuff is old news. Some of it is ancient. The entry at the top of the list concerns the founding of the Gallente Federation.  The 'Azbel-Wuthrich experiment' refers to the invention of the fluid router. Look at the dates: all but one prior to the adoption of the 'YC' standard.

Nothing pertaining to the EVE Gate though. In fact nothing new at all because one look through the scientific literature indicates this download has been seen before. This Observatory then, is not unlike any of the others at all.

I thought I was on to something there...

Later on I docked the Burst in the citadel and jump-cloned out of the New Eden system with the intention of returning in a week or so to have one more pass at the Observatory.

 

Round Two

It ended up being more like three weeks before I jump-cloned back to the citadel, so if anyone in [SFRIM] wondered whose that Burst was that just sat there, it was mine. There were two reasons for the delay: Empress Catiz's coronation, which I just had to attend, and receiving a short comms from my parents relating to the same event, 'requiring' my presence for a gathering at the family compound in Estada Regio Sul on Eclipticum. My father was basically throwing a big party in honour of the new Empress. It seems that the power to cheat death, punch holes in spacetime and harness the power of stars is as nothing to the power of a parental summons. At this gathering, I think I finally convinced my mother that I am still her daughter despite no-longer inhabiting the same body she gave birth to, so that was a positive. Baseliners...

Anyway, three weeks later and I was back in New Eden at the [SFRIM] place.

Nothing had changed. I ran a second pass on the Observatory with the Burst, and this was the take:

This download was tantamount to Jovian poetry, and is the definitive example of condescending Observatory AI with its references to 'them' and 'they'. Noteworthy in this download are the inclusions of the date of Emperor Doriam II's assassination ('primary node'??) and the date of the Seyllin Incident, both summarized with one-line statements. 

Result: more questions than answers. Again.

After this, I left the system and returned to Zoohen, satisfied that the Jove Observatory in the New Eden system is the same as all the others. In the end I'm an artist, not a scientist. I could stick around and run a hundred Entosis passes over it to get 'sufficient data to form a reliable conclusion', but I'll let someone else do that. [SFRIM] have probably already done it. In fact while I was running this second pass I had a very pleasant conversation in the Local channel with [SFRIM] boss Lunarisse Aspenstar, so I could have asked her about it, but I forgot. Like I said, I'm an artist, not a scientist.

There is no doubt though, that the Observatories have not yielded all the information contained within them yet, so perhaps this Observatory here in the New Eden system really isn't the same at all and we just can't get to the kernel of it because we don't have the right tools.

Not yet.

Later on, back in my quarters in Zoohen, I was reviewing the copious literature on the use of Entosis Links on Jove Observatories and I remembered a piece of corporation propaganda I did when I was with [PHP1] down in Khanid. It was a reference to the boss's favourite post-mission indulgence. 

Those were the days:

Astero at the EVE Gate

"It is rumored that the wrecks of many ships destroyed during the gate's final days still float in the void around the EVE Gate. The lack of wreckage detected by scanners has not culled the speculation; some say that the ancient vessels have been cloaked by the Jove to prevent advanced technology from falling into the wrong hands."

Evelopedia: EVE Gate

"The fact that there is a Jove Observatory in there with it, tells you everything you need to know about that thing in principle."

Maryla Hilett - Border Regions Correspondent, The Scope ('Genesis - Origins', 06/07/117)

"I'm telling you, I know how to make one of those Sanctuary ships talk. All of them - they're exactly like the Zephyr. They monitor you, and every time you go there in one, they communicate with it. Anyway I reckon the answer is not in the floating junk around it that no-one can get to anyway. It's on that damned radiation-blasted planet. New Eden I. Something down there saw it all and recorded it in detail. I'm telling you..."

Unknown - overheard in a bar last week when I was in the SoE place around Octanneve V in Solitude

Point Genesis: The EVE Gate

Everybody knows the legend of the EVE Gate. It's taught to us in school; it's part of the foundation of the Amarrian religion; it's the reason for humanity's presence in the stellar cluster that's named after the system it's situated near: New Eden. It's not in New Eden, but more about that later.

Such an important celestial object should be a natural destination - a form of pilgrimage even; at the very least a massive tourist attraction, especially for any capsuleer who has a cosmic perspective and a scientific background by default. Knowing what the EVE Gate is and why it persists, raises more questions than it answers.

Visiting the New Eden system and the EVE Gate was the third reason I became a capsuleer, which is a hell of a commitment to make - having your body cyborgized and implanted, and getting killed a few times along the way 'just' to see a unique cosmic spectacle, but the state of regional and cluster politics in the current epoch means that becoming a capsuleer is almost the only way to see it. The reason why is that the New Eden system is at the end of a long 'pipe' of  sparsely-populated resource-poor systems that have no regular transport services and yet, ironically enough, all carry names that imply a previous era of optimism and hope that failed to materialise, no doubt due to the 'abomination' that's at the end of this particular line, and how history itself panned out.

This 'pipe' to New Eden, to paradise, is all low-security space, so it should be a haven for gate camps and gankers, pirates, freelancers etc., but it isn't. It's that dead end: there's no reason to come down here unless you're visiting the EVE Gate. But that perception of a lack of threat does not mean you're exempt from the usual rules of lowsec conduct. In my case, I waited two months to train the skills necessary to get a Covert Ops frigate with an advanced cloaking device. A Purifier, no less (a stealth bomber on an exploration mission? Hell yes! It's my ISK. Why not?).

Transiting down this lowsec pipe towards the EVE Gate is different from any other part of space. It's like EVE is drawing you to it. An accident of galactic geography means the New Eden system is one of the most northerly systems in the cluster in respect to the galactic plane, so as you progress towards it, there is a commanding view of the region's three major nebulae: Verge Vendor, Domain and The Cauldron; the Domain looks like a hollow-eyed skullmask.

The last accessible orbital station is in Angur, a full six systems away from New Eden itself, and after Angur it's either gas giants or irradiated desert worlds with automated weather stations and hardcore agri-settlements that don't want to communicate and where people go to disappear.  Cluster politics will have passed them by.

The theme in every system is abandonment and desolation, presenting an unsettling contrast against those systems' names: Promised Land, Access, Gateway, New Eden itself.

I passed long-abandoned orbitals, half-hearted Covenant gate camps, and tantalizing indications of pre-Dark Ages human presence in the form of fragments of unidentifiable wreckage or a derelict stargate-like structure that has to be Old Earth in origin. I was the only ship in the last three systems on the pipe, which meant that I was the only ship for several light-years in any direction; so when I got to the New Eden system and came face-to-face with the EVE Gate - Point Genesis - it felt like I was having a one-to-one communion with it.

The flaw in spacetime that the failed EVE Gate is assumed to be, projects a visible luminosity that far exceeds that of the New Eden primary, yet the object is not actually in the New Eden system at all; it's another 3.3 light-years beyond it. It pulses organically, like a beating heart. EVE is alive, and the Amarrian in me appreciates how this thing became the foundation of a religion.

On the other hand, the scientifically-literate capsuleer in me asks questions like any good scientist: what incredible forces are really at work here? Why, when the universe constantly tends towards entropy - when even a black hole evaporates eventually - has the EVE Gate persisted like this, in this flawed state, for over 15,000 years? It can only be because it is being fed - supplied by something. What power is feeding it? Who is behind that power?

The EVE Gate decided to show me a hint of a possible answer...


I was holding station near the automated customs satellite orbiting New Eden I. I heard the 'thump' of an arriving vessel - four Roaming Sleeper Cruisers! I cloaked up immediately and disappeared, mindful of the recent changes in Sleeper tactics. The Sleepers started their bizarre scanning routine on the customs satellite instead.

While they were busy, I noted the presence of another Jove Observatory, here, in New Eden. I decloaked and warped over to it, to see if the Sleepers would follow.

Sure enough, they did.

So I'm station-keeping, here in New Eden, and I'm within sight of the EVE Gate, a Jove Observatory and four Roaming Sleeper Cruisers.

The Sleepers.

I would have felt a shiver down my spine if I wasn't jacked-in and floating in neuro-embryonic fluid.

* * *

I made my way back to the station in Angur to dock for the night. The entire seven-system pipe was deserted. The lack of activity gave me plenty to think about:

Established wisdom/dogma tells us what EVE is and what it may have looked like. Listen to any capsuleer conversation in any bar in New Eden and they'll all talk about the same legend - that EVE is co-located with remnants of Old Earth pre-Dark Ages human tech: ships, stations, detritus that fell victim to whatever caused EVE to fail. The Jovians have apparently seen fit to hide much of it from us in our own best interests, and besides, EVE is supposed to be a radiation environment that is off-the-scale hostile, so we can't go anywhere near it to find out for ourselves. Sisters of EVE have an ongoing interest, basing their entire faith around it, but they aren't telling.

The Jove Observatory: this system is otherwise completely deserted and rarely visited, so the Observatory can only be monitoring EVE. Why?

The Sleepers are believed to be an ancestral offshoot of the Jove race. They will have come through the EVE Gate the first time round. Jove, Sleepers, an SoE 'research' presence somewhere round here...

Then, after the events of Caroline's Star (which was an event similar in spectacle to what the EVE collapse would have looked like) , you can't discuss the Jove and Sleepers without discussing the Drifters. Drifter Battleships are known to be responsible for the structural damage to the Observatories; damage which is also present on this example, so Drifters have visited this system too.

I believe the Drifters are associated with EVE - that their battleships use tech that is openly acknowledged to be in advance of ours, and that the tech is recovered from Old Earth remnants found around EVE, or maybe even from the far side of it; and that the Sleepers - rumoured to be the 'body snatchers' behind the Drifter faction that is a means for the Sleepers to return from their virtual world - are in turn behind the whole damn thing.

Since the rise of the Drifters, everybody has been watching Jove space for another sign following Caroline's Star. Could it be that we are all looking in the wrong place?

Meanwhile, the EVE Gate patiently watches us all go about our business from its position above the centre of the cluster, and has done so for at least 15,000 years. Any visitor to EVE must be prepared to leave with more questions than they arrived with.

We may not have to wait much longer for the answers.