Seyllin: A Decade On

'Shattered worlds were once terrestrial planets, torn asunder by some immense cataclysm. All such worlds in the New Eden cluster are products of the disastrous stellar events that occurred during the "Seyllin Incident". However, reports continue to circulate of similar planets discovered in the unmapped systems reached exclusively through unstable wormholes. How these met their fate, if indeed they exist at all, is unknown.'

CONCORD Aura Database
 
Prologue - Cause and Effect

I'm back in the Zoohen system for the first time in a month. I arrived here by way of three wormholes, emerging in the Kador region in a system only six jumps or so from our head office, so it seemed as good a time as any to dock here and find out a) if I still have a job, b) if I still have a quarters of my own because I could not remember whether I'd locked it when I last left, and c) what the hell happened to my pirated, subscription-free Impetus feed that had stopped working a fortnight ago.

I'd got it rigged up through several fluid routers so I could receive it from our citadel in Anoikis over a thousand light-years away. But a fortnight ago, while I was chilling in my quarters in the citadel and watching a new episode of UUA Is So Far Away, right at the point where the heroic exiled Jove is about to get cornered by a load of Society of Conscious Thought agents who want to silence him, the damn screen went black, then a load of noise and random symbols flashed up on the screen, then 'NO SIGNAL', which I thought was ironic.

It can't have been the fluid router(s), because that's quantum entanglement so it's not like you can switch it off. It wasn't the citadel's own comms systems because I had the citadel's engineers check them out, so I had to wait for wormhole geometry to arrange itself favourably enough for me to return to 'The Zoo' and get it fixed, so I could catch up on the show and also avoid finding out what happened until then.

But then I mentioned this the next day to Quinn Valerii while we were in the lounge in our office in this huge citadel, and she said that she had her own Impetus feed and, because she's a Jin-Mei it was totally legit and that she was also a big fan of UUA Is So Far Away and that actually all I had to do was ask.

So back in Zoohen, I got to my quarters and found that the only reason why my special pirated Impetus feed router had dropped was that the damned cleaners had been in my quarters and unplugged it. It blew my mind to think that something as trivial and insignificant as that would have consequences in another location over a thousand light-years away.

But why am I even telling you this?

Because just as a river always finds its course, humans always become accustomed to our surroundings and eventually take everything for granted. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that; if we were constantly amazed by everything around us then we would go insane. Becoming familiar with something is a natural process. Then there's the one about filling our lives with trivial superficial inconsequential ephemera that only wastes our precious, short window of time (unless you're a capsuleer in which case there will always be a tomorrow, I mean I could have travelled to Zoohen just by running a TEBS cycle and self-destructing in the capsule outside the citadel, but I refuse to engage in behaviour like that as it is wasteful and vulgar in its self-indulgence).

Thing is, we frequently ignore the universe trying to tell us how insignificant we are, so we continue to go prodding around in places where we shouldn't, and things happen that remind us of who's in charge; that something happening here can have consequences elsewhere.

The Butterfly Effect.

The Original Shattered Planet

A few days earlier, before I returned to Zoohen, our 'highsec static' manifested one jump away from the Seyllin system. This coincided with me needing to travel to a trade hub to resupply. In this case the Dodixie system was closest and the Seyllin system was on my route, and since I'd never visited Seyllin before it seemed like a no-brainer.

Eight years ago, half a billion people were killed in a single day when Seyllin I was blow-torched by a focused coronal mass ejection from the Seyllin primary. That CME was so violent it destroyed the planet and permanently reduced the mass of the star that produced it, so the Seyllin primary of today is a kind of mutant dwarf blue star that should not exist; but it does exist, and today it sits there and kind of taunts us by making us wonder why it happened and whether it will happen again.

Nearly a decade later, we still don't know exactly, conclusively, why the Seyllin Incident happened. We know that an unstable isotope of Isogen was involved somehow; we know that the exact same stellar disruption event also happened on nine other stars in New Eden simultaneously - to the second - on that day with varying degrees of loss of life; we also now know that of those nine systems, two of them were uninhabited star systems that are not connected to the stargate network; we know that it also happened to at least two systems in Anoikis. The reason why Seyllin is the one everyone remembers is obvious: it had the biggest body count, it was the only event in regulated, populated space - 'empire' space - and it also nearly caused the State and the Fed to go to war again.

Anyone with a cosmic perspective also remembers what else happened in conjunction with this event: immediately afterwards, the traversible wormholes started appearing all over New Eden that allowed us to (re)discover the Anoikis Cluster, to find the remnants of the Sleeper and Talocan presence that somehow made its way there millennia ago, and to start using those wormholes for typically-human selfish desires, ignoring the bigger picture. Only a minority of us are interested in finding the answers, joining the dots, learning the truth about all of it. The rest just want to blow things up.

So for this trade hub run I was using my Astero frigate, a ship that I use as a high-speed, uncatchable frigate-class blockade runner, so I knew that transiting through the Seyllin system would be relatively safe even though it is still low-security space, which I find bizarre, because with the ongoing significance of this place and what happened here, you would think it would be upgraded to a 1.0, especially since Seyllin I is under permanent quarantine.

I arrived in the system and warped straight over to Seyllin I. It's not the first 'shattered planet' I've ever seen (for the record, that was the one in 3HQC-6 in Outer Ring a couple of years ago). I held station well clear of the extensive debris field that encircles this and all of these ex-planets: the remnants of crust, melted, displaced into orbit and resolidified into asteroids and other detritus.

Seyllin itself casts its calming blue light over this scene of overwhelming devastation with a kind of innocence, like it wasn't really anything to do with it. The star appears benign now, today, but since we don't know exactly why it happened, then we don't know if it could happen again tomorrow.

As I held station, I called up some documents from the extensive-but-inconclusive archives on the whole Shattered Planets thing and refreshed my memory of it.

Noteworthy:

- There was a system of stellar monitoring satellites in the Seyllin system operating under the designator 'Cassandra', which is a cool name if ever I've heard one. If it wasn't for this system detecting the exact trigger of the Seyllin event - a bizarre and still mostly-unexplained explosive event halfway between the primary and the planet - then to this day we'd all be under the impression that the star itself started it, which it didn't. This explosive event acted as a focus and as an amplifier of some kind, causing the star to erupt towards both it and Seyllin I.

- The exact same process happened on all the others.

- One of the most scariest things to come out of the Seyllin Incident was the Sisters of EVE issuing a now-legendary statement that predicted the commencement of cluster-wide spontaneous wormhole formation that has persisted to this day and that we now live with as if it's no big deal (see above about humanity taking things for granted). How the hell did they know? Of course we now know they were in Thera years before any of the rest of us found that peculiar subcluster that Thera sits in, a system with its own shattered worlds, and a subcluster that we believe contains a considerable number of  'shattered systems' that may have all been laid waste, not years earlier during the Seyllin Incident, but during the Caroline's Star event at the end of YC116.

- Today, eight years later, Seyllin I is still largely in a molten state. It also still emits huge amounts of off-the-scale radiation, so lingering here is not recommended. In the case of Seyllin I, it is like loitering over a mass grave; it's ghoulish and morbid to stay here and look at it for too long. Some of the radioactive half-lives involved here measure in the thousands of years. The heat from radioactivity that intense means Seyllin I is on slow-cook and won't be done until we're all long dead.

- Then there's the primary. Since myself and the ship are one and the same, I warped over to it. According to the (revised) catalogue, it's a small blue star. That can't happen, but here it is. It lost a load of mass during the Incident, but it still seems to have retained enough mass to remain hot enough to be blue. I still think this thing could go off again at any time; it represents a discontinuity in physics and this sort of thing has happened before: scientists have compared the event's violence to the collapse of the EVE Gate. The similarities cannot be ignored. Go and visit New Eden. Tell me how many planets you see.

- There was another possible precursor to the Seyllin Incident in the form of the bizarre event during YC109 when a nova occurred that was named the 'Bootini Star'. Just like Caroline's Star during YC116, it was visible all over New Eden for a short time before fading. At the time, speculators even declared that event as the visible manifestation of the collapse of the far side of the EVE Gate, its light finally reaching us 15,000 years later. That theory was eventually disproved. I mention the event here because nobody's ever definitively said it wasn't an event like Seyllin in some other distant part of the galaxy.

- The ex-planet Seyllin I is quarantined, but the rest of the system isn't. You can travel here freely. People still live here. Seyllin III is temperate and inhabited. There is a Roden Centre in the system with a load of those obnoxious holo-billboards surrounding it. There is another Roden Shipyards station and a CreoDron station. I don't know whether it's like a kind of denial or something.

After an hour or so I'd seen enough. More than enough. I left the Seyllin system to head to the trade hub, humbled. 

Half a billion people in one day... 

Ignorance is Bliss

I've seen other shattered worlds both here in New Eden and in Anoikis. If you live in Anoikis, like I do now, you're constantly surrounded by the implications of the shattered worlds and the events that caused them.

We now know there are over a hundred shattered systems, the vast majority of them in Anoikis. The five Drifter Hives and Thera are also classed as shattered systems. It is not possible to determine if the hundred of them in Anoikis were all destroyed at the same time, although we know that two definitely were.

Here in Signal Cartel, we've been running a mass test for a few months now of an AI construct called ALLISON, designed in-house by our own quantum programming genius A.D. Parrot (who calls himself 'A Dead Parrot' in informal circles...). ALLISON is a navigational aid, developed from a project that Parrot was involved in when he worked for CreoDron years ago. It is designed to operate in conjunction with the Aura program, to act as a data and intel-gathering aggregator which enhances the capsuleer's knowledge of what's going on in the space around them, improving the ability to navigate safely and accurately and greatly increasing survivability, particularly in openly hostile space like the Anoikis Cluster. 

In the process of testing the ALLISON construct in the field with many of us carrying iterations of 'her' on our ships, Parrot has assembled navigational data that implies that Thera, the five Hives and the 100-or-so shattered systems in Anoikis are not actually in Anoikis at all; they're in a separate 'sub-cluster of sub-clusters' that is situated as much as a hundred light-years away from Anoikis. I know all this because Parrot asked me to co-author a document about it so I had privileged access to the data:

///enlargement available///

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With this information, if it is accurate and verifiable, it seems logical to assume that the Drifters are the New Sleepers, who migrated from Anoikis to this other, new sector of space at some point in the deep past when we were still emerging from the Dark Ages. Perhaps the Talocan went with them. Perhaps there was a deal done where they all lived there together in ultra-high-tech utopian harmony, merging virtual and real worlds in an enhanced cybernetic hyper-euclidian paradise. Then something disrupted them - us, Caroline's Star, Seyllin, all of those things, whatever - and laid waste to most, if not all of the systems in this subcluster, and now they want to kill us all in response.

Here's what else I think. Here's what else I know: those wormholes are a system. That system got reactivated during the Seyllin Incident. Something is running it, but not correctly, because there is a limited amount of randomness to their manifestations. Conversely, they're not random enough to be occurring naturally. I have no proof of this theory whatsoever. But then nobody else does either.

This is the torture of knowing something about impending doom, but not knowing exactly what it is, and knowing nobody will believe you because you're up against the wilful ignorance of vested interests - politicians, corporations, power-crazed immortals.

It's times like this that I don't want to know too much. I want to reach for my brain-numbing media feeds and immerse myself in the trivial again, like a baseliner who lives on a planet and has a job. Maybe I should return to Kor-Azor Prime and open a skateboard shop and be a nobody.

It's times like this that I don't want to know anything at all... 

Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun

So I spent all that time in Amarr waiting for the wormhole to pass nearby.

It did, I went back to the dreamworld for a few days, then I had some corp media-related business to deal with, so I came back out and headed for our HQ in Zoohen (our real HQ, not the symbolic one in Thera).

The corp business in Zoohen meant I ended up detained there for over a week. So while last time I was away from the wormhole against my will, this time I was away from the wormhole voluntarily.

Such is life and its contradictions.

Then I decided to do something constructive while waiting out the wormhole again, unlike last time when I wasted time indulging in decadent cultural irrelevances and too much rich food. Last month I discovered I needed to repair my broken relationship with the Fed. I found this out when I casually entered Fed high-security space in the Solitude region and was presented with the automatic system-wide broadcast warning me that I was a criminal in the eyes of the Fed now, and that the faction police was after me. This had never happened to me before! How rude! If I hadn't been in my interceptor which was the fastest ship in the constellation at the time, I dread to think how it would have gone down.

It was obvious why this had happened: all those missions I had done for agents in the Empire, removing excessively ambitious Fed presences in Empire space, had, at some point, according to CONCORD and the DED's number-based arbitrary accounting system called 'Standings', lowered my negative status with the Fed below the -5 threshold which caused the Fed's law enforcement arm to become interested in me by default. The problem was that I hadn't noticed.

After this, I regained Empire space and did some intense bureaucratic juggling to restore my Standings to a point where I wouldn't get immediately arrested or blown up next time I entered Fed highsec. 

So with some time on my hands (again), and since Zoohen is right on the Fed border, I decided to take my Prorator into the Fed for a few days and volunteer for some courier/transport work for one of the commercial shipping corporations. My diligence would register with the relevant authorities and I would be at least tolerated in Fed space again.

But that's not what this journal is really about.

This week every ship in the cluster received a new batch of cam drones with upgraded visual processing algorithms. The principal effect of this change is to make stars look much more like the giant balls of raging photosphere that they are.

The effect is dramatic, compelling, arresting, hypnotic. Mind-blowing:

While I transited the border systems en-route to Sinq, I tested out the new cam drones by flying to several of the stars that were on my way, dropping out of warp closer to them than is probably sensible, just to take a look.

Warp drives shift us into a shallow realm of hyperspace, so in the process of reaching a temporary perihelion at each of the stars in question, I flew through some of them, right through their centres, which was weird.

I still dislike doing stuff that shouldn't be possible in this universe...

But there's no doubt that seeing ambient light reflecting off ships' hulls exactly as it does for real now, is far more satisfying to look at than the old system, where stars were just blank discs with no detail because there was no perceived need to render it.

I could have stayed for hours at each star, but I could sense the huge temperature differential being inflicted upon the hull at the distance I was orbiting them, a phenomenon much more visually obvious than it was before. If I stayed here too long the Prorator's interior would become an oven.

The result would be one broiled capsuleer. 

The new algorithm means all stars seem properly alive now. Angry balls of gas and gravity in perfect balance.

At close range (like several tens-of-thousands of kilometres), a ship's sunlit side is bleached clean of any detail. But then you still get the impossible juxtapositions of faint nebulae still visible behind the overwhelming power of the star's light. This new cam drone upgrade must have been overseen by an artist, not a programmer.

 

I can't get enough of it. I still, and never will understand how some capsuleers get blasé about the view outside. It never gets old. It never gets boring.

Even the TransStellar Shipping station orbiting Adiere X that I docked in had a faint pink tint to its slate grey hull that it never would have had under the old system.

Fact: this upgrade means the awesome visual wealth of New Eden has improved even further, and only us capsuleers get to see it like this.

What a time to be immortal.

The Holiest of Holies

Emperor Family Academy Station, Amarr VIII (Oris), Amarr. Waiting…

'Where is it now?'
'Lonetrek.'
'Again?
'Yep.'
'Too far away.  Not interested. Talk to you tomorrow.'
'K.'


 21 hours later...

'Where is it now?'
'Still in Lonetrek. It’s EOL. Sit tight.'
'100 mil says the next one is in Domain. It needs to be in Domain. This place is doing my head in.'
'You’re on.'

19 hours later...

'Call it.'
'Is red your favourite colour?'
'Say it isn’t so.'
'Metro.'
'Damn it.'
'Easiest 100 mil I ever made.'
'Put it on my tab.'

The next day...

I’m sitting here like an addict waiting for my next fix, with every waking moment consumed by the thought of it. I'd gambled, as is normal practice for wormholers, that the access hole would not shift too far away from where it was when I arrived here. That gamble had failed this time, so that's why I was sort-of willingly detaining myself here, at the trade hub in Amarr – nobody bothers to call it by its proper name anymore - killing time, watching the rest of New Eden go about its business while I, the wormholer, sat apart from it all, as if inside my own bubble of shallow hyperspace like a personal cloaking device. It would be more convenient if others couldn’t see me either. This facility I’m sat in now is like a communal plaza, with a huge picture window several decks high overlooking the station’s greatly-enlarged docking bay, and this plaza is like a kind of atrium/mezzanine thing with several floors above me that are arranged like terraces, but set back from the window so everyone gets a good look at the mechanisms of interstellar commerce. This is an unusual level of consideration from its Amarrian designers who institutionally prefer the oppressive monastic theme because it‘s more pious.

If you want the full-on Amarr Experience in here, you have to go to the station's upper decks (closer to God), where it's still the Emperor Family Academy and you can have all the Amarr Experience you want. In the rest of the station, gradual cosmopolitanisation through cluster-wide interstellar trade means that this station is the least Amarrian and most obviously diverse station in the whole Empire, the irony being how close it is to the Empire's very core. It is the second-closest station to Amarr Prime itself. I wonder if the byzantine workings of the Theocracy ever considers the significance of that?

Noteworthy: rumours perpetuated by the students of other universities like my own Hedion U, allege that the gravity up there in the 'Upper Third' i.e. the EFA's cloistered seminary, is increased by 25% over Standard in order to test the faith of its novitiates. I wouldn't know [1]. It's enough that at either end of the concourse that runs across the base of the window here in the plaza, are two identical larger-than-life three-metre-tall animated holographic likenesses of Empress Catiz. Her movements are on a kind of seamless ten-second loop which gets disconcerting after a while, like you're suffering continuous deja-vu. It adds to the sense of timelessness in a place where there is no day/night cycle.

This trade hub is the definitive example of how sections of Amarrian society have embraced a form of religio-capitalism, i.e. 'you will make money and be prosperous if you follow the word of God'. The progressive mercantilist Empress Catiz and her alliances within the State mean this philosophy is now totally legit and will only grow. You have to remember that growth and progression are not normally core Amarrian traits. But this is the Empyrean Age, where traditional cultural definitions are more blurred with every passing day. I sometimes wonder whether there is such a thing as an Amarrian, a Gallente etc. anymore. Especially when I come to this place. The common Amarrian architectural signature of the prolific use of gold plate takes on a different significance to me these days, like it's no longer suggestive of power, opulence and wealth; instead it's more like sunset - an ending, a progression towards something else: change.

What comes after a sunset?

Darkness.
 
It always amazes me how the docking bay in here is a masterpiece of four-dimensional orchestration. So many ships that never come into conflict with each other until they get outside. Then it’s a free-for-all. And then it continues to amaze me how nobody does anything about it.

So I sat here in the plaza, watching ships in the docking bay, listening in on other people’s convos. There was something interesting going on behind me:

"You know what the Jovian Disease really was don’t you? It wasn’t any kind of genetic depression like they tell you." 

"What was it then Mr. Big Know-All?"

"OK you know how Jovians were into considering emotion like a form of personal pollution? Well nobody realised you need emotion in order to make a decision, yeah? Like they were all blind to this one crucial fact. Every decision you make is founded on emotional response, yeah? You either like a course of action or you don’t. You have to favour one course of action over another in order to decide on it. Wanna eat that Fried Long Limb over there? Do you like the Fried Long Limb? If you have no emotion, you can’t decide. You become paralysed by indecision. You become unable to function. You die of passivity. I’m telling you, that’s what it was."

"What are you, the Empire's most knowledgable janitor?"

"What can I say man? What do you want me to tell you?"

* * *

My market status and ‘wallet’ on my datapad is currently exhibiting a solid block of green, which is nice. The reason I’m here at all is because I brought 139 million ISK-worth of artifacts and salvage out of [classified] here to the trade hub, to sell on to those who would recycle it all into the means to go and create more of it.

Cargo manifest (Legion-class): [classified] - Amarr 4/21/119

This infinite cycle never stops. More purist interpretations of Signal Cartel’s neutral pacifist credo would infer that selling salvage to shipbuilders is facilitation of aggression further down the line. Our management does not hold with this belief, and nor do I, although I can see what they’re getting at. Regardless, thanks to the fragments of 'Enhanced Ward Console' and what amount to Sleeper AI brains that I salvaged, I'm minted again.

Ker-ching!

I opened a channel on my datapad.

'Where is it now?'
'Molden Heath.'
'Damn it. Tomorrow.'
'K.'

* * *

The chairs in this place by the big docking bay window are like big bags on the floor that you lounge in. You sit in one, and it actively moulds itself to your shape so well, and pushes back against your weight with such subtlety that you feel like you’re sat on air.

There are holoprojectors in the floor that manifest square panels at eye-level (because this is a trade hub and eye-level is buy-level) that are a metre on each side and display any number of feeds on them. There is one projector in front of each chair, so you can imagine the blizzard of moving images. As a capsuleer I could plug in and control the projector through my head if I desired (connectors provided for my convenience - who cleans them?), but I elect to be more discreet as is the Ni-Kunni way. I've been in this clone now for long enough that it has a baseliner's normal skin tone instead of the cherubic purity of fresh meat, so I pass for a mainstream Ni-Kunni easily now. Nobody bothers me unless I want to be bothered. Children don't point at me.

Then, totally unsolicited, this guy came out of nowhere and sat in the chair next to me who kind of looked Amarrian (the nose, the jawline) but like he'd spent too long in the Outer Ring playing with rocks so his essential Amarrianity, that racial trait they describe in encyclopedias, seemed dormant. Whatever he did out there, he must have been well-fed, because he had a kind of hemispherical drum-tight fatbelly that made him look 15-months pregnant through his tunic. I don't think he had a neck either. He was like a caricature of ex-Chamberlain Karsoth [deceased], who was enough of a caricature as it was.

Then he turned and looked at me through Starsi-fogged eyes as if he'd only just noticed I was even sitting there, and he opens with 'Hey listen to this, this is a good one. An Amarrian, a Gallente, a Caldari and a Minmatar go into a bar,' he said. 'Bartender says "what are you drinking?" Amarr says "Holy water!". Gallente says "Everything on the menu!". Caldari says "Anything made by my paternalistic corporate benefactor."' Then he leaned towards me and said 'Minmatar looks at the Amarr and says "Am I thirsty master?" Geddit? Minmatar slavery, yeah?' 

My impassivity made him turn and look into the middle distance (or into the past). He sighed and said 'Things were much simpler back then. Everybody knew where they stood. Especially with them...'

The light changed as a Megathron drew alongside in the docking bay beyond the glass. It blocked the view.

'You can't say things like that in public anymore man,' I said. 'Not in the new era. You can think it, but you can't say it'.

He turned back to me and squinted. He said 'What are you anyway, one o' them eggers?'

'Me? No, not at all. Just minding my own business.'

He took the hint and got up and went looking for someone else to tell bad jokes to. I knew he'd never leave this place. It was beginning to feel like I never would either.

* * *

The next day...

'Where is it now?'
'Black Rise.'
'What the hell is it doing there??'
'How should I know? While you're still in Amarr, could you get me some Caldari Navy Mjolnirs?'
'Heavy or Light?'
'Heavy, of course.'

In the morning I went shopping for new outfits (what do you think capsuleers wear on the outside? Just the one thing? I certainly bloody don't). I ate a very expensive lunch, then spent the afternoon in one of the station's State-imported fully-immersive holotheatre suites where the scenario was that I was a secret SoCT agent attempting to infiltrate the Angel Cartel in order to find out what happened to the remains of the Second Jovian Empire in Curse. I considered it part of my ongoing personal research project.

The game involved nested multiple realities and I played it on 'hard' mode because I'm a capsuleer and I'm used to virtual reality as my day job, but I died just before I reached the final boss. At least I'm in the top-100 high-scorers. I obviously have far too much time on my hands.

* * *

The next day...

Now, this morning, I'm back at the docking bay viewing plaza (where the footfall is reduced at this hour) and using one of the seemingly hundreds of square holoprojector devices to catch up on some back issues of In Your Face, freely available here despite being a Gallente gossip rag catering towards the trashy celeb end of the market, which is right down my street. Apparently, Synchellian holovid star Myriestene Mahatta is divorcing again, citing her twelfth husband's unwillingness to engage in threesomes as 'irreconcilable differences'. Typical oversharing/overexaggerating Gallente. I don't know how these people get anything done.

I people-watch for a while. Everybody looks purposeful and fierce, chasing ISK. People with nothing to do, like me, seem rare. Who has nothing to do in a trade hub? Who comes to a trade hub to do nothing?

But it's not like I can go outside and take the air.

When you live in a station you get used to limited sightlines, no sky, no horizon, no weather and artificial light. Some people live their entire lives in stations, like the bad joke teller I saw two days ago, who is the embodiment of how people get trapped in these places, their lives in a permanent limbo, where either they can't buy passage out of here for whatever reason or they just get too used to the range of freebies on offer so it becomes a lifestyle choice. They live, they die, they get scooped up and biomassed as waste, and end up as incinerator exhaust or fusion catalyst. Maybe it's too much choice - option paralysis - like that bizarre Jovian Disease theory I overheard yesterday.

I could book a passage to the Throne World itself and pay homage to Empress Catiz, but I drag my feet. 'Saying hello to Catiz', by the way, seems to be the dissenter's euphemism of choice for checking your bank balance. I didn't start it. Don't blame me. For the record I do have enormous respect for Catiz and I do approve of the new era despite reservations I may have expressed earlier in this journal. After all I've named my favourite and most expensive ship after her.

Anyway I'd rather do culture. I got a notification on my datapad this morning about a live broadcast from within the Fed. The noted Intaki tenor Antomien en Divalone was in residence on Intaki V performing a new, purist interpretation of the operatic cycle The Burden of the Intaki, which in this version is the full 78 hours without a break. I'd heard of it. I'd also heard that some sections of the Fed media dismiss it as pompous propagandist dreck, because one of its essential requirements is that it be performed outside as its narrative is synchronised to Intaki V's diurnal cycle.

It had already started yesterday, so I'd missed the good bit. I could have stayed here in the plaza and watched it on the square holofeed thing, but the background noise in here would have killed the tension in the guillotine scene. I could have rented a Captain's Quarters and watched it there, or watched it from the lounge on Empress of Amarr (where I'd been basing myself the whole time I'd been here. I could see her over on the far side of the docking bay), but I needed to be able to move as soon as I got positive word on the whereabouts of the hole back to the dreamworld. So I passed. If I'd watched it, I'd have been compelled to finish it, because I'm a completist.

I opened a channel on my datapad instead.

'Tell me what I want to know.'
'Genesis. Sigga. Fourteen from you and only seven from Zoohen.'
'Thank God for that. I'm coming in.'

I sent a message to Aura: I'm on my way. Prep the capsule and submit a flight plan to the dockmaster. Request priority. Pay him whatever he wants. Destination: Sigga, Ekrin constellation, Genesis. We're going home.

 [1] I never told anybody this before, but when I was at Hedion University in Conoban, there was an exchange student from the EFA who came to us for six months. He was hardcore. He was built like the front end of an Abaddon and was curiously of below-average height. He wore the same elaborate robes every day, he never spoke unless he was spoken to, and as much as we tried to turn him to the dark side by testing his faith with excessive leisure, he wouldn't budge. We even tried kidnapping him for one of our monthly shuttles to the Mora Mosh Pit Club in the Ishukone place in the Mora system one jump over from Conoban. We planned this operation for a week, but when we tried to carry it out, the one of us who got near him ended up with a fractured skull as the exchanger deployed some kind of extreme martial art and shouted in an obscure archaic dialect while he used it. He scared the crap out of the rest of us and we ran away. The excessive and unfeasible strength he used during this incident is where the rumour about the gravity sort-of made sense. I mean if you're used to 25% higher than Standard, then it would be a formality to deliver an ass-kicking in Standard. The hard-as-nails, pious exchanger left shortly afterwards. We never saw him again and I never did get to the bottom of the gravity thing. The rumours persist. If somebody ever mentions it (which is not often), I just say 'I wouldn't know'...

The Frontier Dreamstate of Anoikis

Prologue: The Limits of Knowledge

In my last entry, I described going to the edge of known space and learning what it felt like to be at the edge of the galactic abyss.

Thing is, it felt real enough, but I knew I'd been much further than that on a number of occasions beforehand.

I've felt increasingly done with known space, on the premise of 'been there, done that'. Cluster politics has heated up again of late with the plague outbreak and another possible Gallente/Caldari escalation and I just think yeah, whatever. Very little of it impinges on my bottom line now, which I find is a common progression among capsuleers who have a cosmic perspective. I periodically go planetside to refresh my palate, which always works very well, but it remains that after two years as a capsuleer, I've found out what I like to do and for the most part I stick to it. The ISK still flows, I could retire now and buy my own world if I wanted to, but there would still be those unanswered questions that ISK cannot buy the answers to.

Then, last month, Merkato Cesaille, boss of Signal Cartel's elite group of wormhole explorers and 'Ambassadors to the Sleepers' called the Anoikis Division, announced a new recruitment initiative as new facilities were coming online that would permit an expansion in the Division's limited numbers. I saw this as an opportunity not to be missed, because recruitment into the Anoikis Division doesn't happen very often and because I've become attuned to karmic synchronicity more than ever.

Anyway, I'd actually set the precedent for this new curiosity quite recently on one of those planetside excursions. Bear with me on this. A scene needs setting and it will all make sense eventually.

Desert Is A State Of Mind

The last time I visited my ancestral homeworld of Mishi IV, I went on a road trip with my friend Alisu in her husband's vintage, demilitarized Amarrian hovertank - a relic of when the Empire actually noticed Mishi IV instead of abandoning it as a passive fief of House Kador who are two regions away from here.

Alisu's husband, the noted Ni-Kunni sculptor, portraitist and surrealist Arshadru Serrasus-Abana-Cataalio, acquired the tank years ago and had the interior converted, optimising it for leisure rather than blowing things up, so it became a kind of camper van. You wouldn't know it from the outside though, because the tank retains its active camo. He'd taught Alisu to drive it, which was both generous and risky. Being a famous artist, he affected the attitude that every day of his life was a performance art installation. I don't know how he gets away with it.

* * *

Alisu and I headed out in the tank from her residence in the capital, along some highways through Mishi IV's more verdant and populated regions, then headed north across the southern continent's tundra, then through a minor mountain range and eventually to an ancient trade route across the Greater Western Dune Sea, which led to a small, incredibly remote settlement in the deep desert called Al-Dadashiri, a full 2,900 kms from the capital. The town was on the junction of several of the old trade routes that the caravans of pre-Amarrian occupation would use, so the town became established long ago as a place of trade in whatever goods it took to stay alive out there.

Today, in the modern era of high technology when almost everybody travelled long distances by aircraft and skimmer, the town of Al-Dadashiri survived as a kind of symbolic focal point for all manner of sages, seers, ecstatics, shamans, artists, depressives and paranoiacs who all saw the desert as a place of escape; the unremitting harshness of the environment turning this indigenous population towards a different kind of mysticism from the prevailing Amarrian orthodoxy. Our reason for coming all the way out here was somewhat more grounded in reality: according to Alisu, there was a cafe in Al-Dadashiri which produced the best chai on the entire planet (and by extension the entire cluster). The problem, she said, was the owner only brewed it on one night every year, and attendance at this brewing session was by invitation only. Alisu assured me the invitation was taken care of. We just had to get there. Travelling overland in the hovertank instead of flying there, she said, would delay gratification and only enhance the pleasure of the end result.

I saw the logic in that, and it gave me an opportunity to explore more of my ancestral homeworld anyway, so I went along with it. I felt her other unspoken reasoning was to give us more time together. I wasn't going to object to that either.

* * *

It took Alisu and I six days to get to Al-Dadashiri in the tank, four of them while crossing the desert, which was a huge contrast to my normal working day where I speed round the galaxy at multiples of c. There is a lot to be said for slowing down and taking in what's going on around you.

By day, we would make a steady traverse across mostly-unmarked piste, with the music and the air-con on maximum and grateful for the tank's retrofitted precision navigation kit, which eliminated the uncertainty of where the hell we were. We didn't see a single other person during the traverse except for one time when we caught sight of a long caravan about 15 kms away. As a precaution, Alisu energized the tank's active camo, which was a form of crude cloaking device, rendering us invisible to anyone that far away.

Some people have long memories, and this tank is a symbol of something they spend their entire lives out here trying to forget, she'd said.

We'd park the tank in the lee of sand dunes at night, grounding it on short, stubby struts that would extend out of its base when the repulsorlift engine was inactive. We'd then cook sizzling steaks on the hot metal exhaust of the tank's fusion reactor's heat exchanger, which was something I doubt the tank's designers ever envisioned it being used for.

We never worried about the time as we embraced the methods of the ancients by using the sky as our clock and our calendar. It was such a novelty to view the stars without the luminosity-enhancing algorithms of cam drones. You can't beat the unaugmented reality of it: the density of the cluster, the pulsing EVE Gate, faint at this distance but still unmistakable; the Cauldron Nebula, dim and diffuse as nebulae really are, but covering a quarter of the sky and visible for half the night until the planet rotated away from it - not the tranquil blue pool that you see from Kor-Azor: from the Aridia side it looks angry like a kind of hairy tumour.

Occasional bolides would leave their silent marks on the sky; then maybe once or twice per night we'd see the same apparition but slower, sort-of in reverse: a ship decelerating out of warp and into orbit. There are few satellites orbiting Mishi IV, the brightest and most obvious being the automated Customs Office warehouse (I destroyed one of those in Khanid once - a lifetime ago) that we would observe each night either side of sunset and sunrise. The planet's tiny moon would appear a few hours before dawn, a static point of light, bright, but easy to miss among the myriad constellations of the cluster.

When the desert night got too cold we'd retire to the tank. Alisu would energize the active camo (just in case), so if there actually was anybody in the vicinity, they'd hear us but not see us, which was weird...

Then on the morning of the fifth day I got temporarily scared out of my wits when I was awakened by the inbound weekly InterBus trans-atmospheric shuttle, laying down double sonic booms across the desert as it effected a re-entry high above us on its way to the capital. I'd ridden that same shuttle the previous week. Now it just seemed alien, intrusive and in fact incredibly rude. I mean how dare it interrupt the sanctity of this pristine environment?

* * *

Our reverie, our dreamstate, ended when the settlement of Al-Dadashiri emerged from the shimmering desert heat near the end of the sixth day, by which time I'd become fully immersed and had largely forgotten about what was going on in the rest of the cluster. Actually, not so much forgotten, but no longer cared.

We parked the tank on a small, unmanned airstrip just outside the town, alongside two other vehicles: one land-based, the other a skimmer which carried a registration mark indicating it had also come from the capital, like us. I suspected both vehicles belonged to people I would meet later tonight in this mythical cafe. I wondered who had had the better deal: the skimmer driver who would have got here in just a few hours, or us, who had taken our time and immersed ourselves in the journey.

Alisu and I put on our hooded robes for the two kilometre walk into town. The sun was setting quickly as it does this close to Mishi IV's equator, so the desert air would rapidly chill again.

From a distance, the town looked like it did not want to be found, with no building being more than two storeys high. For the most part, the town's appearance was as if we'd regressed in time a thousand years as we'd crossed the desert, but a couple of the buildings - simple blocks with no pandering to style - had some concessions to technology stuck to their flat roofs in the form of 10-metre parabolic antennae, all pointing in the same direction, up, towards what I already knew to be the CONCORD station orbiting Mishi VII, which will have risen from the eastern horizon a couple of hours previously. They would be receiving either entertainment broadcasts or standardized footage of government hearings. Quite likely the former. This place was not so hardcore and devout after all.

As we got closer to the town, I broke the comfortable silence we were maintaining as we walked.

'Is this place safe after dark?' I said.

'Of course not', Alisu said.

'So why did we park the tank back there?' I said.

'It's no use bringing it into the town. We'd block half the street. Besides, if you're worried about danger, then don't. You're not in space anymore.'

'Er, I'm in the middle of the goddamn desert, out of contact with, like, everyone. The only difference is I can breath the air?'

Alisu took my hand as we walked and said 'Listen, I've kicked more ass than you've sat on. Chill out. You know for a death-dealing immortal you're quite the over-thinking neurotic aren't you?'

'Don't tease me,' I said.

After about twenty minutes, as it was getting dark, a few dim yellow lights passing as street illumination flicked on as we walked down one of the town's wider streets. There was only a small number of other people outside as nightfall appeared to have driven the population indoors.

We turned off the main drag into a narrow street, then turned again into a series of alleys that progressively narrowed until we could no longer walk side-by-side. I could smell exotic spices, chai, dung, fusion waste disposal, oils, all kinds of scents I couldn't even name. It was so evocative.

By now it was almost dark. I caught glimpses through open windows: a gambling den with five different languages in play; every other house seeming to be either a bar or a cafe; the noise of a too-loud holovid; dogs barking; domestic arguments; the sound of a discharging sidearm that was probably on the holovid but I couldn't be sure.

The maze of side-streets made the town seem bigger than it was. None of the buildings had numbers or ID or anything. You either knew where you were going or you didn't. Alisu clearly did as she stopped abruptly at an open doorway. The muffled sounds of voices came from inside and above us somewhere.

'This is it,' she said. Then she turned and grabbed my arms excitedly and repeated 'this is it Cassie, this is it! The chai!' I couldn't see her eyes for the huge hood over her head, but I could tell she meant it.

We walked in through the narrow doorway and up a badly lit stone staircase, our heels loudly betraying our presence so there would be no element of surprise even though I could hear those voices now from the room at the top of the steps.

At the top, Alisu turned right, and I followed her through a heavy curtain covering the doorway, into a room that was much warmer than outside and misty with exhaled hash pipe. The smell was unbelievable.

This did not look like a cafe full of chai connoisseurs. My Ocular Filter implant told me in less than a second that there were twelve other people in here, all of them swarthy desertified men, which annoyed me. I don't think any of them knew what a razor was. They were mostly all sat at several tables of varying sizes, which all had a number of one-hitters on them. Two of the customers had cybernetic arms (one may have had a cybernetic head); at least three were open-carrying, and everyone spoke strong Ni-Kunni dialect except one who looked like an Achuran, who spoke hushed Caldanese to someone in front of him whose back was turned to me, and who must have also been Achuran otherwise how could one understand the other? A low-ranking Amarrian priest sat in one corner on his own, his unblinking gaze fixated on a portrait of Empress Jamyl on the opposite wall, his lips moving but making no sound. There was a radio on somewhere broadcasting a sermon from the Ministry of Internal Order, which was just background noise in here and mostly drowned out by conversation. The walls were a faded orange, kind of like the desert outside, and had probably not been repainted since the occupation, and there was a hissing, smoking, bubbling machine on the counter at the far wall which I took to be the mythical brewing device.

Five seconds after we entered the room, and in timeless stereotypical fashion, they all stopped what they were doing and turned to look at us. The radio clicked off.

Alisu theatrically removed the hood from her head, so I did the same, like we were a double act. A few more seconds passed, then one of the randoms got up and walked over to us.

'Ladies, can we help you with anything?' he said. He spoke with excessive politeness for the situation, so he was obviously hiding something. His breath smelled of hash pipe and vehicle exhaust. His glazed eyes suggested he was off his gourd already even though the night was young. This was going to be fun.

An invisible mist-shrouded voice from the back of the room shouted 'Hey, the strippers are here!' followed immediately by the sound of someone's nose breaking and a kind of yelp like a dog, followed by 'what the hell was that for?'

Hash Pipe did not break his stare at us two. He bowed slightly and said 'I apologise, ladies.'

Alisu surveyed the room again, then looked this guy in the eye. With the funereal seriousness of a mistress of ceremonies, she said: 'We're here for the Sacred Nectar of the Sand Crab.'

Hash Pipe said: 'Who sent you?'

Alisu was not yet done with the performance. She raised her arms like an evangelist and announced to the entire room in a loud voice: 'The Mother of the Desert herself!'

Hash Pipe looked over at me, then turned to the rest of the room, where my Filter detected a virtually imperceptible nod from some red-headed weirdo at the back of the room who was obviously Mr Chai Man, Mr Big, Mr Kingpin. Then the room relaxed all at once as Hash Pipe outstretched his arms and said: 'Welcome ladies, please take a seat'.

Somebody turned the radio back up, then changed the channel to something with a tune. I noticed a brief, half-smile of acknowledgement and a nod between Alisu and Red-Headed Weirdo, so he knew exactly who she was and knew her style - that the desert evangelist schtick was not to be taken seriously.

The rest of what became a colossal all-night bender passed in twenty-eight courses of the spiciest chai I'd ever known, accompanied by serial one-hitters, all handed out ceremonially by Minmatar slaves who would appear on cue from a side-room. In-between, it was about noisy card games, some live musical breaks from the Achurans every hour on the hour - it turned out there were four of them - and being hit on a few times ('I've kicked more ass than you've sat on' was the perfect rebuttal). The whole gig ended abruptly when the first rays of dawn broke through the window. That would be it for another year. Some of the clientele were in tears when we left.

It was an epic session. You couldn't buy experiences like it. This clone I was in had no tolerance for booze and hash, but I didn't care.

* * *

When Alisu and I returned to the capital in the tank, she let the tank's AI take us autonomously back to the capital in half the time, as it could drive itself through the desert night while we slept our hangovers off. As the fog in my head cleared, I did some thought-experimenting about turning some of my ISK into hard currency, buying out Red-Headed Weirdo and turning his place into the definitive epicentre of Ni-Kunni cafe culture. People would travel to it from all over New Eden just to experience my chai. But then would keeping it secret, like he does, be more authentic?

I also had a series of insights into how this semi-forgotten desert settlement perfectly embodied the frontier wilderness philosophy - and the desire to escape - that is one of humanity's default states. I could find a version of Al-Dadashiri on every inhabited planet in the cluster.

In places like this, the minutiae of cluster politics seems a thousand light years away.

Just like it does in Anoikis.

Cosmic Wilderness

So last month I joined Signal Cartel's Anoikis Division on a bit of a spur-of-the-moment thing, but with the higher purpose of addressing an imbalance in my experience. It shouldn't be the case that we have newly-qualified rookie capsuleers that have more knowledge of operations in the Anoikis Cluster than I do.

The Anoikis Division has three citadels in three systems in Anoikis: one in [classified], one in [classified] and another in [classified]. Not only are they [classified], but they are [classified]. If they were [classified], then they would be [classified].

This means operational secrecy is at the heart of everything we do there. Membership of the Division is limited to a handful of personnel, and operational comms are restricted. There is none of the exuberant curiosity of our Alliance channel. Codewords and cloaking devices rule. The pseudo-random nature of the entrances to the systems our citadels are located in, means access can't be controlled (actually it can up to a point, but that's a technicality), so we're at constant risk of rapacious scumbags coming in here at any time and 'evicting' us - as if the local indigenous population wasn't dangerous enough.

The system I selected as my operational base: I don't know exactly where it is. Nobody does. Nobody knows where any of them are. Attempts to map Anoikis have only resulted in vague dissatisfactory approximations. Only the Caldari scientist-capsuleer Mark726's Project Compass has identified the Anoikis Cluster at 1,300 (+/-100) light-years to the galactic south-east of New Eden. There is no way to confirm this observation visually. The thick gaseous nebulosities that dominate Anoikis render visual confirmation of its location in the galaxy impossible. There is a dim view of the galactic plane available in one direction, but that's away from the direction New Eden is believed to be located in, so it proves nothing.

The system I'm residing in has a relatively benign yellow dwarf primary. This is probably as safe as Anoikis gets as the cluster as a whole bathes in the complete catalogue of death-dealing hard radiation served up by pulsars, magnetars, black holes etc. etc.

The wormholes that facilitate travel to and from and within this cluster are the only way in or out of here. I've read many scientific papers on the analysis of these things. They've manifested between here and New Eden ever since the Seyllin Incident, so it's accepted as fact that the two events were related. The wormholes come and go, always within the same 36-hour (give-or-take) time-frame. The crucial fact is that they tend to lead to the same limited set of destinations and never anywhere else in the galaxy.

When you're aware of this fact, as everybody is by now, the question naturally arises:

What if they're not naturally occurring phenomena?

Who built the generating mechanism?

Who is controlling them now?

If the wormholes were to stop manifesting one day, then we would be trapped here, 1,300 LY from home.

On somebody else's territory.

It is well-known now that humans in the present epoch were not the first to get to Anoikis. Those circular black refrigerators are all over the place, along with their drone guards that shoot on sight. I wish they didn't. Some of us just want to talk.

The presence of Talocan relics here - weird structures, dead ships - is obvious evidence of humanity's knowledge of Anoikis in the ancient past. Why did we lose that knowledge? Is that knowledge still residing in a database that lies undiscovered on a planet somewhere in New Eden, waiting to be discovered by a data archaeologist?

That's why this place is so scary: there is a power at work here that doesn't exist in New Eden and we can barely comprehend it. It's ancient, but still far ahead of us in its power and capability. And yet some capsuleers treat this place with an unbelievably casual squatter's disregard for somebody else's house.

Not us, though.

I've only been here a couple of weeks, so I'm just scratching the surface. New doctrines are being worked up that require a heightened and sharpened Sense Of Paranoia ( Level V) and a Complete Divesting of Trust (Level V).

None of this is anything new to anyone, but this is what I've discovered:

You can learn to use those wormholes and their non-specific destination criteria in a particular way. The entrance to the system from known space moves around, so I find it easy to adopt the mindset that the entire system moves around with it. It's a compelling vibe and I prefer to live with it as it feels more exciting and adventurous.

If I'm back in known space on business and decide to linger, the system's wormhole will expire. It will then manifest in another known space system somewhere else, but the stress inherent to finding it is eliminated because our intel channel will always report exactly where it is, so I can look up the system's new 'location', and if it's nearby, I can head over there. If it isn't, if I can't be bothered to fly that far, I can just wait it out - live with the normals again, do some deals, build some stuff, go back to working on eliminating Covenant scum. When the system passes close enough I can head to the entrance, which will be in a known space system whose capsuleer occupants will be mostly oblivious to the entrance's presence, so I can slip out the back door of spacetime, right under their noses, and back to the dreamstate.

Back to our own ultra-high-tech version of Al-Dadashiri. A citadel in the wilderness.

Conversely, if I remain in Anoikis, every 36 hours or so the system will have 'moved' and I can leave it and go and visit somewhere new in known space, totally exempted from the limitations of the stargate network and its dangers of camps, gangs, 'deccers etc.

This method of conducting flight operations is actually incredibly liberating, and makes me feel as if I'm part of a secret society of capsuleers who have invented our own way of doing things and are beholden to nobody. Since the act of transiting a wormhole is instantaneous, the concept of distance travelled between Anoikis and New Eden becomes meaningless and irrelevant. It really can engender the belief that Anoikis is not really anywhere at all.

That Anoikis is a state of mind.

I can ride an elevator to the top of each of the twin spires in our Astrahus citadel in [classified]. In one of those spires is an observation loft where I can look out upon the cosmos. I've quickly adopted this as a regular routine. I can linger on the planet that the citadel orbits: an oceanic, with shallow seas barely covering huge impact craters probably formed by the ice comets that brought those seas with them.

This citadel, by the way: the clone bay doesn't work properly (at least it didn't when I tried to use it), and somebody didn't pay for the entertainment package upgrade in the holovid suite so if I want my favourite Impetus Studio feeds and FedMart shopping channel, I have to rig up a wireless feed to my datapad through the fluid router on Empress of Amarr, which is linked to my pirated setup in the Theology Council station in Zoohen, a mind-boggling distance away.

Also, the coffee machines all serve up standard Upwell freeze-dried dreck that must originate from the Caldari State where they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. I was forced to redress this totally unacceptable situation by bringing my own supplies:

Deep Space Transport 'Quantum Mechanic': cargo manifest: 2/27/119: routing: Tash-Murkon Prime - Jxxxxxx

From the observation loft up here, I can watch my trashy holo dramas while getting wasted on quality Al-Dadashiri hash (because I kept some and brought it here), after which Anoikis seems benign. Or I can watch news reports and recognise how far away their origin is. What a contrast it is between that smoke-filled cafe and the observation loft here in Anoikis, but it's exactly the same frontier, wilderness mindset that humanity takes everywhere it goes when it seeks the limits of knowledge and the edge of awareness; where the only laws are those we take with us.

The difference here is the quality of the neighbours, who in Anoikis are trans-humanized, quasi-extraterrestrials who I suspect just want to be left alone to do their sleeping.

But when the hash really takes hold, I start riffing on the most mind-boggling and crackpot theory of all: that the Anoikis Cluster is actually New Eden several billion years in our New Eden's future. Apparently some of the mappers have declared similarities in the arrangement of star systems here. It seems so, therefore it must be so.

It is of course the highest of all dreck. If Anoikis is New Eden in the future, then New Eden is Anoikis in the past. However it is a fundamental tenet of physics that you cannot travel backwards in time and you cannot communicate with the past. The fact that our fluid routers still work in Anoikis and we can communicate with New Eden in real time, proves that they are separate locations in the same epoch.

There is another reason why it's dreck: if Anoikis was the future - if we were time-travelling during transit - then how come nobody who lives here knows the lottery numbers..?

 [This journal has been cleared for dissemination after appropriate redactions in accordance with current operational guidelines. AD Policy document ref:0024788/4651/4170098]