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///

///enlargement available///

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... 

Thera Is A Harsh Mistress And So Is Paragon Soul

The Set-Up

The call came right out of the blue:

Drop everything! If there was anyone who could track down a wormhole for this job, it was me.

The financial incentive helped too.

With Hayabusa's Vmax/warp of 12.78 AU/s I made it from Dan to Nand in record time (sidebar: Danera and Nandeza are less than six light years apart, yet to travel there the 'normal' way requires a detour of 15 jumps well to the galactic south and back up again in the manner of traversing a valley between mountains. It's just the way it is).

For the record: I found a superb route to Geminate and the Eastern Drone Lands via the 1,300 light-year Anoikis Detour (J110121 - a Wolf-Rayet system - below).

In Nandeza, I also found a direct shortcut to Stain and another one to somewhere in Aridia. The decision that came back later on (along with 50 mil in the bank) was: Stain. For the record again, I'd have preferred to go east. For reasons that will become apparent, I suspect the others now wish we had too, now that we know what we now know...

The Warm-Up

I did the jump-clone shuffle, left my science head in Danera and emerged in Nandeza in my 'empty' head. The one that likes to shoot first and not even ask questions. The one that still finds bad sitcoms funny.

We set off from our station at Nandeza IX and headed for the wormhole to Stain. We found that it had disappeared. Evaporated. I swear it looked stable when I'd scanned it and reconnoitred it just five hours earlier, and nothing in the records suggested it was reaching the imminent end of its life. When I found it, it wasn't even wobbling (did you know you can tell how unstable a wormhole is by looking at its event horizon? The closer it is to collapsing, the more 'wobbly' it gets).

This is the risk with actively using these things to get around. They don't do as they're told and they can ruin your night. This would not be the only one that ruined ours...

Plan B: Thera. Thanks to the excellent work of the Signal Cartel and their 'EVE Scout' service, we merely had to look up where the nearest route to the Thera system can be found. On this particular evening, Thera and its hub of 'magic doors' was facilitating a route to Feythabolis from Ashmarir, which was not far from us.

Ashmarir: gateway to Querious, gateway to the feared Khanid Lowsec Pipe and part of the region's central 'desert' where you can travel through up to eight systems without seeing a single orbital. There are only 38 orbitals in the whole of Khanid for that matter, and only five between here and Aridia; yet we have one of the most spectacular scenic views in the whole of New Eden. I didn't notice until now just how undeveloped Khanid actually is.

Once again, we set off. Endiir brought the means to find the wormhole to Thera in his Hecate destroyer, and sure enough, we found the magic door.

Some of us made it through to Thera, including me -

- then the wormhole collapsed!!!!

 

So now, two of us (FC/boss Tryce and wormhole scanner Endiir) were still in Khanid while me, Gaybrushki, Nizzle Ma and Nitereper were trapped, 1,300 light-years away in the Thera system. Just take a minute to get your head around that: our two groups were separated by a distance that is more than ten times the north-south extent of the New Eden cluster. Without wormholes - which, let's face it, are capricious, mercurial zephyrs of the cosmos that are not meant to be used as a transport network - it would take several hundred thousand years to transit back to New Eden at sub-warp speed, even if we knew exactly which direction it was in, which we don't.

We were really in the shit now...

...unless we could procure the means to scan wormholes ourselves, or if Tryce and Endiir could locate another entrance from their side.

Cue suspenseful music...

Will they make it? Who survived and who got blown up in a ball of fire? Tune in next week to see if our intrepid heroes can find their way out of Thera and continue their small-gang roam!


Actually we did both.

Thera is in no way a trade hub and doesn't possess a functioning industry because its planets are quarantined. Nevertheless, I knew there was some token trading going on here in the Sanctuary facilities, mainly in armaments. Signal Cartel's activities indicated a strong likelihood there would also be scan probes for sale here, albeit at a substantial and predictable markup. Sure enough, there were.

Note: if you ever get trapped in here like we did, then this is your way out. Don't worry about the inevitable price-gouging. Just remember it for future reference: bring your own stuff here and sell it to trapped capsuleers like yourself. Capsuleers like us.

Fast-forward about half an hour by which time Tryce and Endiir had found another way in via Genesis...

I found the wormhole that led to Feythabolis with what was now my hybrid explorer/interceptor.

But then...

This wormhole was camped by some group looking to interdict gangs like us, probably just for fun, possibly because this was a premium shortcut to distant nullsec territory. Bubbles blew up, ships appeared, Nitereper was destroyed, and Endiir and his Hecate were destroyed. We jumped back and forth through the hole a couple of times to try and shake them off.

The Roam...

We made it through to Feythabolis, but just a handful of us were left -

- a handful of disparate stragglers, in damaged ships, stranded light-years from home, left to wander Southern Null with no hope of rescue etc. etc. Cue even more dramatic music in the background...

We did the lot: Feythabolis, Esoteria, Omist, Paragon Soul. We found nothing except occasional neutrals, Blood Raider enclaves (one of which was the domain of the Covenant officer Mizuro Cybon), Angel Cartel gate camps near non-standard stargates, other faint signs of human habitation, but nothing else -

- except a noteworthy scenic view.

There were more clusters of disruptor bubbles that may have been here for years.

I lost count of how many systems we searched for a suitable target. Every neutral we saw registered in the Local channel appeared to be docked in a station.

We even passed through the most southerly systems in all of New Eden when we got to Paragon Soul -

- home to featureless ice worlds and gas giants that display no history and answer no questions. Does anyone know how many human settlements there actually are out here other than Kuvakei's sick experiments in artificial totalitarianism? Have all of them been subsumed by Kuvakei? 

Then, in 2I-520, we found a Harbinger. It was doing that standard nullsec tactic of planet-hopping between stargates as a means of avoiding disruptor bubbles and scanning the gates in advance to see if there is any 'trade' there. In here the 'trade' was us lot.

Now here's the thing: if we hadn't been depleted in numbers, if Endiir's Hecate was still here and we had the full complement of interceptors, we could have taken the Harbinger down. But we couldn't bring enough firepower to bear. The 'Harby' just sat there and the capsuleer inside it probably laughed as he mentally sent the command to his ship's AI to release two waves of drones upon us.

Tryce's ship was destroyed; so was Nizzle's. Nitereper was killed a second time. Gaybrushki and I retreated and let the Harbinger go on its way. Then we had the indignity of 'killing' the boss and Nizzle in their capsules to facilitate the pod express.

This roam was over - put out of its misery. That Harbinger had done us the favour of administering a coup de grace.

Now I was stuck in Paragon Soul, in hostile territory and without a meaningful human settlement for light-years. I had to get out of here as it would only be a matter of time before Kuvakei's minions found me.

I chilled for a bit and considered my options for getting home.

- I could have self-destructed and taken the pod express myself. I would have woken up in Hedion University in Conoban and probably been subjected to considerable verbal hassle from clone bay boss and occasional lover Dr Taltha over this new failure. Not to mention wasting a Malediction.

- I could have just set course for Nandeza by the most direct route, but didn't feel like risking the notorious gate camps in Delve.

In the end I took advantage of a political situation - our recent (and ultimately short-lived) alliance with Darkness - and headed for the P-ZMZV system in Querious. Darkness had a major facility there that we had docking rights in. That would do for an overnight stop.

I powered up again and set off. As I progressed north through all that ocean of nullsec, each system seemed to merge into the next to form a seamless blur of sameness. Delve, Querious, Period Bloody Basis and its pulsars. All the same. Madness is the only endgame for anybody who lives out here.

I was glad when the Cauldron Nebula and the Vapor Sea finally emerged from the void. The Cauldron was home.

After what felt like years, I arrived in P-ZMZV and found the safe harbour of 'blues' I was looking for. 

I docked and decided to use the pod gantry to get unjacked in order to cleanse myself of the total failure of this roam along with the sticky capsule fluid, with artificial gravity washing both away down the drain.

I spoke to nobody while I was here. Nullsec stations don't have the cosmopolitan mix that even the most devout Amarr facilities have. Here it's all cliques and hushed tones. Suspicion is the default state, especially when one's hosts are at war.

The only reason I could dock here at all was because the previous week our alliance had agreed some diplomatic thing with Darkness involving us establishing a presence in Querious. We started getting all manner of comms and mails telling us - ordering us - to go here and there and everywhere, telling us what we could and could not do, and achieving nothing other than total confusion. It was obvious even to my inexperienced eyes within just a few days of the agreement that there was no coherent plan behind any of it and that it could not last. I resolved to get planetside as soon as I could and just wait it out; to see how the dust settled.

By the time you read this, our temporary alliance with Darkness that allowed me to dock here will have reached the end of its short noisy fuse and exploded, taking Mortum Ravagers with it as collateral damage. Some of the ex-Mortum lot are still in Querious now. What they are doing there is - who cares? We in [PHP1] on the other hand, have aligned ourselves with Darwinism - our third alliance in a year - and now have what amounts to the Freedom of Aridia. My beloved Aridia: home of my ancestral homeworld.

From the standard issue couch I sat on in the standard Gallente-template Captain's Quarters here in P-ZMZV, all that confusion and low signal-to-noise ratio still lay in the future. From this couch, over a few beers, I considered the essential truths that not every roam can be a success; that I was lucky to escape with my ship intact on this one thanks to learning when to make a tactical withdrawal; and that most alliance politics is garbage.

Postscript: I left P-ZMZV the next day and routed back to Khanid via the Sib constellation. I found the regional border gate in Efa being camped by the first of a new wave of Drifter Incursions.

So that lot are back now too...