Keepstar on the Edge of Infinity

 

The desire to seek remoteness is not about adventure, it's about escape - from other people, from yourself. It's a calling. An obligation, to save your soul.

from Essays on New Eden's Sociological Evolution, 3rd Edition

I've been performing a series of experiments with Needlejack Filaments: those devices that came about as a by-product of the Triglavian Invasion.

I'm loath to get into this sort of thing, as it is experimental technology that is still not completely understood, which is why nobody has yet to get past the pseudo-random nature of the result of using one. Something this small, that doesn't need the power of a stargate, that burrows so deep into hyperspace that you end up 50 or more light-years away from where you activated it, but you won't know where, is to be handled very carefully. Yet these things are available on the open market, to be treated like an amusement. A laugh.

Sometimes I wish I didn't have an imagination. These things are dangerous. You could end up in another dimension. You might not ever come back. I mean, do you know of anyone that this has happened to? Of course not, because they don't come back to report on the experience. How many capsuleers do you know that have just disappeared..?

I ran this series of tests using a basic Probe-class frigate, rigged and fitted to a very basic exploration capability but with a couple of missile launchers for a token feeling of safety.

I bought ten of the 'Noise' filaments, had them set up to interface with the ship's systems and warp drive, and departed from my home system of Kor-Azor Prime. The first filament took me back to Syndicate. There was one other capsuleer in the system, ice-mining in an Endurance. I thought about hitting it for a few minutes but then thought better of it as it would be waste of ammo. No way am I going to catch an Endurance, not in a Probe.

The second 'Noise' took me to the Catch region. I'm not really familiar with it. I've never had much cause to go there. I wasn't interested.

The third one flung me way out to the extremely remote outer limits of the cluster - Cobalt Edge!

I've been here once before, six years ago. To this same system, HB-5L3. This is the end of the line - the last system on the network in the north-east. The one with the stargate that reaches out all the way through the centre of Jove space (or what's left of it) to the Tenal region in the even more remote, empty, godforsaken far north. 

But I understand why people want to go there...

The last time I passed through HB-5L3 six years ago there was nothing here, no human presence to speak of except the maintenance crews in the stargates. One of the system's four terrestrial worlds had a few automated weather stations broadcasting faint signals in the radio bands from its surface, but that was it.

But now, to my great surprise, and despite me going on about remoteness and emptiness, there's a damned Keepstar here:  

Pandemic Horde has two industrial facilities, a couple of Ansiblexes, a Pharolux Cyno Generator, and this thing, the whole complex probably housing a population equal to a small planetary colony, out here on the edge of the cluster. 

What in God's name are they doing out here?

It's possible that by advertising this facility's existence in the public domain like this has violated some sort of Horde opsec, but I doubt they'll care. The sheer remoteness of the system is its best defence. If they're building supercaps out here then there is no better location.

Of course the machinery of the faceless bureaucracy even reaches this far, which means the 'sov' out here is actually owned by the enigmatic Pan-Intergalactic Business Community, but these are Horde structures. Some kind of renter arrangement, presumably.

I couldn't hang around too much because a) this Probe is so cheaply-fitted it does not have a cloaking device, b) the ops crew of that Keepstar will have noted my presence here and told somebody, who would have undoubtedly been on their way here right now, and c) the Rogue Drones eventually showed up with those horrible mutations of ex-capsuleer ships with their probably-forcibly-cyborgised crew facing a deathlife worse than that of a Sansha zombie. 

See what I mean about having too much of an imagination..?

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.

Covenant Network Disruption

 

Syndicate, 10/124

It seems the Sani Sabik abominations have started their annual 'Crimson Harvest' again. These vile heresies are like insects. I must have killed literally millions of them in their spacecraft but they keep on coming. It is among the highest of religious duties to purge them.

And yet they persist.

This time the Order of St.Tetrimon has stepped up and declared its intention to fight the Covenant during this 'event'. All of us in Khimi Harar are committed to assisting the Order wherever we can.

For me this takes the form of locating the Covenant's comms and data network nodes here in Syndicate and hacking into them and shutting them down. The fact that these installations exist out here in Syndicate at all is remarkable enough, but they are here so they must be eliminated.

These Covenant nodes are well disguised, hidden deep within fields of rubble surrounding fractured planetesimals, and it takes considerable scanning power to pinpoint their location.

It's a primordial setting, dangerous enough with drifting rocks bouncing off my shields and the possibility of the node blowing up in my face if I mess up the hack, but then with the added risk of opportunistic capsuleers trying to stop me from doing this important work and 'ganking' me and looting my ship, which would be a magnet for them since they would see 'Pacifier' on their directional scanners and know it's worth three-quarters of a billion ISK.

Of course, the flip side of this is the other work I'm doing to defend the Order's own network nodes from those same opportunists who would disrupt the Order's work for personal profit, and from the absolute scumbags who are actually siding with the Covenant. This of course means me ganking them.

One of the scumbags I caught attempting to hack a Tetrimon node didn't take it very well when I destroyed their ship -

- because this happened:

This capsuleer I killed (the other name is some random who was passing through the system), turned out to be one of that group who insists on communicating in a non-Standard language, so I had to use translation algorithms on her rage:

She called me a bitch. I mean, how rude!

But the translation algorithms are a bit off as it otherwise doesn't make a lot of sense, except that it's obviously insulting. Salty, even. I don't think I ever got salt before. The thing is, I've always found it funny how so many capsuleers can dish it out but can't take it. If the tables were turned, this capsuleer would not have hesitated to take down my Pacifier, and would unquestionably have gloated about it because, as I said above, my Pacifier is worth three-quarters of a billion ISK. Her Probe was worth a tenner, tops. She had a few choice modules and loot that survived the destruction, which was useful, but the real imperative here was the prevention of the interruption of the Order of St. Tetrimon's work against the Covenant. This is God's work.

Anyway, I didn't actually kill this capsuleer at all, just her ship. She warped away in her capsule and delivered the polemic I've just described. You could even argue there's no point in killing them, because a TEBS cycle and a new ship and they'll be back. That 'cycle' will repeat, forever.

As long as capsuleers exist, the names may change, but the game will always stay the same.

That is a terrifying concept...

Drugs, Guns, Booze

The Vicinity of the Fourth Moon of Jita IV, earlier this year

'This place is unbelievable. You know ever since they built the extension, that's no space station anymore, it's another moon. I don't know why they don't just call it that. Tow it into orbit around the planet and leave it there. But yeah then they built the elevator, so at least there's that.'

'You can get anything you want in this place. Anything. Think of anything you might want no matter how straight-up or deviant you are, and somebody else will be doing it here. Or selling it for that matter. Commerce is the only religion here. Vices, virtues; sins, morals;  redemption, ruin; it's got the lot. Fortunes are won and lost, sometimes all in the same day. To most Caldari this place is a cathedral. Where else can a dress cost more than a battleship? How messed up is that?'

'Nobody knows where this place is controlled from. How can you control anything so big from one place? Easier to think of it as a microcosm of New Eden itself. You know, different regions. But then it's also the purest expression of the free market that has ever existed, and ever will exist. Nothing but the market. No borders, no regions. Everything comes from the market and everything gives to the market. The market giveth and the market taketh away.' 

'You know there was the Amarrian who lived here and went mad and started rounding up Matari - he'd advertise some sort of tribal reunion or something and they'd show up - and then he'd lock them in a cargo container. The inside of the container would be full of lights and cameras and audio. He'd hack into a live broadcast feed, he'd take the container out in his ship and cast it into the atmosphere of the gas giant and recite Amarrian scripture to them as they got incinerated, and this is what he'd broadcast live. I mean what a sicko. He kept going on about "cleansing infidels with holy fire". He did this twice a day for about five days before he disappeared. I mean somebody must have got to him, right?'

'This place kinda polices itself. There's a security staff of some kind, and there are thousands of them, but they only investigate high level stuff that interests them. Think about it, the place is so big you can't police it. Keep a low profile here and you can get away with anything. Murder is rife. Rife I tell ya. Don't get me started on what goes on right outside the front door with all them eggers. They're out of control I tell ya. But then without them this place would still be a manufacturing plant for the Navy.'

'I took a job on a loading dock for a few days while I was on layover between assignments. I was bored, really, you know, 'cos even in a place like this you can still get bored. But I got scared to death so I quit. I saw a dude get chopped in half by falling armor plates and they just left his dead body lying there, I think they put cones round it. It was like an hour before some robot cleaned him up. I saw a dude get dissolved in front of me when some nuke shells he was handling leaked on him. It ate through the damned floor and landed on some other dude's head on the deck beneath and there was just his legs left. And then I saw some really shady stuff like containers full of active stasis pods where the manifest said biomass for clone regeneration, so that was literally like people who thought they were colonists or passengers or something but they were going to end up having their bodies used for parts or their minds replaced with something else. It was going to somewhere in Delve. I mean, Delve! You know who operates there don't you? And nobody said a damned thing!'

'The volume of trade in this station at any given time exceeds all the other trade hubs in New Eden combined by a hundredfold or more. The Grand Concourse is so big you can live your whole life there and never see all of it. It's so big it has weather. Actual clouds. It rains. I'm serious. Get me another drink will ya?'

'I heard somebody does actually live in a penthouse apartment right at the top of that tower. But nobody knows who. Maybe it's like some sort of God. But then I heard there's a room up there that has a portal to UUA-F4 in it. You never know. This is Jita, it could be anything. I mean a large part of the whole station is given over to engineering and maintenance and manufacturing the equipment needed just to run it, just to keep it going. But even then the place is still massive. There are huge spaces that have a biosphere or terrarium or whatever the word is. There are communities that live in them that probably don't realise they're in a space station.' 

'I think it's a mining station down there. DCM runs the elevator. I think it could be a theme park. Not many people come back. One-way tickets are very popular I hear. Don't know why. It's an airless moon. Some people just love a hard time. Maybe it's full of monks. But this is not Domain. Maybe it's the Feds. There's a lake you can swim in. It's under a bubble. In low gravity. Imagine that!'

'You know how they say you can get away with anything? There was this woman who ran an organ-harvesting operation, something to do with biomass for clones or whatever. I never saw this place myself but there was an advert on holo that ran for a couple of weeks. "Experience life as a capsuleer" it said. Plug you into it somehow and you'd do some sort of video game capsuleer holo-immersion thing in your head but it was really a euthanasia machine. People would pay this woman a bunch of money and they'd think they were experiencing capsuleer death, you know, she'd kill them and they'd be excited about it. I mean a capsuleer simulator? Didn't the name tell them anything? That lot regenerate afterwards. Some people are just idiots. But then the worst of it is I heard the the other thing she'd do is sell some of the meat to restaurants without them knowing what it really was and she made a ton of money and left for Molden Heath. She was never caught. I heard it was human ears in fried batter, you know, people loved it!'

'The holo billboards on the outside are bigger than battleships. You know in different radio frequencies they're brighter than the sun. The power generation for that, you could run a planet. This place couldn't exist without ISK. It is ISK. But ISK doesn't exist because it's not a physical currency. There's your paradox. This place is so big, if you blew it up you'd get a nebula. A nebula of money.'

'I'll tell you what it is. It's like a damned ant farm. With spaceships.'

Excerpts from 'Rough Guide to the Trade Hubs of New Eden, Vol 1: Caldari Navy Assembly Plant, Jita IV-4  - Chapter 10: Culture and Lifestyle - What to Expect When You Visit'

Eight Years On - Titanomachy Revisited

'Most wars start for fairly prosaic reasons.'

New Eden's History of Violence Vol III - Hedion University Archives

It is eight years since one of the biggest, most notorious, most destructive capital ship battles in New Eden history took place.

The Battle of B-R5RB.

A week ago I visited the site for the first time. This is my account.

* * *

Prologue - Tanoo II

When I made the decision to go to B-R5RB I was spending a few days in the Tebu Amkhiman, our Fortizar that symbolically orbits Tanoo II. To be specific, when I made the actual decision I was sat a table smoking a shisha on the terrace of a cafe that is on the main street of an exact replica of a Mishian souk that Directrix Lunarisse has installed here. 

The accuracy of the place is remarkable. Some of it should be impossible because we're inside a space station: sand and dust on the deck; the not-quite-uncomfortably-hot temperature; a light breeze wafting down the street carrying the scents of food and drink and tobacco and other stuff that you might not want to smell; the sounds of people and commerce - a background noise of chatter and barter and debate and argument; and enough overhang in the buildings' facades that you can't quite see that there is no sky if you happen to look up.

There was a holovid on the wall of the cafe playing a music channel. It was my soundtrack as I was randomly paging through my datapad at news articles and I found one that listed the largest space battles in New Eden history in terms of total cost in ISK, and I saw a reference to B-R5RB - the one everyone remembers, the original biggest-ever, the one that made headlines all over the cluster.

I drew a big inhale on the shisha and cast my mind back to when it happened in YC116. I was in my final year at Hedion University and still in the original baseline body my mother gave birth to. My class devoured the holovids and telemetry feeds and cam drone footage from the battle, and we took classes on the tactics involved, and had it drummed into our heads about the importance of paying your bills on time... 

In my time as a capsuleer I'd never got round to visiting the site that memorialises the battle, known as 'Titanomachy'. For some reason I'd forgotten where it was and always believed that B-R5RB was 'up north' and basically inaccessible as it was too deep and too risky to get to.

Then I looked it up on the stargate map on my datapad and realised I'd been an idiot all this time as it was in Immensea, just a few light years away from Tanoo, and that I had every reason to go there now as I owned one of the most powerful covert ops ships in existence - my Pacifier, TES Divinity's Edge.

God willed it.

I literally dropped everything and ran to the Edge's docking bay (I paid my bill at the cafe first. If you don't understand that reference, you will...).

Tanoo is in Derelik. To get to Immensea from Derelik, I needed to pass through the Curse region, so I got to the big Derelik/Curse border gate in the Sendaya system and held station for a while and went through some systems diagnostics, then went through them again, then a third time, just to be sure...

But then again, a ship that may or may not have classified Jove tech in it should feel at home in the ex-Jove space that's named after the disease that made them all leave there, so I dived in.

But nobody was going to catch me today, not at 13.2 AU/s and enough acceleration to achieve that speed in the blink of an eye. With full cloaking/EMCON protocols and nullifiers and these engines and all the other secret CONCORD Aerospace stuff, I was invisible.

This much power can make you complacent, even out here. 

But then I hardly had time to worry about it as soon enough I arrived at the border gate to Immensea and I could see its distinctive blue/white emission nebula in the distance.

 The B-R5RB System in Immensea - 01/16/YC124 - 21:09 hrs

I will refer you to the usual media outlets and search algorithms for more detail on exactly what went down during the twelve-hour battle that happened here (you could start with this one).

In summary, in what you might consider a typical capsuleer mistake, the whole thing started because of a bureaucratic omission. Not an argument, or a loss-of-face, not even a grudge. It happened because of an unpaid sov bill! 

That fact kept replaying in my head - the sheer unbelievability of it - as I got closer to my destination. I jumped into the dead-end, single-gate system and was pleased to see I was the only ship there. I warped to the battle site's marker beacon and just held station for a while, taking it all in through the cam drones.

I've seen Titan wrecks before. I saw 'Steve' once. Most Amarrians have seen the wreck of St. Jamyl's ship in Safizon (peace be upon her) as the wreck is a holy site and indeed a pilgrimage. I haven't seen this many Titan wrecks in the same place.

It's incredible.

Spellbinding.

The sight of any Titan at any time is intimidating, which is the point of them. But even a dead one has the same effect. More than ten of them in the same place is another thing entirely.

These massive ships all shattered, snapped in two, pulled apart.

The wrecks are so big that I speculated that there would still be pressurised compartments in there, holding irradiated corpses with frozen memories of eight years ago. I refrained from finding out because to scan them and establish for sure would be to desecrate the wrecks. In another time or place they might have been classed as war graves and just being here would be illegal, but this is nullsec. 

After the battle, the authorities and the capsuleer community of the time moved quickly to declare the site a monument, as its significance as the largest battle in New Eden's history up to that point - by far - was immediately obvious.

A token boilerplate dome was installed here which has the whiff of ersatz Amarr about it. Kind of kitschy, not really appropriate - because the wrecks themselves are the monument here.

It's not just Titans. There are Dreads, carriers, diminished in scale to bit-part players - afterthoughts.

This battle stands apart from those that eventually surpassed it years later - those other two during the Delve thing - because this one had an element of spontaneity about it. It's always seemed to me like FWS-whatever and the other one had a degree of competition about them, like an intent to set a record for destruction. 

The vulgarity of that.

This one in B-R5RB just happened organically, if you will, and the wrecks are a more morbidly authentic memorial because of it.

But that doesn't mean I admire it. This place inspires awe, sadness and contempt all at the same time; and there are other memorials to it, like the historical record of the price of Tritanium.

I'd like to say this battle is more readily remembered, but then eight years is a long time and I wonder how many new, optimistic, and, let's face it, naive young capsuleers coming out of the AIR cookie-cutter basic training thing today are aware of the existence of this place. What happens in the media feeds on the actual anniversary of this battle will tell you everything you need to know.

With these thoughts riffing through my neuro-linked and enhanced mind, I found I was becoming angry. I shook myself out of it - as much as is possible when your body is jacked into a capsule - and I concentrated on moving Edge around the site, carefully, as small chunks of wreckage occasionally pinged off my shields, and I stopped near one of the big Avatars. Some of their cores still burn. In other wavelengths of light they shine brighter than the system's red giant primary.

I discovered it's actually possible to establish a datalink with the dome. It has a brief explanation of what this place is, and it lists the names of the major participants:

With something like this I always wonder how many of them are still capsuleers or whether any of them have retired or even submitted to permadeath. And I always note how this sort of thing never bothers to list the names of the tens-of-thousands of baseline crew members that will have died in those ships. I said a prayer for them.

I was getting angry again. The thought that all of this was the end result of somebody missing a payment deadline. 

Madness...

I was done here. There was nothing more to say or see or do, which is how it should be. This is not a tourist attraction.

I turned away from the site and prepared to warp out of the system. I left the wrecks to deep time. I'll probably never come this way again as nothing will change within my lifetimes as long as the bureaucrats and nullsec dwellers leave it alone, which the latter certainly will, because of the highly specific code of honour that exists in this part of space. 

From around 10,000 kilometres away, a flourescence of what appears like charged particles is visible surrounding the site. I did not take the time to analyse this phenomenon using my sensor suite, but I speculate it is either fine dust particles from the wreckage interacting with the gas giant's magnetic field, or metal and alloy fragments simply reflecting the red giant's light in the manner of a high altitude cloud. The effect is stunning - almost like a warning.

There is nothing here now but coldness, emptiness, and intense radioactivity with unfathomable half-lives. Nothing will change here for millions of years. The wrecks are massive enough that they will outlast the red giant itself and its inevitable supernova. 

One day, they will be alone with God.