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.

All Roads Lead to Khanid, Part II: Poacher Turned Gamekeeper

The Trailing L5 Point Behind Ibani V, in the Ibani System in 'Cabeki Pocket' aka The Budar Constellation, Khanid - 12/5/119, 1105 hrs

I left the wormhole, because my work there was done.

Shortly afterwards, I left Signal Cartel, because my work there was done too.

It was a sudden thing. In the wormhole, over the course of a single day, I came to a series of realisations about my own ethical stance towards exploring Sleeper and Talocan archaeological relics.

In the wormhole, I'd seen enough, done enough, to know that I could no longer tolerate those archaeological relics and paleo-technological artifacts that I saw there, being plundered, ransacked, stripped, and stolen by capsuleers, all looking to make a quick and dirty profit by taking this stuff to a trade hub and selling it to some collector or industrialist, in return for a bunch of non-existent digital fiat currency that has no intrinsic value in the real world. Plundering those sites, when they actually need to be studied and learned from.

Studied, not sold.

A new, overall awareness arrived in my conscience like a beam laser through my forehead: if I can stop just one of those looters, then one fewer looters out there could make all the difference to understanding what the Sleepers and Talocan were, and to understanding the Drifter threat. It could be me that finds that piece of data that explains where they went and what they were (and are), instead of that data being found by some 'explorer' who doesn't stop to understand the significance of it, and goes on to flog it to some collector who doesn't give a shit, puts it on a shelf and leaves it there, forever undiscovered; or some industrialist who recycles it and turns it into something else, something designed to limit human knowledge rather than expand it.

I have the means to stop looters in their tracks. It is time to use Empress of Amarr as it was designed to be used: not as a ship of peace, but as a protector of a technological faith. It is made of Sleeper tech. It is part of what they were.

So I made the move. I locked the doors to my quarters in the citadel, resigned from Signal Cartel and re-emerged from the wormhole, back into New Eden.

There was just one corporation I wanted to move to.

To return to.

Outdated Host Productions - [PHP1] - the corporation I first joined when I left Hedion University, dozens of lifetimes ago.

I opened [PHP1]'s public channel and reached out. I got a swift and welcoming response, as I knew I would. I'd left on excellent terms 500 days earlier, and it was like I'd never been away. I had missed the Big K and its mostly-uninhabited lowsec 'pipe' that I had re-visited precisely once during my time in Signal Cartel. I missed the calming presence of The Cauldron in my cam drones' synthetic imaging algorithms. I missed Borgin's one-liners and Crystalline's urbane wit and elocution and passion for post-op cuisine. I even missed Jzma and Mechoj's turbulent leadership style (although I found since I rejoined that both are no-longer prominent in the Darwinism alliance now).

I missed the dulcet tones of Sul Glass, Bishop of the Seevadin Constellation - his ongoing doctrinal schism with Amarrian Orthodoxy alive and well (Sec Status -7.6) - now leader of Darwinism, which means Darwinism itself is guided from above. It was all the same old crew: Garen, Gettosmurf, Madrocks and Endiir, all still there like a universal constant (Endiir, what happened to those dreads man??).

Some other names I remembered had moved on since I was last in [PHP1], but that core foundation was still present.

All was well with the universe.

I considered the sudden and radical nature of my personal course-change once again while lobbing massive destruction at somebody's industrial facility today in Ibani - somebody I've never met, never even heard of.

It's about interests and objectives and how they align organically with those of others.

It's how and why, in the cam drone stills you can see here, I'm jacked into a stealth bomber as part of a fleet asserting Darwinism's presence in Khanid.

It's part of my job now, and I like it.

You might wonder how it is possible to live with what outwardly appears to be a complete 180-degree reversal of principle that comes with moving from a pacifism-oriented service corporation, to returning to a corporation that practices piracy and does crimes. The answer is in the principle itself and how it led to the realisation I arrived at that day in the wormhole: I never totally believed in the feasibility of Signal Cartel's pacifist policy in the first place; I just went along with it because it served my purpose to do so for as long as I wanted to stay there. My time in Signal Cartel was overwhelmingly positive, but now its core policy would become an impediment to the preservationist stance that I was about to take up, and as Signal Cartel itself states, if you can't abide by the credo, you can't stay.

I could no-longer abide...

I've left friends behind in Signal Cartel (on good terms, I hope), but progress and change and evolution are the dominant forces in the universe and resistance is futile (where have I heard that before..?).

There is nothing new about any of it. I'm just doing what humanity has always done: looked after number one. But I'm also looking to preserve knowledge.

Explorers: I'm coming for you now...

The North Pole of Danera VIII and Other Ice Worlds

Most of my empyrean infrastructure is based in the Royal Khanid Navy place orbiting the inner moon of Danera IV. This is where I live. It's my home system. I have an excellent relationship with the RKN and they leave me to it (the thing with the mercenaries and strippers was so last year).

The Danera system has two 'ice planets' at its outer frontier - Danera VII and VIII. Residents of the townships on Danera V know them by other, much older and more traditional names associated with their extremely high albedo which renders both planets visible to the naked eye from V when their distance combined with their small size as rocky terrestrials should render them invisible. It's all that ice. The brightest light is the coldest.

Light without heat.

A few months back, I experimented with a token level of resource-extracting in the Danera system by setting up an ice-mining facility on Danera VIII, just to see how it worked. I bought the equipment and had it shipped down to the surface. I have no idea who installed the facility, which can't have been an easy job, or what ran it beyond caretaker servitor robots. In that environment though, with an ambient temperature that makes ice indistinguishable from solid rock, machinery wears out quickly. Which is worse, the frozen surface of an ice world, the crushing depths of a gas giant's atmosphere, or hard vacuum itself?

The returns from mining on worlds in high security space are acknowledged to be inferior. This is evident in Danera because even though it has two of what are supposed to be only 5% of all planets in New Eden, my facility on VIII is the only one on the entire planet.

I shut down my facility after a couple of production runs late in YC117 and had it mothballed. I didn't dismantle it because I knew karma would require me to restart it at some point, maybe years from now; and if I didn't restart it, then the environment would ensure its preservation for the lifetime of the Danera primary itself. My ice mine would bear witness to the G5 star's evolution and eventual transition to the white dwarf state, billions of years from now. Danera VIII's distance from the primary - 31 AU - would ensure its immunity from being engulfed by the star's red giant phase. At that distance, would the ice melt? I doubt it. Danera VIII is probably going to remain locked in icy stasis for all eternity.

However, last month I reactivated my ice mine because I've started producing combat boosters on an experimental basis. I have a tower orbiting the fifth moon of [classified] where I've become a producer, a supplier, and a dealer of performance-enhancing drugs.

I am a drug dealer. A producer of contraband. I have taken one more step down the slippery slope...

The boosters I'm producing all require large quantities of water as a key component in the chemical reaction. This is what I meant by karma earlier: I needed water and I happen to have an ice mine ready to produce it.

Fast-forward a month: the mine has come out of mothballs intact, it is producing water for my drugs and it launches that water into low orbit around VIII in those standardized disposable rocket-powered cargo pods that everybody uses. The timing of these launches is at my discretion and the inclination of the cargo pod's orbit depends on the position of the facility on the surface, so the pod could basically be anywhere when I intercept and retrieve it.

This one time I found the cargo pod above the planet's polar regions. It was an unusual and arresting perspective - most of the time our ships are programmed to arrive in near-equatorial orbits around any given world as a result of the intersection between orbital mechanics and starship design. Cargo pod interceptions are the rare exception.

This was another one of those cosmic alignments I'm into. Perfect geometry and karma. The light of Danera, close to the planet's horizon at this latitude, caused specular reflections off mirror-smooth ice plains; light that diffuses through VIII's tenuous atmosphere that is nothing more than sublimated surface material.

It would be worth exchanging the capsuleer's conditional immortality for a short time, for the ability to look upon these worlds with my own eyes instead of through the filtering firmware of the cam drone that gives everything in space a uniform luminosity. I want to go down there in a lander and an environment suit and stand at Danera VIII's pole, where I would see ice crystals in the thin atmosphere forming sundogs that would follow the star as it tracked around the horizon with the planet's rotation, slowly marking the passage of an elongated time (VIII's 'year' is 22 of ours). The Vapor Sea Nebula would also be a permanent presence, albeit barely visible.

I didn't realise I have a thing for ice planets and their unchanging states, until now. Desert worlds are also my thing because the Ni-Kunni homeworld is in my ancestral DNA. What is it with the desire to seek remoteness?

Escape?

From what?

The noise of the cluster - the oppressive instantaneousness of the fluid router which makes Anoikis no further away than next-door; capsuleer conflict and the constant threat thereof; Sansha, the Drifter enigma, monosyllabic Minmatar terrorists, the Covenant; the ridiculous bias of Amarr Certified News etc. etc...

If everybody looked the same, we'd get tired of looking at each other, but sometimes you have to get away from it all and recharge. Looking at the view - the awesome visual wealth of New Eden - from time-to-time, is also good for one's perspective.

Shut off your overview occasionally and just look out of the 'window'. Remind yourself of why you do this.

J164710 - Vidette

The Drifter faction hasn't been seen in New Eden since the Nandeza Incursion several weeks ago. The incursion followed soon after the brazen assassination of Jamyl. Then - nothing.

No proliferation, no mass assimilations, no futility in the face of deadly superweapons and no more 7:1 kill ratio.

Starting it in the remote, underpopulated parts of Khanid made no sense either.

Where did they go?

Since then, occasional sightings and loggings of the 'Unidentified Wormholes' that led to the four Drifter complexes known as Barbican, Conflux, Redoubt and Vidette, have continued, so one way to find out what happened to them would be to go and ask them.

I've wanted to dive in and explore one of the complexes again (I did the Barbican a while ago) but whenever I saw them on Overview, I was either in the wrong ship for the task or committed to some other job for the corporation.

The situational geometry wasn't working for me.

Then I saw one while passing through Ashmarir two days ago - an Unidentified Wormhole with the attendant massive Sleeper constructs that appear to be an essential piece of the puzzle.

I was in my Anathema - perfect. I dived straight in.

I found the Vidette complex.

Deserted.

No Drifters.

Just the massive structures as previously reported by others; still active yet attended only by a token Sleeper drone presence.

Shattered planets, with the same type of Turbulent Blue Subgiant star as in all the other shattered systems - Seyllin, T-IPZB, Thera etc. - except here, they're all shattered.

As is always the case with all these places in Anoikis, wherever you are, there is always something sinister nearby (in astronomical terms) which generates that constant feeling of helplessness because, unlike a Drifter battleship, it threatens death on you in ways you can't see and can't do anything about.

J164710 is a 'magnetar system'. A magnetar: a deadly neutron star - a supernova remnant - only 20 kilometres across but more dense than a K3 yellow dwarf like Mishi; saturating the vicinity with X-rays and gamma rays, and generating a magnetic field so strong that it would be lethal within 1,000 kilometres of it, because it takes the atomic nuclei that make up your ship and your body and your brain, and distorts their shape from spheres into cylindrical rods. Can you imagine what that would be like..?

It's a common theme in the cosmos: the deadliest stuff often shines the brightest. Drawing you in, seducing you.

Sidebar: Magnetars give off gamma ray bursts that should be detectable from the New Eden cluster, which would allow more accurate determination of where Anoikis actually is. If Anoikis is 1,300 light-years away, it can't be possible that this magnetar and the others within Anoikis all formed within the last 1,300 years it would take for detectable gamma ray bursts to reach us, because we would have seen and recorded the supernovae that generated them. Also, a powerful gamma ray burst from that distance has the ability to make a planet's own magnetic field ring like a bell. We wouldn't miss it...
 
The Sleeper structures in the Vidette complex are still there: one damaged yet still powered. Whatever dreams the Sleepers were having; whatever world they were inhabiting, would this corrupted shape be a part of it? Would they be living in a virtual hell?

Eventually, one Drifter battleship showed up. I dared not decloak. Would it have ignored me, or one-shot me? A 50/50 chance. One that I'm not wasting a ship on.

I couldn't progress any further into the Vidette complex because it is still necessary to be part of a fleet in order to achieve the simultaneous hacking of the complex's data cores, so I saw no more reason to stick around.

I tracked down a few exit wormholes and dived into one of them, emerging in MOCW-2 in Insmother, 49 light-years from home base in Danera. A single-gate dead-end system that serves no purpose except to cultivate sov-fodder.

Another sidebar: the Ginnungagap Nebula near the Kalevala Expanse is prominent and easily visible from MOCW-2. More than any other nebula I've seen so far in New Eden, this one looks terrifying, because whatever is in there that is causing those directional jets of incandescent gas, nothing good can come of it. Unlike the other nebulae in New Eden, this one is active.

I tried docking at the resident Outpost in this system in Insmother just for the hell of it, but I got a big fat lockout signal that was very rude. I'm not having that...

So nobody followed me out of the Vidette complex with its angry magnetar. No Drifter battleships were hovering around on the 'normal' side of the wormhole either.

I had no more answers than I did when I went in there. I only had more questions.

What the hell are the Drifters doing in there?  

What are they waiting for..?

War's Over So I'm Going Planetside

I bought another Venture and ferried it to our new base in [classified], with the idea of doing some mining in the deep lowsec in Southern Khanid and basing this Venture there permanently.

I fitted it to a sort-of ninja speedy Venture spec: combat drones for defence, microwarpdrive for high-speed getaways and a cloaking device as a last resort.

A few problems materialised:

- all that lovely exotic lowsec ore is pointless if nobody will buy it. I have to ferry the bloody rocks light-years to bring it within range of others' buy orders.

- my Ninja Venture was defenceless against what NEOCOM classified as a 'Blood Raider Clone Soldier Cruiser' that I caught lurking in a belt in Gousoviba (0.1). A Maller, no less, that lit me up from 80 km away and one-shot me with pin-point accuracy. Seriously. A sniper job. The damn thing carried a bounty of 1.75 million ISK. Clearly it's been operating there for some time. If you see it, say hello from me before you kill it.

So my lowsec mining strategy needs work. I need something more substantial than a Venture.

In the meantime, the nuisance over the 'wardec' reached farcical levels with no less than eight alliances/corporations wardeccing us at the peak. Intel reached us that 'Space Warriors', the instigators of this thing, started losing members at around the same time for some reason - an exodus by all accounts, and that all the other war declarations were some sort of bureaucratic consequence of this, so it meant nothing. Then a mass of messages from CONCORD arrived that stated all the 'wardecs' were invalidated and cancelled due to an unspecified violation of the Yulai thing. In reality, they'd all failed to pay the fee. Some of these 'wars' lasted less than a minute...

So now we can go to Amarr and Jita again, and life in Khanid is, er, exactly the same as it was before.

I'm going offline for a few days as I've got a trip to the sand dunes of Danera V arranged. Since I've been based here in this system I've found out that Dan V is an unexpectedly interesting world:

- it's classed as temperate, so you can walk around outside without a pressure suit. You'll need a breathing mask if you're outside for more than half-an-hour or so as the pressure is lower than standard, but gravity is only slightly lower. The climate is even stable too as its year is 4.7 standard years long with no axial tilt. Not much changes except on a cosmic timescale that may see the large ocean sublimate away in the low pressure. At 11.2 AU, Dan V should be an ice ball, but it generates a lot of internal heat through tectonic activity associated with the tidal effects of having previously had two moons, so the average ambient temperature is only slightly lower than standard, hence the liquid water.

- there's not much in the way of vegetation because of the thin air and that tectonic activity, combined with what in the past must have been a period of bombardment from the remnants of the shattered moon that created Dan V's asteroid belt at only 90,000 km distance. So today it's mostly tundra, some mountains, large flood basalt traps and desert; with the remaining moon exerting weaker tides than before, resulting in a more benign environment. Liveable.

- here's the interesting bit: there are loads of archaeological remains spanning several thousand years. It seems that in the deep past, starting before the Dark Ages, Dan V had a human civilisation that dated from the Terran era that may have persisted on some basic level up until the time of the Reclaiming. Unearthed temples, relics and other artefacts have been found on Dan V that indicate the planet was known as 'Al-Kaukab' for a long time; that the Danera primary was, during the same period, known as 'Said al-Akbiyah' and that the two nebulae visible from the planet - the Cauldron and the Vapor Sea - were called 'Al-Khiba' and 'Al-Udhi'.

Fast-forward a couple of thousand years and the star was known as 'Dhanab al-Asad', by which time the population had almost died out. Then sometime around the arrival of the Amarr, the name 'Danera' appears for the first time and the standardised 'Danera V' designation sticks.

Today, it's a relatively unspoiled and underpopulated world that is away from a main trade route and home to various strict religious retreats and temples, amid small low-rise cities that are a product of the tech and personnel pipeline to the three Khanid Navy facilities elsewhere in-system. If I was describing Dan V in a tourist brochure I'd say it was a 'compelling fusion of ancient architecture and modern high-tech amenities - cave dwellings with holovids".

Time to go planetside and breath some real, albeit rarified air instead of oxygenated capsule fluid. Here's where I'll be for a few days - I'll send you a holopostcard:

In fact if the ongoing thing with the Drifter faction, the Sleepers and the Jove keeps on escalating, Dan V will be the perfect place to ride it out for a few years.

May you live in interesting times...