Signal Cartel @ The Devil's Dig Site - 9/7/118

Prologue: Theology Council Tribunal station orbiting Zoohen III - 1900hrs

Signal Cartel is incredibly professional. The outwardly-informal, communal, inclusive, egalitarian and chilled-out vibe that the corporation projects externally, has a deep specialist knowledge of the craft of exploration at its core. Signal Cartel therefore manages the rare feat of walking the walk and talking the talk. Then there is the strict non-aggression ‘credo’ that is enforced by the velvet-glove/iron-fist policy of the boss, reformed pirate Mynxee. Flight data recorder telemetry aka the ‘killmail’ tells no lies and if you appear on one that is not your own, then it’s tea & biscuits with management. If you don’t believe me then check the feed below:

As well as access to an unparalleled knowledgebase, members also have access to hangars full of exploration-equipped frigates provided at the corporation’s expense and much more. This means we also act as an education and training facility for new capsuleers that is far more effective than the cookie-cutter syllabi of the basic training academies. Here in Signal it's all about the practical operational advice that does not appear in any instruction manual. Yet in no way does access to any of this resource imply an obligation in return. Members are entirely free to base themselves anywhere and do their own thing if they want to so long as they refrain from killing people, which is fine by me, because as I’ve said many times on this journal, I’m a lover, not a fighter.

I became a capsuleer for science: to learn, to discover, to see parts of the cluster that my long-dead baseline self would never have experienced.

This is why I fit right in here.

So I was excited when shortly after I joined Signal, management announced an expedition to the Devil’s Dig Site in The Forge. It would be a fleet exercise, focused on exploring and investigating an archaeological site in the Otitoh system that is known to contain evidence of human occupation of the cluster in the pre-Dark Ages epoch, possibly even pre-dating the collapse of the EVE Gate.

This was exactly what I joined Signal for: not just doing my own thing, but playing an active part. I signed up for the expedition immediately.

In the meantime, since I started operating from Zoohen I've found that having a base in an outlying system just a few light years away from the Fed means it is far easier to procure trashy holofeeds from across the border, even in this Theology Council station which conveniently does not have its own Censor.

It's easier because there is a Core Complexion station right here in Zoohen that receives the feeds direct, so thanks to corruptible comms engineers and several untidy hacks through that station into this one, I’ve got into this drama series from Impetus (who else?) called UUA Is So Far Away, about an exiled Jovian trying to return to his homeland but discovering that it no-longer exists; so it's got historical accuracy, existential crisis, philosophical quandary, a torrid love triangle and totally inaccurate science.

For my sins I was binge-watching the seventh series of this compulsive dreck when a familiar chime sounded the arrival of a message. New corp, new message. It was the Devil’s Dig Site Expedition Briefing from expedition leader Markus Vulpine.

This is what I mean about total professionalism:

After reading the briefing I decided to raise my game. I joined the ‘Hacker Wing’. I would bring another Anathema; not my regular Hayabusa, now docked in Thera, but a new, purpose-built Anathema. The comprehensive briefing ensured the liberating certainty of a known objective, so unlike a standard exploration/investigation fit where contingency is everything, with this operation there was no need for either a cloaking device, a suite of Scan Probes or a Data Analyzer, because we were hiding from nobody, we knew exactly where we were going and exactly what was there. I could specialize my ship’s fit around the required Relic Analyzer and the need for some armor tank against an expected hostile intervention from Rogue Drones known to inhabit the site. Even then, the Hacker Wing had at least ten combat-equipped vessels to call on as a defensive screen - the ‘DPS Wing’ - some of which would be battleships and Tech-III-class cruisers.

This would not be amateur night.

Total professionalism.

So I resolved to spend some time equipping the new ship (which would be named Hacker Republic), before starting the long transit to the Okkelen constellation in The Forge, where the fleet was due to assemble in a few days' time at the Lai Dai station orbiting Otitoh IV's tiny 500km-diameter moon.

I would have time to kill because I intended to arrive early, however from this Caldari megacorp station there was no way I was going to be able to receive Impetus broadcasts, so I couldn’t finish the seventh series of UUA Is So Far Away.

This was probably a good thing.

Part 1: Gods Walked Among Us

Two days later…

The expedition fleet assembled in the Lai Dai place. Some had rushed over here that afternoon from the first day of the SeyCon5 conference in the Seyllin system. All of top management were here and there were nearly 30 of us in total. The docking bay was a fabulous sight, with far more than its normal share of exotic ships that are designed to be neither seen nor heard, using the language of curiosity rather than death. I’ve seen a Nestor precisely once before and here there were two in one place. Several examples of the ubiquitous (to us) Astero, some Stratios, a Navy Omen, three Tengu and a Drake, and a ‘Logi Wing’ that was assigned to repair the Hacker Wing if any of us were attacked by the Drones. Conversely, my Anathema was the sole example of its type.

Unlike in Darwinism where a fleet departure time was always an abstract concept that was communicated to nobody until after Jzma and Mechoj had already left, here in Signal we had a precise zero-hour and we damn-well stuck to it. At the exact appointed time we undocked from the Lai Dai station and assembled at a pre-determined safe-spot elsewhere in the system.

[sidebar: it was good to see Kobura Juraxxis in this fleet. He won’t remember, but a year ago I crossed paths with Kobura somewhere in Cobalt Edge and we did comms in an otherwise empty Local channel for a while. This is how I knew about Signal Cartel back then, and how I knew it was meant to be.]

At this staging point we finalised briefings, at least four of us took some cam drone stills and we set up the live broadcast feed (!) for the rest of the corporation to tune into from afar. Then we set off for the site. Being part of a fleet, this was where I got a chance to see the new instantaneous vector symbology at work on tactical, which is another of those mandatory capsuleware upgrades that fall into the category of 'solutions in search of a problem'. At least it looks nice.

The nominal entrance to the Devil's Dig Site was where the baseliner scientists, academics and archaeologists live in those standardised hab modules you see all over the place. They appeared to be guarded by Caldari warships who didn’t see fit to bother us, probably because it wouldn’t have lasted long (for them).

We briefed some more while slowboating over to the acceleration gate at the site entrance, then we hit a point-of-no-return. This was it: it was on.

 

 

When we activated the gate and warped to the first part of the Devil’s Dig Site itself, we split up as briefed and the Hacker Wing got to work. There were a large number of artifacts to investigate. A couple of times I got to the required distance from an artifact and discovered somebody else was already hacking it, so that wasted some time, but I found one eventually and went through the usual drill with the Relic Analyzer. All of this while under constant threat of attack from hostile Rogue Drones.

 

These were difficult hacks that were full of restoration nodes, and I thanked God that I’d had the foresight to fit Hacker Republic with an Emission Scope Sharpener modification otherwise I would not have completed them.

The artifact I found contained the expected evidence indicating this site’s builders were the Talocan civilization, which dates this site to at least 15,000 years-old. This site in Okkelen was where the first evidence of this pre-Dark Ages civilization was ever discovered; a civilization that is now suspected - believed - to have attained a higher level of technological achievement than we have now, even surpassing the Jove, and going on to inhabit Anoikis an unbelievably long time before we ever found it by accident. 

You’ve heard the rumours about what Anoikis is; the feeds about Caroline’s Star; wondered what all those Talocan structures are doing in Thera and elsewhere in Anoikis; the arguments, theories, papers about not only what Anoikis is, but where it is and when it is. Anoikis was manufactured they say. Anoikis is New Eden in the future, they say. Caroline’s Star was no accident of nature they say. The spacetime metric in Anoikis was modified by the Talocan to suit their purposes they say. The Talocan could remake the universe in their image. The Talocan are Gods and we are not fit to look upon their likenesses.

Rumours, not answers.

If I’d had more time - with less external risk - to riff on the significance of these objects being tractored into Hacker’s hold, I think I might have put them back. I have some small-scale Talocan stuff in my own collection of hangar artifacts along with Sleeper Data Libraries and other related, incredibly ancient and utterly inscrutable relics. Sometimes it scares me. I look at the alien symbols on them and I swear they say don't get too close because you are not yet ready for the truth.

Then again, my own ship contains tech derived directly from relics appropriated from this location. The databases classify the object I retrieved from here as a ‘Solid Atomizer‘, which is used in the production of cloaking devices. I’m already flying around with Talocan tech. What kind of explorer-scientist would I be if I didn’t follow this experiment through to its conclusion?

While I was once again taking a cosmic perspective, the Hacker Wing cleared this part of the site with no failed hacks and a complete take, but sadly, Cali Estemaire’s Catalyst got the full focus of the Drones’ attention and was destroyed before the rest of the fleet could intervene. We knew that the Drones would deploy this focus tactic at some point so we were ready for it, but now the DPS Fleet was one ship down.

After clearing this section, the rest of us gathered our composure, made repairs, recharged, re-briefed, and got ready for the core of the Devil’s Dig Site. To her eternal credit, Cali stayed on the field in her capsule and did some media when she had every right to leave the site.

Total commitment.

 Part 2: The Ancient Temple and the Sun Reader Monolith

We warped into the site’s centre and saw for ourselves how the ancient Talocan temple based here has been desecrated and transformed into a monstrous Drone Hive. There were even more hackable artifacts here with correspondingly greater opposition from the Drones, which one must assume have all learned to adapt and absorb the Talocan tech into their own architecture. What in Divinity's Edge will eventually emerge from that obnoxious mashup?

This part of the site is also the location of the ‘Sun Reader Monolith’. There is, to our knowledge, precisely one other example of this bizarre structure in the whole of New Eden: the monolith in the Dead End system more than 30 light years away in Genesis. There are known to be considerably more of them in Anoikis. The monoliths emit nothing, reflect everything EM including visible light and are, to us and our tech, essentially gigantic dead mirrors. I was sad that I didn’t get chance to view this one close-up because I was so busy hacking and busy not getting killed, but then if I had, who knows what it might have done to me?

The scientific principle of the simplest-explanation-being-the-truth would dictate that the Sun Reader Monolith is also of Talocan construction given that it is co-located with the ancient temple. It could be anything: a monument, a tomb, a nav beacon or even a transit conduit of some kind, and if it is, can it be activated? Would anybody want to? Where the hell would it lead to? To the other monolith in Dead End? To Anoikis where the others are? To wherever the Talocan went? Did they transcend themselves out of this reality into one of their multiple dimensions of hypereuclidian mathematics?

Maybe the monolith is just an inert lump of material, taunting humanity’s dislike of an information vacuum. Maybe seeing this thing from afar means I just became a more ardent believer in the Old Earth Myth. The implications of this place, its contents, and the ancient, long-extinct culture that built it here are that our civilization is playing around in somebody else's house. One day its owners might return and take it back.

Sometimes I get scared by this career path I chose. Possession of knowledge requires responsibility.

As before, the DPS Wing drew the attention of the cruiser-sized Drones and kept them away from the hackers, although one of the Drones got within 6km of me - thank God for the Anathema’s low observability and signature otherwise, even with armor hardeners, I would have been toast. The hack during this phase was more difficult and took three attempts to get through another forest of restoration nodes. I may even have been the last of us to finish the operation, which meant for a short time I had every defensive ship in the fleet watching my back, which was nice. 

By the end of the operation we had successfully hacked every single artifact. A 100% success rate, with just one ship lost to the Drones. With more Drones arriving on the grid, we wasted no more time and returned to the safe-spot outside the site. 

 

Part 3: The Aftershow Party

As is usual when I visit scientifically-important places, I left the Devil's Dig Site with more questions than I'd arrived with, and with answers to none.

Talocan. 

What were you? 

Where are you?

On the other hand, a fleet of ships in one place is always an impressive sight.

Time for a post-op photo op:

 

Then we invoked the standard post-op fireworks procedure:

 

 

 

We returned to the Lai Dai place and docked with the collective satisfaction of a job well done: our raid on the Devil’s Dig Site was a resounding success, a testament to sound planning and perfect execution. The whole thing took less than an hour too. A speed hack in every sense.

Hacker Republic had performed perfectly. I was never targeted even once by any of the Drones, not even during that close pass. Covert Ops ships are awesome.

So are fleet warps:

 

We even laid down some more fireworks outside the Lai Dai station. This is why the Zkillboard service - that ceaseless accountant of competitive killing - rates Signal Cartel as 98% Snuggly.

Some of us (including me) stayed at Lai Dai and didn’t leave the Otitoh system until the next morning, with the safe knowledge that capsule neuroembryonic fluid cures hangovers. A few of us left immediately to head straight back to Seyllin for day two of SeyCon5. Some more left for parts as-yet unknown.

We don’t hang around. We only look forward.

Because the explorer's path never ends.

Because you can’t stop the signal.

Footnote:

As I mentioned briefly above, I wasn't the only one of us who documented this expedition. For more righteous imagery of the cosmos, the Devil's Dig Site and more ships, check out Cali Estemaire’s image file, Thorin Shardani’s image file and Razorien’s image file.

CONCORD and the Yulai Graveyards

“May you live in interesting times”

Unknown - Jovian Historical Codex


Since joining Signal Cartel I’ve been mostly tied up moving some of my stuff to the Theology Council Tribunal station that orbits Zoohen III and serves as one of Signal’s bases. It’s been educational: I never realised how familiar I was with Khanid. I could recite the name of practically every system in Khanid and recite the names of pipe systems in order of transit in either direction. Now I’m up here in the Genesis region, in the northern borders of the Empire and it’s like pressing the reset button as none of it is familiar.

ZOOHEN III - THEOLOGY COUNCIL TRIBUNAL STATION aka THE ZOO

I’ve quickly realised that the Zoohen system was a very wise choice by Signal, as this part of Genesis is close to the borders of five different regions as well as the more significant border with the Fed itself, so there is huge operational (and cultural) variety available within a short travel time.

In fact 'Zoo' is just three jumps from the Fed, so I have available, if I want it, the gigantic culture shock of going from Signal's office in an ultra-orthodox Amarr Theology Council station with its thought police, slave-whippings and its church-on-every-floor design; to the neon lights of Federation stations across the border, where I’m fully exposed to the Gallente and their militarised version of liberalism (“we can do whatever we like and you have to let us or else...”).

This also means that unless I'm in one of my more neutral ships, I take the risk inherent to docking in a Fed station, in Fed territory, in an obviously-Amarr vessel and, if I'm not extra-careful, walking around its interior wearing traditional Amarrian dress; otherwise I can expect judgemental glances from meathead Fed baseliners who will regard me as a tight-arsed Amarrian who needs to spend a week in one of their 'Pleasure Hubs', when little do they know that as a Ni-Kunni woman I could run one of those places better than they could.

As it happens I do actually prefer Gallente stations on the whole because they're into wide-open spaces which triggers my ancestral memories of the deserts of Mishi IV, but that institutionalised Gallente tendency to prioritise self-gratification above all-else starts to grate after a day or two. I'm not prudish - far from it - but there's a ritualistic elegance to be observed with that sort of thing.

In fact I don't know how the Fed get anything done because of their obsession with leisure.

I'm digressing again...

Anyway it's not that big a deal, because as Empyreans we're supposed to be above this sort of thing.

Supposed to be.

Far more interesting is that 'Zoo' is in an area of space where there are a number of historically-significant star systems that have been host to some of the most seismic shifts in New Eden politics. Orvolle is nearby (where the recent CONCORD/Upwell deal was signed), so is Villore (home of the Villore Accords group and their Assembly), so is the notorious death trap of Old Man Star; Luminaire isn’t far and even the New Eden system is a mere afternoon’s jaunt.

YULAI VIII

Then there is Yulai: the former capital system of New Eden. CONCORD was and still is based here, but it also used to be the cluster's principal trade hub until Jita gradually assumed that role as a consequence of the reorientation of Yulai's stargate connections. 

My father used to go on about how much better it was in the 'Yulai days' when he'd spend ages in his study, staring at volumetric holographs of the commodities trading he specialized in (some of the proceeds of which sent me to Hedion University). He'd manipulate prices and market orders with his hands and to the eight-year-old me it was like watching a magician. The volumetric display would emerge from a device beneath a wide, sunken pit in the floor of his study. I used to stand in it and let the numbers and graphs and squiggly-line things trawl across my face. This used to wind him up, so naturally I did it as often as possible.

Later, I remember how my father went on for months when Jita emerged as the dominant market hub, and how he visibly mourned when Yulai’s stargate ‘superhighways’ were shut down in YC107. This was still a few years before I entered Hedion University.

He would rail against “those damned money-grabbing Caldari corporate bastards who think they can take it all with them. They have no understanding of the artistry of a trade. The ritual of it.  A successful trade - a transaction - is a ritual. The longer it takes, the more satisfactory it is. A week is an absolute minimum. Back in the Yulai days…”

You’ll have noticed that Ni-Kunni are very big on ritual.

Prior to the stargate thing and when Yulai was still prominent, my mother disappeared for a month in accordance with the Ni-Kunni Mourning Ritual when two of her brothers were killed during the Yulai Siege in YC106, when their hauler was caught in Yulai by the rogue fleet of smartbombing battleships that a notorious capsuleer group used to blockade the system in defiance of CONCORD. The Yulai Siege is also how I learned that my father’s business interests included a low-level smuggling operation into the Fed from Syndicate and Placid, as his brothers-in-law were in the middle of a run when they were killed. Yulai was crucial to this quasi-legal operation as the system is only a handful of jumps from Syndicate and Placid, both conduits to the wild west and the frozen north. This event caused a temporary but substantial rift between my parents after my mother returned from her ritual, and I know - although they rarely admit it - they almost divorced over it. It was a difficult period.

You would think an event like the Yulai Siege and its impact on my family would have had automatic negative consequences for my ambitions as a capsuleer (which had not yet formed back then because I was only 15), but they didn’t. My father’s business interests were only affected for a short time by either the deaths of his two brothers-in-law during the Yulai Siege or by the system’s later decline in importance as a trade hub. We Ni-Kunni adapt as per our primary hereditary trait.

In fact as Jita assumed its dominance, his business did better than ever because of the Empire’s alliance with the Caldari and their capitalist fervour, which saw my father conveniently set aside his prejudice against ‘those money-grabbing corporate bastards', because, as he would put it, "Adapt or die Cassie, adapt or die, because back in the Yulai days…"

* * *

So with this family connection to Yulai in mind, I took some time out from the hauling and logistics and flew the short distance from 'Zoo' over to Yulai in The Aridia Express. As soon I arrived in the system I found that today, the Yulai system is a shadow of its former self in terms of activity, with only a handful of capsuleers in the Local channel and not much else.

Those capsuleers were probably all here to see the same thing I was.

The Yulai system may be diminished as a market, it may still be politically as important as it ever was, but there is also a dark side to it in the form of the Yulai Graveyards site. This is another mass of starship wreckage that, like the Mekhios Graveyard at Sarum Prime III and the Kor-Azor Battle Site orbiting Eclipticum, all represent the aftermath of the same event: the Elder War of YC110. In Yulai’s case it was the Minmatars’ successful attempt to shut down CONCORD while trying to headshot the Amarr Empire and liberate all the Matari slaves within it.

The fierce battle that took place here in Yulai resulted in dozens of wrecks and a destroyed station. Wrecks on both sides too, with CONCORD battleships rendered inert where they are supposed to be infallible. It escalated when the Matari - Thukkers - brought dreads through an illegal cynosural beacon and it became a Dread Ball. Records show the whole exchange lasted less than fifteen minutes.

CONCORD was defeated. This site is a monument to a defeat. To an organisation that is so impenetrably secretive and arguably hubristic, there isn't much logic in that.

I crept around this 'monument' in Express for a while and took some cam drone stills as the blue giant of Yulai itself painted its cold, judgemental, hard ultraviolet wash over everything. Why do blue giant stars seem so cold when they are among the hottest of the hot?

The Matari dread wreckage was just the shrapnel that it is (because since when is a Matari vessel anything other than a collection of organised shrapnel?). The CONCORD ships appeared mostly intact; some even still evidently under some sort of internal power. Batteries? After eight years? There were no life signs - why would there be?

The derelict station over a hundred kilometres from the wrecks is further visible proof of CONCORD's moment of defeat; the station bisected - decapitated - by the Matari fleet. Thousands died in here, and out there.

For what? The Elder War ultimately failed (Jamyl!), and the status quo was preserved.

A Catalyst showed up here while I inspected the derelict station, so even though it was a hundred kilometres away, I left the field because the 'C-word' tends to trigger an automatic response (call it Explorer's Instinct). I decided to get right to the heart of it all and flew over to the CONCORD Inner Circle station - the new one - and docked in it.

The lack of capsuleer activity in-system meant that Express was the only non-CONCORD vessel in the Inner Circle station’s docking bay. After I unjacked from the pod and cleaned up, I took a walk along the viewing galleries and tried to examine the Jove-influenced spindly battleship-sized vessels up close - I’d never been this close for this long, and if you are ever this close, it’s usually because you’ve done something wrong and are about to be shown the error of your ways, which is down to that peculiarity of CONCORD doctrine where they’re into punishment rather than prevention, which is how gate camps proliferate like they do. Why does that doctrine never evolve? Why does CONCORD never comment on the Drifters? Why is CONCORD content to maintain a status quo rather than moving to shut down edgelords like CODE? Remember the bit about the 'Yulai Convention' in the pro-forma standard wardec notifier? This station is where it came from. 

It was the earlier Yulai Siege that led to the ‘Jove Upgrade’ that manifests in CONCORD’s vessels today and their ability to one-shot anything - which did them no good in YC110 - along with the ability to insta-warp anywhere in a system in seconds apparently without recourse to the combat scan probes that we Empyreans are stuck with. What is that tech? Why can't we have it?

By looking at these ships with my own eyes instead of through the filtering firmware of cam drones, I realised that it’s true that their colour - that green/black combo - appears to shine as if it’s wet when it can’t possibly be so. It’s like you can’t bear to look at them for too long lest it induce nausea, like your brain can’t process the colour properly. Given the amount of Jovian influence on these ships, I have to assume they are also largely automated and crewed by a single capsuleer, unlike mainstream ships of similar size.

Given the Jovian influence, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if CONCORD ships were in fact piloted by a transhumanised disembodied brain in a jar; a brain with a serial number instead of a name, the serial number of the ship itself. Ship and brain merged into one. Maybe not even a brain but an uploaded mind like everybody says the Sleepers are. Capsuleer tech came from the Jove, and a brain in a jar is the ultimate evolution of the capsuleer - the non-corporeal clone-free endgame. Is this where we’re going? Is this why the Society of Conscious Thought have assumed the Jove’s seat in CONCORD? That seat - those Inner Circle seats - are right here somewhere in this station, with its humourless white strip lights, airless corridors painted in Standard Government Sterile, nameless doors, proscribed no-go areas and no shops. None. Not even a café. No Fed Mart, no nothing.

Pure bureaucracy.

All those conspiracy theorists who allege that CONCORD is the visible part of a collective that steers humanity’s evolution from the shadows of Anoikis by maintaining that status quo that I‘ve referred to above: they may have a point. I may be about to join their ranks.

If you try to speak to any of the suits in here, their faces go blank for a fraction of a second, as if their answer is being puppeteered to them from elsewhere.

It's the CONCORD party line: "No comment".

A baseliner wouldn’t notice it; it’s only my headware that gives me the enhanced intuition that makes it detectable. One might say it’s also made me totally paranoid, but think about what’s happened over just the last few months: the Society of Conscious Thought becoming part of the Inner Circle; the formation of the Upwell Consortium from out of nowhere and the ultra-rapid development of Citadels; the thing with the Fed vs. the Serpentis Corporation and the stolen tech that has burst out into the open this last couple of weeks, with militant Caldari groups that may or may not be getting in on it; the legalisation of combat boosters. Have I missed anything?

Somewhere on this station is an event horizon behind which exists smoke-filled rooms where bribes, backhanders, secret deals, favours, plots and machinations are formalised. CONCORD is about as clean as a fedo burrow cluster.

There are two New Edens: ours, and the one inside this station where the members of the Inner Circle sit around a table and speak to each other without actually speaking. I don't believe for a second that The Scope is truly independent now either. There's no such thing. In New Eden, every man/woman has their price.

All this calm and peace and tranquility here in Yulai is deceptive. A storm is brewing all around it and the most significant event of all is yet to come: Empress Catiz Tash-Murkon's coronation.

Later on, as I prepped Express to leave and head back to 'Zoo', I messaged my father about the superficial lack of activity in Yulai in the modern era and his reply began with: “Back in the Yulai days…”