Incident 10: A Reason for Hate

I look back at my words of weeks ago. I said that most refuted evil, that the only reality was enlightened self-interest. That there was no Devil.

Funny how I kept meeting him.

I was angry, frustrated, blocked off. Superhuman yet as impotent as a paralytic. For weeks I'd sought answers to the cipher of Stiletto, and I was no closer. Though I stretched myself out, the void remained the void. Every wormhole led only to another. Each fallen firewall offered only flat data space. I thought of the good I'd done and saw only mocking ashes blowing in my eyes in response.

For all the chatter on open channels, the neocomm was silent to me. New Eden had become blacker than the depths of Limbo. And all the while the whispers brushed against my brain.

Avenge us...

Overcome evil with good.

I'd been aboard Apparition, the Gnosis-class cruiser I'd been drawn to before the madness of the graveyard of ships, for several days, opening my mind to the intangible "something" that drew its ghost fingers across the neural relays and soul code of the capsuleer interface. Now a new flavor to the torment had been added: that code I'd found in the temple of heretics. A counterpoint, an antiphony to the chant of blood guilt.

Ordinarily, I would have feared accusations of insanity and the promise of the biomass recycler if I'd bothered to confide to anyone of my secret fears and growing anger. But this wasn't madness. Instead, I felt a sharpening of the focus slicing its scalpel through the shadows. But still, my true enemy remained elusive.

Until the day I'd met the reason for the rage building in me.

We capsuleers aren't the ultimate evil. No one being is. Evil is giving in to what I found that day.

I'd just finished a frantic raid against a Blood Raider data cache, trying the purge my imagination of the red-soaked banality I'd found when the transmission impaled the necomm.

"Dray... Dray... Dray..."

The Ashimuu was heavily damaged yet it had changed course to intercept me. The target lock alarm sounded in my head, and I charged my shield boosters and gauss guns while I programmed my drones to engage.

"Dray... Dray... Dray... Dray...," it kept saying.

"Identify yourself," I shot back. "How do you know me?" But the raider wasn't firing, just orbiting at optimum range.

"Dray... Dray..."

"What do you want?" I said.

"Nothing."

The hostile cruiser kept orbiting, toying with me. I couldn't understand the reluctance to engage. And that chanting of my name was a pickaxe against my ears. Who was this lunatic?

"Dray... Dray..."

"What the hell do you want?" I shouted.

The howl that came over the channel made the gorge rise in my throat. The vocal chords of a human being shouldn't sound like a wild badger or an emphysemic cat. And a perfect stranger shouldn't say THOSE WORDS that came through the neocomm at me like a carnivorous dog hungry for the flesh of an infant. The more I listened to the mysterious curses and mindless threats, the more the rage that had been building in me grew to the proportions of a storm god.

Whoever... or whatever... was piloting that ship had to be destroyed.

My guns primed and my drones flew at the enemy with a speed and fury I hadn't thought mere machines capable of. Mirrors of my own outraged perceptions. Super-cooled coils let loose my wrath and all the dissatisfaction was dispelled in a moment. Apparition circled the fireball of the Ashimuu like an avenging archangel as the raider's reactor went critical.

And all I felt was joy.

Maybe I was insane as I set course for Amarr Prime. But so be it. I was tired of everyone in this bizarre conspiracy knowing more than me. I'd had a bellyful of the shadows and uncertainty.

A few hours later I was broadcasting on an open channel to anyone that would hear me.

"Sheng. Where are you, damn you? I know who you are. Show your face and give me some straight answers!"

Then somebody flipped the switch. And I knew nothing at all.

Incident 9: Cries in the Wilderness

I've begun to see my lack of a past as a two-edged sword: at once a curse and a gift.

It's been said that some are born to greatness. Others are destined to be forgotten. And there are lot more of the second kind. But there is an advantage to a slate wiped clean: there's more room in my head for the memories of the forgotten ones. Their dreams, songs, and cries to an uncaring universe won't go unheard.

In my search for who and what lies behind Stiletto, my mind and senses have imbibed those stories: ruins, corpses, distorted data, people shunted into the background. The relics of a past that refuses to vanish.

And some things that will never die.

I've said I'm being watched, and I know it now more than ever. Governments and corporations. Sheng. My employer, whoever he is. Maybe the Jovians. Maybe by something... someone... else. Sometimes its the prick of the interface tendrils caressing my ganglia, sometimes a flash of movement at the edge of vision.

And sometimes the recognition of a presence at my elbow. Not the endless chatter of Aura or Allison, nor even the sure knowledge my fellow immortals send my way with every combat scanner probe or target lock, but a patient and potent essence pervading the vacuum, my shields and superstructure, the Neocom, the interface nodes, flesh, electronic code. Even the soul and the spirit, if you believe in those. The prime melody in every pure experience. Whale song in the emptiness.

But I had no real definition for what I felt until I found the old temple. To the eye, it was no more than one of many abandoned shrines to the imperial faith, fragmented by asteroid impacts, scorched by cosmic rays and solar winds.

But it still quietly spoke to the senses of my ship. Subtle binary hums pulsed into the Nothing, waiting for a listening ear.

And the whispers it emitted were blasphemies. I knew enough about the Amarrian religion to understand why this temple had been demolished. There were, of course, all sorts of splinter groups branching from imperial orthodoxy: the Blood Raiders, the underground pleasure cults, assorted radicals. But this was different. I'd never heard these words before. And new as they were to me, they rang with an ancient cadence: something, if it were possible, far older than New Eden.

In the beginning... A virgin shall conceive...

I activated my recording systems. I didn't understand what I was hearing, but this discovery seemed somehow significant.

I am the way... I make all things new...

The data squirt was quick, between two and three hundred kilobytes. But after I'd examined it, I wondered if I should erase it. I had a feeling if I ever transmitted this data on an open channel, I'd have half the Amarr fleet after me. The information not only deconstructed their entire religion, it threatened to rock the foundations of every culture in New Eden! It defied everything, redefined everything. It was more dangerous than anything else I'd uncovered.

And now I wonder if it might be the only hope left.

But back then I deferred action for the time being. I had a murder to solve and a conspiracy to unmask. My investigation had to go on.

Still, I knew a virus had entered into my systems. Yet not the biological or the digital kind. And at the time I didn't know that one day I would bleed over what I'd found.