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.
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