It was not me

There was distressing news from Jita, well known as the main trade hub in the Caldari State. Its jump gates experienced disastrous accidents: hyperspatial rifts opened up and damaged the gates, killing many gate personnel. 

The link with the hyperspace fluctuations that scientists recently reported near Jita was quickly made, and the initial investigation by the State points to experimentation with the (Drifter appropriated) Talocan hyperspace network done presumably by the Federation or the Intaki, either for fraud and extortion, or for sabotage. 

This caused some confusion also close to home.

The Ministry of Internal Order, through the reports of mr. Ivan Firth, the political officer on board of the Indagatrix, is aware of my intentions to experiment with the Drifter wormhole technology myself. I planned this in order to test a hypothesis on the diminished number of wormholes in Sanctified Vidette. A scientific goal: of course I do not plan terrorist attacks on Jita gates.

Nevertheless they were worried that I had made some mistake, and that the Empire might be blamed for the Jita gate incident because of my tampering with Drifter wormhole devices. A very understandable worry, so they prevented me from undocking and invited me for a conversation. 

I was a surprised that also a member of the Caldari State Police was present. Usually conversations with the Ministry are very private. 

The misunderstanding was soon cleared up, as flight records of the Indagatrix, reports of my political officer, and the surveillance records of the Ministry itself showed that I had not done any such experiment yet. I have indeed been holding off on these experiments. I have been waiting to hear back from dr. Fritte Cornelius, to see if we could coordinate our research efforts. I am very glad now that I have not done anything yet.

The Ministry was also quite interested in dr. Cornelius and where they could find him. They asked me whether he is a trade hub ganker, and the man from the Caldari State Police asked whether he is a Black Eagle. I answered to the best of my ability, vouching for his pacifist nature and track record as a scientist. 

Unfortunately I had no idea of his whereabouts. 

That is regrettable: my ignorance forced them to use more advanced conversation methods to try and help me remember anything I might have forgotten. The next few hours were not pleasant. I vaguely remember that at some point in the conversation the man from the Caldari State Police no longer wanted to be in the room, which made the interlocutors from the Ministry laugh.

But all is good that ends good, and in the end I was allowed to resume my usual business. First, I will take a day off and pay a visit to medbay as my current clone misses some teeth and some nails and has a limp. 

Thermoelectric convertor field projectors

I have been discussing the decrease in static wormhole numbers with dr. Fritte Cornelius from Signal Cartel. 

The number is not always exactly thirty, but fluctuates. There appears to be a cycle, around noon it starts out low, rising to forty and close to fifty at midnight, then it decreases back down towards the next noon. This seems to imply human interference, rather than a natural phenomenon.

Dr. Cornelius has offered an interesting hypothesis that sounds correct to me. It is best to test it before it is made public, I think. That requires some experimentation that is not very easy to perform: an attempt to generate a wormhole in Sanctified Vidette ourselves, using the Sleeper Thermoelectic Convertors in known space. 

These structures need to be scanned down. I stumbled on some abandoned ones in Sanctified Vidette; they look like this:

The bright spot is no wormhole but the magnetar in the system. You would expect a Drifter wormhole in between those two structures when they are active. Now, if we manage to power these up...

President Moreau

After a month of voting, the Gallente presidential election has concluded! 

Dr. Alix Moreau won narrowly, on a programme of unrestricted research and a promise of the bright future that this research would bring. 

President Moreau also promised more independence for the constituent worlds of the Federation that seek a greater extent of self-determination. This was a crucial strategic move, gaining the support of the Intaki autonomists. Polls before the election showed a sea of support Roden, with one isolated exception: Intaki, which pundits quickly labeled "the highsec island of dr. Moreau".

That island grew, until the map finally colored more evenly between the candidates. I think the Intaki will not be forgotten, and will fare better than under the militaristic repression of Aguard.

But the true agenda of dr. Moreau is to liberate scientific research from any moral or legal restraints. That is dangerous - as the code of Demeanor warns, "Be Watchful. Free Thought is the Begetter of Disorder". What strange inventions and hybrid creatures will dr. Moreau create? CONCORD is concerned, and chairman Sakari of the State calls it proof of "Federation insanity". 

Scientific progress always holds both promises and dangers. New findings can be used to improve the lives of countless billions or to destroy these lives. To turn planets into gardens of Eden or into burning radioactive hells. 

In the Empire, we have God and the Empress guiding us. 

But in the Federation, the situation is very frightening! Whether science is used for good or for destruction depends on which leaders the capricious and mostly ignorant citizens call upon to decide for them...

Worrisome wormhole development

While working on the wormhole atlas and collecting some more data, I noticed a worrisome development in Sanctified Vidette. I do not know if the same thing is present in the other Drifter wormholes, I have less experience with these and do not know their normal number of wormholes.

In Sanctified Vidette there are always six static wormholes to the six other classes of Anoikis system, one for each class. And there are always sixty wormholes to systems in our own cluster. As joint research with mr. Cornelius has shown before, these sixty "statics" lead systems picked randomly out of a uniform distribution over the systems with Jove observatories.

Today, I found that the number of wormhole connections in Sanctified Vidette has halved. The six Anoikis connections are still present, but only thirty statics to our cluster! That is way too large a discrepancy to be a statistical coincidence. 

I had the impression before that there were less, but did not pay attention to it, as I was too focused on other tasks, so I am not sure how new this anomaly is. But it must be fairly recent, no more than about a month. My new friends at the Imperial Navy anchorage in the system declined to comment. When I asked whether they think it is linked to their experiments, they told me it was inappropriate for me to consider such a thing. 

Static wormholes are supposed to be ... static. Their number is a topologically protected constant for any given system - a change in their number is unheard of. It cannot occur without there being a major disruption in hyperspace. This comes at the time when the science community is reporting hyperspace fluctuations also in our cluster, notably in the Forge region... 

Exordium

I have received more help for the wormhole atlas project, from mr. Fritte Cornelius of the Signal Cartel. These intrepid explorers have probably ventured deeper into the wormhole network than anyone else and have imaged the nebulae even more extensively! 

It is really heartwarming to see how the New Eden research community forms a network of friends that steps up to help each other. Science is a search for truths that are independent of ideology and as such this endeavor transcends borders, giving it the capacity to bring us all closer to each other.

It is in the same spirit that Exordium was established. Rumors of its existence have been going around now for a while, and the existence of this new region was finally revealed today. Around fifty new star systems have been linked up to the cluster-wide jump gate network. These are to be peaceful systems, of little strategic or industrial value, where law is enforced by concord and dominion is shared among the empires. 

May it bring hopes of peace to all of our star cluster!

New bloodshed in Vak'Atioth

There is a rumble, like faraway thunder, coming from the outer worlds: the barbarian kingdoms are at war again. 

There are always skirmishes: without the light of faith, the poor souls out there are condemned to live in a violent darkness where they hold violent, dark convictions. 

This time around the bloodshed was worse than ever before. The various warlords have aggregated into two large coalitions that battled it out in Vak'Atioth at the edge of the Jovian regions. Countless lives and trillions of isk were lost. Titan-class ships were ripped to shreds in a cruel death dance involving -it is claimed- ten thousand capsuleer pilots.

The news of fresh bloodshed in Vak'Atioth gives me cold chills, as probably it does to many Amarr. 

In this system, our Empire suffered a historic defeat at the hands of the Jove. That defeat paused our expansion into the universe. It also led to the opportunistic rebellion of the Minmatar, a rebellion that is causing pain and death enduring to this day. 

It is as if all the evil from the battle of Vak'Atioth first spread through the cluster as a disease, gaining strength, only to refocus now back to Vak'Atioth through some strange alignment of fate.

Help with the atlas project

My mapping project has gotten kind support from mr. Ché Biko, a diplomat who sometimes visits Gottin's Lamp. He has connections to the Arataka Research Consortium, and gave me access to the Consortium's archive of holographic pictures of the sky as seen from various regions in the cluster. 

Together with the data from the Imperial Astronomical Society at Hedion University, I now have plenty of images to go by. 

Theoretically I could compute how the sky and the nebulae of various regions would appear through a Sanctified Vidette wormhole, but I think especially here it is still worthwhile to image the real thing, with all its sources of noise and instabilities. Also for some remote nebulae, I may still want to search for higher resolution imagery; perhaps in those cases indeed there is still value in collecting one's own images. 

But certainly this kind gift has cut back the amount of work, and I will not need to expose myself to as much danger in the outer worlds of the cluster.

Cloud Atlas

Apparently I have a reputation of being an expert in Sactified Vidette wormholes.

I have been commissioned to create an atlas of the wormholes there, for all different regions in the cluster.

Each region's typical night sky appears in a distorted way through the wormhole, on the other side, allowing pilots to see where it is leading to before actually traversing it. While the image is heavily distorted, our cluster's nebulae can still be made out distinctively. Even the direction from which a nebula is viewed alters its aspect. Take for example the Kor-Azor nebula as seen from Khanid:

It has a "coeur d'azure" or azure heart, surrounded by a brownish shell. The blue-sky colored center of the nebula is clearly visible from the Kor-Azor region where it dominates the celestial dome, and some say House Kor-Azor got its name from it. But when you look at the same nebula from Genesis, it looks more like a cup or cauldron:

You no longer see the blueish center part of the cup because you look at it edge-on rather than from the top. So, to embark on my commission I will have to start with making a "cloud atlas" of the twelve different nebulae of our cluster, and after that match each with the views from the Vidette wormholes.

Presidential candidates pay homage to the Empire

Capsuleer fickleness. Well, I guess it is for the better that the wedding annulment has been annulled. I am happy that lady Ashland and lady-consort Blackwind seem to have patched up their relation. Personally, I blame the slaver tooth necklace, it being a bad luck charm.

While around Amarr, I have noted another increase in pilgrims. To Emperor Doriam II's memorial, and to empress Jamyl I's statue and the Mekhios graveyard. 

This time around, I am wary - I do not let my heart jump of joy at the sight of hit-and-run-pilgrims any more. Indeed, after asking around a bit I received confirmation that this is again part of the Gallente election tour. 

The candidates - all three of them! - not only urge their capsuleer supporters to visit the Eve Gate, which can be considered a space phenomenon beyond borders, but they also bring them closer to Amarr, to our memorials. This is very good news, and can only signal the willingness of each of the three candidates to collaborate more closely with the Empire. At the least, it is a show of respect. No wonder that the Empress has reciprocated, and that she is not preferring one candidate over the other.

It is also a very big snub from the Federation to the Republic. 

The tour does not pass by any Minmatar system. And the choice of visiting the Mekhios graveyard is a clear condemnation of the Elder Fleet and of the Minmatar agression. Official election tour visits to the memorial are an expression of support for the Amarr side of our enduring conflict. It also signals a strengthening of the new Entente between our empires, and the deepening rift between the Federation and the Republic. 

Perhaps the day that the Federation presents excuses for their support of the Elders and even aids us in bringing the Defiants to justice is not too far away!

Trouble in paradise

Bad news never comes alone. After finding that confession did not help mr. Quirinus, I am now confronted with a marriage annulment by lady Ashland. And this only a few weeks after it has been officiated! 

I am not even sure all the paperwork is properly processed by the Amarr Civil Service, and this spells trouble. What if the marriage paperwork ends up on the desk of a slow -or let us say very busy- clerk, whereas the annulment paperwork finds its way to a relatively empty desk of a fast clerk? The latter may annul the annulment on the basis that there was no wedding registered yet, after which the former will end up registering the marriage at a later point. 

Even if it is all processed in the correct order, there will still be an official pauze in the annulment, since there needs to be a minimum time (I think it is nine months) between both. It can be sooner, but that requires the couple follows marriage counseling first. 

I will try to offer that service as LUMEN's chaplain.

I worry about the reasons for this break-up. If it is merely capsuleer fickleness or the revelation of a past lover, that can probably be mended. But perhaps something more perfidious has happened? Hopefully it is not something that could cast doubt on the sincerity of lady-consort Jade Blackwind's conversion? I also hope that he horrible Gallente tabloid person is not still around for this.