The eve of war

There has been another terror attack, yesterday. This time it was Girani-Fa, and the vessels were from the Federation. The images of the attack were broadcast by Amarr Certified News without commentary, live.

This second strike shattered my belief that the attack on Tanoo was an isolated freak incident, launched by a Brutor general who lost his or her mind. The harsh reality dawned upon me and those who were watching the events unfold with me that a war has been declared against the Empire. 

We are mobilizing. Shore leaves have been cancelled. Fleet commanders are taking stock of their ships, and commoners are taking stock of their pantry. Indeed, the baseliners, usually unfazed by wars between capsuleer corporations, are panicking this time, and hoarding supplies.  

Everyone is tense, keeping an eye on the newsfeeds, waiting and hoping for guidance from the Empress. 

Also in capsuleer channels, everyone is on edge. Hawks are quarrelling with those trying to understand why the Republic and the Federation deny involvement in these acts of war. All sorts of conspiracy theories about the true intent of the attackers go around. Lord Shutaq-Newelle reminded us about our proper roles, countering these speculations with an admonishment, "Shut up and man your posts". Today we balance on a cusp between war and de-escalation, but what will be decided seems indeed out of our hands.

Terror in Tanoo

Yesterday, at about this time, terrorists launched a suicide attack on Tanoo, using indiscriminate orbital bombardment to sow death. Even if many rounds landed in the sea due to bad aim, it led to many casualties.

I am shocked, and sad, and a bit scared. Scared because the strange attack seems to have but one aim: force us into all out war with the Republic. At the moment, the news points to a rogue faction within the Brutor Vanguard. A crazy admiral who took matters in his or her own hands.

It doesn't convince me. There was also an attack on Inis-Ilix, where Chakaid is held, accused of Blood Raider sympathies. While our forces were fighting the dreadnoughts bombarding the planet, a raid was conducted to free the prisoner Chakaid. This would not be the first time the terrorists side with the Blood Raiders. There is more going on, and I pray all night and all day today for everyone to exert restraint and investigate before acting on an urge of revenge.

On a personal matter, the Amarr Civil Service closed for two days following the attack. I have now all the documents I need for the DoD but I will still have to wait to go back...

Human nature

I traveled to Akhragan, and found the Accadis family willing to meet with me. They are commoners, and Uldryk and his wife both work as clerks in a company that ships farming equipment. We made an appointment in the evening after dinner, at their house. I declined a kind invitation to have dinner with them, as I did not want to engage in small talk before or after my strange request.

It was a difficult conversation. They had not seen a capsuleer before, and did not trust me. 

 

Moreover, at first, there was a very painful misunderstanding: they thought I had come to tell them about their daughter, Talya, who has been abducted by the Sansha now many years ago and who has never been found. So, when I started talking about Layla, they thought their daughter's corpse had been found. 

 

Once that misunderstanding was out of the way, and the shock was absorbed, I could explain my quest in more detail. But my story about a Takmahl who died a thousand years ago sounded like total nonsense to them, I think they took me for a madman. Hearing myself explain this to bereft parents made me sound like a madman to myself as well. 

 

What stupid request am I bothering these people with? Of course it makes no sense, and of course it would look to them as if I am torturing them and dragging them into some silly game designed purely for my own pleasure. I felt guilt and embarrassment. I could sense they just wanted to kick me out of their house, but did not dare to.

My sense of guilt was lessened, and my sense of embarrassment was increased, when Uldryk asked whether there would be an inheritance from this Layla. Maybe he meant it as a rhetorical and cynical question. Or perhaps he thought that there is a profit to be made from the madness of a capsuleer. Or maybe Uldryk was simply asking a price to cooperate in my games. 

 

And, to be honest, Layla's Takmahl cybernetic implants are worth quite some money to industrialists who can repurpose them. A Takmahl phrenic appendix alone is worth easily half a million ISK. I hid my disapproval of this materialistic turn of affairs, and swallowed my pride. I offered them half a million ISK. A fortune.

The mood changed instantly.

 

Uldryk opened a bottle of whisky he had kept for a special occasion, and insisted I drink with him. I remember the whisky tasting with Ishta and how sick I was afterwards, so I only accepted a very small shot glass. After downing a rather tall glass himself, Uldryk slapped my back and joked with me as if we had been old friends. He gladly signed the papers recognizing his genealogical link with Layla and releasing the corpse to me for scientific study. 

 

I transferred the lump sum and when he saw the money appear on his account, he took his wife in his arms to dance in joy. When I left, clearly it was only Uldryk's wife who was still thinking about their daughter.

A name and a system

It has been a very busy few days. I have been working with Keeper Thadron on the information I retrieved from the Book. I still feel somewhat dazed by my visit, it is hard to grasp the immensity of being surrounded by the history of our holy people. Thadron says it is quite common to remain overwhelmed for a couple of days.

 

The information was exactly what Keeper Thadron needed, he has to the best of his abilities tracked a common ancestor for the heretic Accadis branch and those that remained faithful. From that common ancestor, he worked his way forward, according to the hereditary laws appropriate for the time and place, until he arrived at one name: Uldryk Accadis, who lives on Akhragan III.

 

The fog of time and heresy does not allow for absolute certainty that this is the closest living relative, of course. But having formal paperwork signed by a Keeper and approved by the Book authorities is all that will matter to the Amarr Civil Service's clerks at the Department of the Deceased.

 

Of course, now another difficult task awaits. I have to visit this Uldryk identified by Thadron, and obtain written permission to work on Layla's corpse. Oh, what difficult task did I assign to myself? I have no idea even how to start this conversation.

 

The good Record Keeper had a gift for me, as we parted. He's done a quick genealogical research on my own family, and gave me a holocube with which I can project a galaxy of people and their links, that are part of my own lineage throughout the ages. This kind gift touched me deeply - we promised to stay in touch, and Keeper Thadron agreed to come to visit Mehatoor.

Sorting through the records

 -report continued-

 

Over breakfast, I asked Guide Maslan about the light. Rather than giving me a straight answer, she told me another of their tales. Elleka claims that long a ago, a family of Sani Sabik hid in the depths of the Book, fleeing persecution. They survive from eating the leather of the book bindings, and feast on rats and on the occasional visitor they can catch, although they are wary to eat Guides, afraid of the repercussions. My Guide also claims that in the area up where I saw lights, there is a statistically significant anomaly: too few rodents. That, according to her, is hard proof of the hidden Sabik. She says they reverted back to a feral state, and in the passing of generations have grown inbred and became horrorible to behold.

 

I objected that if the system can detect vermin, surely they can detect human beings wandering about. She just scoffed, telling me it's easy to avoid the cameras. I was not reassured. You see, in these inner layers of the book there is no telling that it was morning, it is always dark except for the spot of motion-activated light where you are. So, it again felt like a campfire tale, for breakfast.

 

We made it rather soon to my destination the second day. Keeper Thadron had given me a list of records to check. Every record contains basic data such as date of birth, partents, marriages, children, date of death. If the children on the written record do not match the digitized version, this means either an error or one of them got stricken. I could check this by locating the "missing records", and verifying if the line containing that name was indeed crossed out. My task was to tally up the missing branches of the Accadis lines.

 

Although my Guide was doing some maintenance in the neighborhood, I did not feel safe. Also, I was not comfortable. There were not chairs or desks to sit at, so I had to stand or sit on the ground and walk about to find the records within the confines of my section. I'm embarassed to admit I hid when the lights came closer, and only came out of hiding once I could see that it was Guide Maslan who had come back to my spot.

 

I took me four or five hours to complete the task, handling each book with records carefully, with gloves, and putting one back before taking another. But in the end it was a success, there was indeed one of the lines rife with heretics. If any Accadis would have fled Amarr on cryoships, it would be these ancestors. After I collected my documentation, we made our way back. This took the entire rest of the day, as Guide Maslan navigated a route that allowed her to pick up dead rats from some traps.

 

It was a strange sensation to be in there, and stranger to exit it back to the outside world. As if I had jumped into some strange pocket universe, with its own physics and its own concept of space. I am deeply grateful I had this unique experience, one that I will not likely forget. 

-end of report-

A night at the toilet

-report continued-

We spent quite some time repairing the collapsed stack, and I must have seemed been a bit annoyed at that, because my Guide explained that for her, this is a short "expedition". Usually, they stay about a week inside, doing several repairs and other maintenance work. 

We continued our way deeper into the Book. The smell of old paper deepened - records are kept on special acid-free paper that stays good longer. Amazingly, paper and parchment remain one of the most long-lived way to store information. Magnetic tapes, spintronics, optical storage, all the modern techniques turn out to have a shorter lifetime. Only chiselling something in rock beats paper.

The day ended with some climbing. Using the scaffolding and the stacks rather unceremoniously, Guide Maslan clambered all the way up to the ceiling to replace a broken light. After that, we made our way to sanitary station C13-4R4. It’s a toilet in what used to be a visitor’s area, before the area was swallowed up by the ever expanding records. It is still functioning, there are some sinks with running water too. We set up camp for the night and ate a simple dinner. No cooking on fire, since the fumes are not good for the records.

It was hard to catch sleep. Sometimes, you see lights going on in some distant part of the Book. Are there others supposed to be here? Guides working late? Or do the motion-automated lights get triggered by accident? By rodents? Then there were noises. Creaking wood. Something that sounded footsteps. Guide Maslan was sound asleep quickly enough and I did not want to wake her. It was not a comfortable night, my imagination was fueled by the stories of the Keepers about zombie librarians roaming the stacks.

-to be continued-

In the hallowed halls

-report continued-

The "outer layers" of the Book consist of a series of large halls. When they were new, these halls were reading rooms to which Keepers would bring requested records of the dead. The walls were lined with colossal shelving units, all the way up to the high ceiling. These once bore the weight of the living.

As the exponentially growing population caught up with the available space, more shelving was built, and the reading area contracted to a small island and then disappeared altogether. All this took place with a regrettable lack of planning, so it grew organically and there is now no neat rectangular grid of bookshelves. There are some straight sections that seem to go on endlessly - the scrolls and books extending as far as the eye can see into the dark, as the Book is not lit up all the time, and light only switches on where you are. You'd be a little island of light making its way in a ravine between steep cliffs of books.

Scaffolding divides up the halls horizontally, making new 'floors' connected with ladders or simple stairs. The first destination for my Guide was a corner that stored records of some lower Kador houses, and where a rodent alarm had gone off. No-one knows how rodents get into the vault that is the Book, or maybe they don't and the Book is like an island cut off from the rest of the world, where strange species will in time evolve and adapt to digest paper and parchment. Of course, the Guides have their own tales about the hidden fauna and warn about mystical flying killer rabbits. Reality is more prosaic: traps were set, using some Gallente cheese and Caldari nuts, to catch the rats.

Our next destination was a collapsed stack. Shelves have cracked and spilled their books for several floors: as the content of one shelf dropped on the one below it, it created a domino effect. I helped and sorted the books that had dropped all about while Guide Elleka Maslan replaced or repaired the shelving. The new materials that she carried along were put in place, but she is not relieved of burden, as the broken pieces cannot just be left behind but must be brought back.

-to be continued-

Entering the book

Dear reader, it was such a blessing to be inside Scripture, to be surrounded by it. I was successful in retrieving the information that I needed, but it took some effort. I have taken some notes, which I plan to transcribe to this log in the coming days.

The older parts of the Book are well defended and cared for. Looking at the building visible above ground one would never guess the massive defenses in place, nanite and plating reinforcements, shielding, heavy artillery placed in the neighborhood, and a garrison of elite soldiers about which I am not allowed to give any details.

 

Of course, you cannot enter the building from the front door above ground. That front door is just part of the facade - on the other side is just the wall of a massive vault. There is only one entrance, underground. You enter via a vault door leading into an old basement of the ancient building.

 

You do not enter before you have been thoroughly screened for weapons or explosive devices. I had to wear a tracking device at all times, and a subcutaneous chip that  can release a strong tranquilizer. Some people get so overwhelmed by their visit they become psychotic and have to be stopped. Also, it is yet another fail-safe against terror attacks.

 

Once the vault door closes behind you and your Guide, you feel as if you have entered a new world. There is a certain smell of old books, old paper. Not moldy - the atmosphere is controlled - but... dusty? The smell of old books is hard to describe, but anyone who has been to an old library and wandered between the stacks will recognize that smell. Or you could take an old book, one that has been on a shelf for a long time, and then open its pages and sniff it. That cherished smell, the librarian's favorite perfume, was my first sensation in this holy place.

 

My Record Guide was carrying a heavy backpack, almost larger than herself. Along our route there is a stack that has collapsed, and she was carrying materials to build new shelves. Elleka Maslan is small yet wiry and must be very strong - I felt ill at ease to be carrying so little weight while she took so much.

-to be continued-

Preparations

I received a briefing about our visit this weekend. 

To my surprise, we will spend the night in the Book, and I need to bring a sleeping bag, food and some toiletries. It takes some time to get to the spot I need to be and to get back. Also, my appointed Record Guide, Elleka Maslan, will do some other repairs and maintenance on our route. 

So we will camp near sanitary station C13-4R4. There is running water. It used to be a toilet for visitors when that part of the Book was new and still not filled to the brim with records.

I will not be able to communicate from inside the book with the outside world, so probably will not be updating my log in the next few days.

Tales of the Keepers

My visit to the Book has been fully approved, and the necessary paperwork stamped and signed. I can enter with a Record Guide on Saturday morning, and have permission to stay up to three consecutive days in some selected sections.

To celebrate this, Keeper Thadron and some of his colleagues took me out for dinner and drinks. We first went to an area close to the Book, with a lot of small restaurants and bars. After a simple but tasty meal, they brought me to their usual after-work bar.

The Guides and Keepers have a vast supply of legends and tales about the Book of Records, and especially about the vast labyrinth of bookcases and scroll racks. I think they were trying to impress me with their campfire stories, knowing that I will enter this harrowed collection soon.

They told me about poor souls that get lost in the Book of Records and never return. And they have a legend about a cursed Keeper who mislaid a scroll and is doomed to forever wander the halls in search for that elusive scroll. She continues to search even after her death, as a ghost.

All this they claim with a certainty that grows stronger after each round of beers.

I asked about the legend of the tree at the heart of the Book, with a carving from our prophet Dano Gheinok. In their minds, its existence is a self-evident fact. Even though no-one of those present ever saw it with their own eyes, they believe old Guides that claim to have seen it.

The tale the Keepers believe is that St. Gheinok, when he arrived on what we now call Amarr Island, created two settlements. The first one he dedicated to God. The Keepers situate it near the Grand Basilica since that is where Dano Gheinok also built the first church. The second one he dedicated to his love, Marie. The tree stood in a garden at the edge of that second settlement, where nowadays the Book of Records stands. The second settlement turned out to be on more fertile land and in time became more succesful than the first, and it grew to eventually engulf the first.

I pointed out that this story is meant as an allegory indicating that dedicating one’s life purely to God is more difficult than dedicating it to worldly love but that in the end the two can merge. Keeper Thadron and his friends were almost offended, they believe in their tale as literal historical fact.

They added that since the second village was dedicated “to Marie”, or “à Marie” in an old tongue, its inhabitants were soon called Amarrians. And that, in their legend, is the origin of our name, Amarr.

At some point one Guide who had been pouring beer down his throat as if there was a small black hole in his stomach, climbed on the table and with a grand sweeping gesture proclaimed that “All of this great galactic Empire is nothing more than a lovestruck guy’s attempt to impress his girl!”. We quickly forced him back down from the table and concluded our evening out, blaming his blasphemy on drunkenness and a partially Gallentean ancestry.

Family connections

I met with Keeper Thadron Dakha today. The holorooms are even more impressive than I imagined! He had prepared an overview of the Accadis family name. A large hall was filled with a galaxy of stars, each point of light representing an individual with that family name, over the ages. Countless points of light! And, if you try to pinch a star, it pops up with the information on the individual, and the links to other stars, the closest relatives, light up.

The points at the nearest end of the hall were colored, indicating the genetic match between people (named Accadis) alive today and the DNA sequence of Layla that I handed over to Keeper Thadron. He cross-referenced it with the genetic birth records of the the MIO. Colors more towards the violet end of the spectrum indicated a closer match. 

 

Then a pulse of light flowed through this galaxy, a wave going from the front of the hall to the back. It lit up a gossamer web of connections, broad in the front and funneling towards the back. Threads from different people from the present coalesced into common ancestors, until at the very back only a few illuminated threads remained as most of the namesakes of long ago did not have a line of children stretching all the way to the present. 

 

Going back to the time of the Sabik purges of Queron I, only three threads remain, two more strongly colored than the third. We are going to seek out these ones on the old records, to find out which lineage contained heretics.

 

When the scribes are instructed to strike out a name they do so using the blackest of inks. Digitally, the record disappears, but in the Book of Records, the page or card is not physically destroyed except when it concerns high ranking individuals. The name is just crossed out. This is how a poor soul disappears out of memory for all of Amarr. But in the Book, for commoners the crossed out line remains, a hidden, fading trace of existence, a last ember of hope for restitution.

 

Keeper Thadron suggests to find out about a Sabik branch of the family via these crossed out records. For that, we will have to delve deeply into the Book, with a Guide. The committee that would give the final approval for this is meeting tomorrow morning.

After his impressive display of genealogic craftsmanship, Keeper Thadron invited me for dinner and drinks with a few other Keepers and Guides tonight. I am looking forward to meet these men and women in charge of our collective memory!