A brief history of wormhole space

The Talocan era

The Anoikis star cluster is situated at a distance of roughly 1500 light years from Amarr, far beyond the reach of modern jump drives. It is believed to have been first colonized over 6000 years ago by an ancient and advanced race, the Talocan. They were masters in manipulating spacetime, far outstripping even the Jove in that particular science. We now believe that the Talocan could alter the very fabric of spacetime to allow easy travel via artificially generated wormholes. 

There was a control hub for these artificial wormholes, hidden in our very own cluster, in the system W477-P. This hub would have consisted of a vast orbital lattice surrounding the W477-P star. One of the functions of this stellar swarm was to generate and stabilize wormhole passages at will. There have been rumors of similar hub in Anoikis, but to this date it has not been found. 

The Talocan used this technology to maintain a network of interstellar routes in Anoikis, in our cluster (bypassing jump gates), and between them. Some believe that the Talocan even manipulated the locations of the stars in Anoikis or the strength of their gravitational field, but that is generally considered far-fetched. 

The Talocan vanished, both from our cluster and from Anoikis. We do not know what happened to them, nor exactly when they vanished. They left behind only a handful of derelict structures, among which the wormhole control hub around W477-P, which has kept functioning until fairly recently.

The Sleeper era

A certain faction of the Jove, the Sleepers, discovered this wormhole travel hub, sometime near the end of the Second Jove Empire, roughly 1000 years ago. The Jove of this faction are called Sleepers because their bodies reside in permanent hibernation, and they live their lives as disembodied infomorphs in virtual space. They did not inform the other Jove about the Talocan highway to Anoikis. The Sleepers relocated, in secret, to Anoikis to escape the internecine Jove wars that ended the second Jove Empire. 

It is only fairly recently, three hundred years ago, during the Third Jove Empire, that their brethren found out where they had gone to. By then, Sleepers had thoroughly colonized Anoikis and had become its new inhabitants, heirs to the Talocan. You will encounter Sleeper structures in wormhole space, and their drones are still active there. They will attack you, for example while you mine. They will become more ferocious going from class 1 to class 6 holes.

The Seyllin cataclysm

All this time, the passage to Anoikis remained a well-kept secret - parhaps only known to the Society of Conscious Thought or the Sisters of Eve. This changed abruptly on March 10, YC 111, when a cataclysmic event occurred that revealed Anoikis to all.

That day, the type-O giant blue star at the center of the Seyllin system in the Federation erupted with a ferocity never seen before. The eruption resulted in an highly energetic and strongly-focused plasma flare that not only destroyed the Gallente colony on Seyllin I, but also reached a hidden entryway to the Talocan wormhole network. 

The flare's energy was injected in the hidden Talocan network, leading to an overload of the network and a concomitant overload of the Talocan stellar engine at W477-P. The wormhole control hub was critically damaged. As a result, the wormhole connections were no longer kept in check and became uncontrollable. Suddenly, hundreds of unstable wormholes opened up all over New Eden, offering temporary pathways into Anoikis that could be traversed by our ships.

A mere six years after the Seyllin cataclysm, W477-P went supernova, and the Talocan control infrastructure stabilizing the wormhole network was lost. The remnants of the supernova can still be seen in the sky, and are known as Caroline's star. As a result, for the foreseeable future, wormholes will continue to appear randomly throughout our cluster, and they cannot be stabilized any more. 

The Capsuleer era

Wormhole connections to Anoikis are short-lived and randomly connect stars. This inherent instability is why the Empire's rule of law cannot be enforced in Anoikis, and no territory can be claimed. At first, Concord tried to ban all travel to Anoikis, but this travel ban was soon defied. The first (non-Jove) person to enter Anoikis was a Jin-Mei astrophysicist from CryoDron, Lianda Burreau. She is believed to have died at the hands of the Sleepers.

Of course, capsuleers and their organisations -attracted by the lawlessness of the place- could not be stopped either. They are now the de-facto (third-wave) colonists of Anoikis, battling over its resources with the remnants of the previous inhabitants, the Sleepers.

Footage analysis

The footage offered by yuanshenqidong confirms the tale of the other capsuleers that claimed to have visited the Jove regions. Their space - or more precisely the TO21-U system - seems to be devoid of any Jovian activity. The specialists at the Lamp's image analysis lab think that the footage is real, and offers a true glimpse of what happens in this sealed-off region of space.

Capsuleers are seen prancing around this seemingly abandoned space, and warping to unused Jove stations. No other signatures appear. The footage does not have a high enough resolution to see if the planets are inhabited, but from what we can make of it, it looks like the planets do not have large cities.

Where did they go? 

Did they succumb to the Jovian disease? Leave their physical bodies to upload their mind to a virtual world? Move to a different region? Perhaps they concentrate now on fewer systems, as they do not need two full regions of the cluster to support their shrinking population? Why then abandon their stations rather than move them, or at least strip them of all functionality?

I find it hard to believe than they went extinct so quickly - last contact was only a eight years ago, in YC118. Perhaps the activity of the Deathless may stir them once again into action, and cause them to reveal themselves again.

ooc acknowledgment: Thanks to yuanshenqidong for sharing the videos of their exploits; the links are to a Chinese version of youtube: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Z142167HY  and  https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV19T421X7cQ/  . The low-res versions can be viewed without any subscription. The images of the previous blog post were taken from stills of the low-res version of the videos.

First footage

The Lamp's security are proceeding well with their analysis of the links that I was sent by yuanshenqidong. It turns out to be footage from their incursions into Jove space. 

A trait often found in capsuleers is vanity; part of that is bragging about their famous exploits. In order to prove their trip into Jove space, yuanshenqidong recorded it. And mounted some sort of compilation of this footage, in two films of about ten minutes each. They are without narration, but one of them has a soundtrack with music which can only be described as previous-millennium soothing shopping mall music.

I have only obtained parts of the footage from our computer scientists - at a very low resolution unfortunately. To gain access to higher resolution, some sort of subscription is necessary which the security people think is either a Jita scam or an attempt at espionnage on LUMEN. Still, from the first low resolution images, the capsuleer is seen clone jumping from a Fraternity Building Management station in 4-HWWF (in Vale of the Silent) directly to a Jove station in TO21-U. This offers some tantalizing view inside the Jove station. It is mostly dark, a sign that it is no longer inhabited.

There, a covette is boarded, which undocks. The hangar force field appears to be active:

After a little while, a view of the entire station becomes visible.

The timestamp of the footage has been verified, YC126/05/06 . More analysis is to follow.

The Deathless: a biography?

There is a buzz in the archeologist community about recent logbook fragments that were found by capsuleers. These are logbook entries written by a Society of Conscious Thought archeologist called Yosef Okada. The community is divided over whether these are real or a hoax. 

There did exist an archeologist of that name, but the dean of the Archeology and Paleontology School of Hedion University is sceptical about the logbook. She points out that this Okada fellow has a very poor publication record so he is not a "serious" academic and certainly the claims in his logbook would not stand up to peer review.

From these logs, two stories seem to emerge. The first one is from before Yosef Okada joined the Society of Conscious Thought. He was an assistant archeologist investigating a dig site that dates back 15'000 years, on Caldari Prime. The site and the expedition were destroyed during the Gallente-Caldari war, collateral damage just before the dig would reveal its secret. That secret would have been some sort of evidence corroborating the existence of a common ancestral world for all of the peoples of the cluster. The dean remarks "The louder someone supports this evergreen feel-good myth, the weaker is the body of proof that they can present. In this case, any proof was conveniently destroyed by fusion bombs."

The second part of these logs recalls how the archeologist turned his back on the State and joined the Society of Conscious Thought, helping them with the investigation of the Jove. During his new expedition, he gained the trust of the Hrada-Oki clan, part of the nomadic Thukker tribe, and joined them in their travels. During Amarr's own age of exploration of the seas by sail ships, it was not uncommon that a scientist -often a botanist or geologist- would voyage along with the explorer to collect samples and then bring their collection back home to a major Scientific Society, hoping to become famous. Okada seems to have fulfilled such a role for the Hrada-Oki wandering clan, with the distinction that he never brought his collection of artifacts back to his masters, the Society of Conscious Thought. He turned rogue.

Again, according to these unverified logs, the Hrada-Oki caravan (perhaps with Okada's help) eventually hit an archeologist's grand prize: a passage to an abandoned Jovian nexus system, Zarzakh. It seems that both the Society of Conscious Thought and the Drifters were searching for this valued place. The prize is more than a functioning Jove station, now known as the Fulcrum. There are also ships of Jovian design - or based on it. And who knows what other Jovian technology can be extracted from it!

While two dogs are fighting for a bone, a third one runs away with it. Neither the Society of Conscious Thought, nor the Drifters got their prize. The Deathless and his Hrada-Oki friends did. There are hints in these retrieved log entries that the Deathless is none other than Yosef Okada himself, transformed by the Fulcrum into whatever being he is now, straddling (I quote:) "a world of substance, a world of dreams, and a world beyond." Clearly, humility is not his strong suit. Anyway, another hint that the Deathless is Yosef Okada comes from Okada's life: his disappointment with the State, and his connections with dubious clans in Molden Heath would explain the Deathless' association with both Angel Cartel and the Guristas.

Now that I suspect that the Deathless is a struggling archeologist, I have a strange new appreciation for him, although I still strongly disapprove of his career choices.

The way into Jove space

The contacts all have strange callsigns; often just a list of meaningless symbols such as "DY HEII K", "jie11 jie", or "JFZY2". But in the end, one of them agreed to talk.

There was something out of place about the man, I could sense it as soon as he entered the little restaurant. He did not fit in, like a square peg trying to fit in a round hole. He acted at the same time nonchalant, flattered, and paranoid. 

He spoke a language I have never heard before; not even among the Grassbladians. Somehow the universal translator seemed to manage, but it did slow down our conversation a lot and I think some things got lost in translation.

He told me his alliance had a secret way in; it was not any lost gate like the Deathless stumbled upon. Rather, they have managed to keep a cloning facility running in one of the abandoned stations in the system of TO21-U. 

Apparently, there are no Jove to be seen in the system. They have abandoned the system altogether. A capsuleer (or several, that was not clear) from his alliance is able to clone-jump to that abandoned station, and has access to a ship that can generate a cynosural field. That is how they bring in others.

There are no gates to other systems from TO21-U. There are no pirates, or any activity in the system. My contact did not see any wormhole appear, but could not exclude that some might open up, as he was not actively looking for them. So, what are they doing there? They are there because they can, he said. I think it is some show of power or prowess among the barbarians. 

I would certainly not be allowed in, unless I broke ties with the Empire and joined their alliance; a thing I most definitely will not do. They would probably force me to adopt a callsign like "Th3O 7r". 

And that's it. That is all he wanted to say. He did show me some concord combat logs to prove his presence in TO21-U; then he left.

I am not sure what to make of this strange tale. Are the Jove really gone?

Lost and Found

I found frustratingly little new information on the Jove. For a school that celebrates a link to the Jove empire, they do not seem to have special knowledge about them that cannot be obtained at Hedion University.

Something that I did find and which relates to my quest, is that under the Jovian Directorate of the third empire, there was an agency called the Lost and Found Section Unit. This agency was in charge mostly of searching and retrieving missing Jove technology or artifacts that had resurfaced in the wrong hands.  Whatever they considered to be the wrong hands. More often than not, that would be us Amarr. 

The agents of this section unit, referred to as the 'Lost and Founders', were not just looking for Jove technology. In fact they were going after any advanced technology that would be harmful to a lesser advanced society that came across it. Think of cavemen finding a suitcase nuclear weapon. The job of the Lost and Founders was to identify and retrieve things like the suitcase nuke in the cavemen society.

They seem to have been quite interested in our relics as well, especially the Ametat and Avetat. They do not believe that these were a gift from God, brought by the Sefrim to emperor Amash-Akura. To them, these relics must be potentially harmful advanced weapons that the emperor has received from renegate aliens, perhaps Jovian dissidents. As they fixated on this blasphemy, they have searched for the sceptre and crown around the cluster. 

It is telling that they have been particularly active in areas and systems where also professor Bathana has been looking.