EVE®: Templar One (41 page)

I’ll slit your throat first, and then yours second.

I’ll keep slitting and slitting until you’re all dead.

Until now, only a colossal mega-corporate deal could evoke such triumphant elation.
Not the kind of deal where both sides benefited, but the kind where she won absolutely, leaving her opponent utterly ruined.
That was the price of challenging her in the boardroom or anywhere else.

It was a euphoric overload; she was letting herself reach nearly orgasmic bliss, and then she noticed she had accidentally crushed the flowers in her hand.

This saddened her, but only for a moment, as she let the ruined petals fall back onto the soil.

Heth is going to die, Heth is going to die.

Mordu, my love, will stab his heart.

Oh, Heth is going to die!

The weekly meeting was moments away.
The guards would call her, and she would obediently follow, as she always had since becoming a prisoner in her own home.

Oh, Tibus, you’re going to think of me when you burn.

There was a cool breeze blowing through the arboretum from outside, and the flora’s natural perfume was intoxicating.

“Haatakan!”
the guard yelled.
“Uplink in five!”

Her fingers skimmed over her beloved plants as she walked toward the villa, all the while humming her twisted tune to the guards.
They gave her a datapad and guided her to a desk to await the feed of Tibus Heth and his cabinet.

She was beaming.

Today is the day.

GENESIS REGION—EVE CONSTELLATION

THE NEW EDEN SYSTEM

>>
SIGNIFICANCE
MISSION LOG ENTRY

>>FINAL RECORDING

Again, he called out from the darkness.

“We Jove do not sleep,” Grious told me.
“But I know you enjoy waking from a good rest.”

His cold voice contrasted with my comfort, which was alarmingly good.
I found myself still lying prone on the gurney I last remembered being in.

“Are you in any pain?”

I wasn’t at all—physically.
But emotionally I was distraught; I felt numbness in my chest, around my heart and throat, like the dreadful grief that follows loss.
I realized that I had become invested in what I had seen, when logically I knew I should have been repulsed.

“Some residual discomfort was expected,” Grious said, for the first time sounding somewhat compassionate.

“Residual from what?”
I asked cautiously.
“How long have I been asleep?”

“Long enough,” he said.
“Try to be calm.”

“I can’t,” I said, noticing my limbs were still immobilized.
“Who were those people?”

“Before I answer,” Grious said, “remember that you are speaking with a ghost.
The Jove imprinted on the memory stack of this AI no longer exists.
There were things he could say that I cannot.
Do you understand?”

“What does it matter if I do or not?”
I answered.

“Very well,” Grious said.
“What you call the ‘Sleeper’ civilization has origins that predate the collapse of the EVE Gate.
You already know they are our direct ancestors.
By the height of the first Jove Empire, they were an elite scientific subculture whose prestige stemmed from proficiencies in cryostasis, fullerene-based quantum computing, virtual reality, and biocybernetic technologies.
They were the undisputed masters of virtual worlds, able to create parallel existences almost indistinguishable from reality, as well as a new clone anatomy that allowed seamless passage between the two.”

Imagery began taking shape before my eyes; I was transported outside the
Significance
and saw the EVE Gate swirling before me.
Then we began moving backward in time.… Decades, centuries, millennia passed by in seconds, as the gate’s intensity ebbed and flowed until it swelled into the most violent maelstrom of its existence.

“To understand the Sleepers, you must first understand this perspective of humanity’s struggle,” Grious said, as time slowed to a halt.
“This is the EVE Gate, as it was right after collapsing fifteen thousand years ago.
Few stargates were operable in New Eden, and the warp drives of the era relied heavily on a fuel whose supply was tightly controlled by powerful factions.
This fleet of ships…”

Seven massive vessels entered the picture.
Each featured enormous domed forward superstructures, behind which extended several perfectly straight spines.
Twelve circular subsections similar to the concentric Sleeper stations of w-space were arrayed on each one.

“… contained what we called the Architects.
They are your so-called ‘Sleepers,’ Doctor.
They were commissioned to build the first stargates of the Jove civilization, which at the time occupied a single colony in New Eden.
You know it today as the Utopia system.
It may seem ironic to you, but they were the most technologically inferior and destitute race of that time.”

Specifications for the warp drives of the age appeared before me; they were outright primitive by today’s standards.
Most relied on inefficient isogen-catalyzed fusion reactors to generate warp cores, requiring long buildup and cooldown periods between warps.
It appeared as if the most advanced of these drives could generate speeds of just 0.0025 AUs per second—barely faster than the speed of light.

“These seven ships passed through before the cataclysm but were not fully fueled,” Grious continued.
“Faced with extinction, they pressed on to their intended destination—the Heaven Constellation—thirty light-years from New Eden.
The only reason they could even consider the voyage at all was because they built their mission around cryostasis and virtual storage.
With no assistance from warp drives, this journey would take decades to complete.”

I was taken inside one of the mammoth vessels and saw circular rows of cryogenically stored souls for as far as the eye could see.
Then I saw their humanoid caretakers performing tasks all over the ship, using shuttles and railed vehicles to traverse the spines.

“The Architects convalesced in time-dilated virtual reality to keep their minds prepared for the task ahead,” Grious said.
“But the crew you see caring for them had the greatest responsibility in the entire history of the Jove Empire.
They were the guardians of our race during its most vulnerable time.
They, along with each ship’s captain, were called the Enheduanni.”

These were literal motherships, each with some thirty thousand Architects aboard.
Stowed away along the spines, away from the circular cryostasis chambers, were modular containers filled with all the equipment and materials needed to build a single stargate, in addition to the basic colony infrastructure.
The virtual world inhabited by its passengers was primitive; the earliest version of a strange “Construct,” in which minds could interact but not grow.
It was restrictive and imperfect.
These people knew their world wasn’t real.
They dwelled within memories of the home they had left behind, anguishing over their prospects for survival—if they ever reached their final destination at all.
They tried to test the Construct, push its limits, break its inadequate laws, and for many, rebel against it.

The captains of those ships had to make unfathomably difficult decisions during the journey.

“Providing safe passage was just the beginning of their obligations,” Grious continued.
“The core mission of the Enheduanni was to guide the Architects from their virtual world back into reality at journey’s end.
Once there, they presided over the construction of the gates and the establishment of the colony.
To their eternal credit, all seven succeeded, securing our foothold in the New Eden cluster.”

Time accelerated, and I saw the first stargates of the Heaven Constellation.
Like the motherships, they looked nothing like present-day Jove architecture.
But then the imagery skipped forward thousands of years, omitting a huge gap in their history.
The academic in me, now fully engaged, knew what should have been there.

“What happened to the First Empire?”
I asked.
“What made it collapse?”

Grious paused.

“I am forbidden,” he said.

“Why?”
I asked.
“What can’t you tell me?”

The Amarr Empire had devoted immense resources to uncovering that dark mystery, finding nothing but dead ends.
Their motivation was founded in the search for superior weapons technology.
But I was driven by something else:

The fact is, when the most advanced civilization of mankind collapses, we had better understand the reasons why.

But Grious continued as though I had never spoken.

“By the time the Second Empire arose,” he said, “the Architects had transformed from an elite subculture to one of the most powerful and influential forces of our civilization.”

Imagery shifted forward to around the year 22,000 A.D.
The Heaven Constellation was a vibrant, thriving set of worlds, littered with distinctly Jovian structures, exactly like the sparse remnants we had found.

“Their technology evolved significantly,” Grious said.
“The imperfections of the first voyagers were corrected.
The Construct was now a network of minds, the perfect medium for scientific experimentation, where every possible variable of the living world could be re-created to test theories almost instantly.
Add the advantage of virtual time dilation and you can imagine that their advancements would take the equivalent of centuries or longer here.”

I certainly could
not
imagine.
As a researcher my entire life, the pace of discovery was always restricted by the constraints of reality, even with the Empire’s wealth supporting my work.
You can be fearless in a virtual world.
You can have any resources you need.
There are no obstacles.
There is only science and nothing else.

“The Architect’s virtual discoveries leapfrogged the real technological capabilities of the Jove Empire forward by generations,” Grious continued.
“The Enheduanni began overt attempts to influence our way of life directly, a proactive plot to guide our world closer to theirs.
They played the role of gods, deciding what new technologies to unveil, which leaders to support, and sabotaging interests they believed didn’t align with their interpretation of the greater good.
For a time, we tolerated it.
But then the Disease happened.
And everything changed.”

The Jovian Disease—a genetic affliction for which there is allegedly no cure.
It is believed to be responsible at least in part for the demise of that civilization and directly accountable for their absence from modern affairs.

“When the Disease surfaced, the Architects became something unfamiliar to us,” Grious said, “something more powerful than should have been possible in our civilization.
We believed they were capable of finding a cure.
Given their technology, it stood to reason they should have been able to.
But they claimed otherwise.
That made some think the Disease was engineered by them intentionally, to force us into compliance with their vision.”

“Is that true?”
I asked.

“They denied that charge,” Grious answered.
“But their exodus from the Heaven constellation began shortly after the Disease surfaced.
From there, they kept their technological discoveries hidden from us entirely and instead used them to support their migration while the rest of us struggled to find a cure.
We followed them to the fringe of the cluster.
When they saw that we would not give up, they took measures to ensure we couldn’t follow them at all.”

I knew there was much more to it than that.
I couldn’t explain how, but I felt as though the person whose memories I had seen would have much more to say about all of this.

“Marcus, you cannot comprehend what the Architects managed to accomplish,” Grious said.
“They reached a technological
singularity
in their virtual world—a civilization’s event horizon.
You saw a glimpse of it.
It is not possible to understand the intentions, motivations, or desires of a civilization that surges past this threshold.
And while the greatest minds in our society struggled to avert a potential pandemic, hundreds of millions migrated to the Architect’s virtual world to escape from the Disease.”