Rettic’s Log: The Sickness, Part 1

It was happening again.

Rettic awoke in a panicked sweat and ran to the sink, his stomach retching as he expelled an orange bile from his mouth. Pod fluid.

A flash of brightness suddenly filled the room with a perfect simulation of atmospheric morning sunlight. The window projections in the cheap Oursulaert temp-dwelling had mistaken his sudden movement for a wake-up routine. “I’m still sleeping,” Rettic said as he squinted so his eyes wouldn’t adjust to the light that was feeding his migraine. The room dimmed in apology.

The first time Rettic felt this he thought it was a faulty clone. The extreme disorientation. The need for sleep. It was more than a physical pain—it was an ever-present feeling of being lost. It pulled his brain, tilted his sense of place. It wasn’t safe to fly this way, but he had persisted with the intent to get himself in the wrong situation until the clone was finally ripped from its pod. Finally, relief.

But it didn’t last. In fact, over time it had gotten worse. The physical clone had nothing to do with it. It was a mental sickness—a psychological needle in his mind that he carried with his metaphysical existence.

Every time it happened the same way: He was born into a new clone body with the feeling of being able to breathe again, and over a few days, maybe weeks time, the pressure returned. The longer he stayed in the body, the more smothering it became.

Rettic washed his face and stared at his reflection in the mirror display, breathing slowly.

It was known as pod sickness. Independent bioengineers had claimed for years that research proved the potential of such a toll on an unchecked capsuleer’s mind state. Between the eternal sleeplessness, adjusting to artificial gravities, going years at a time without looking out a window, and the utterly surreal feeling of walking again after weeks in a pod—the earliest capsuleers were sometimes driven to extended states of psychosis. Sometimes they’d eventually recover after adapting to the realities of eternal life. Others remained as mentally capable in space as a rolling ore.

But with the regulation of cloning technology, Cromeaux Inc. now injects first time capsuleers with enough stabilization meds to have even the youngest of minds accepting their godliness as easily as they’d accept an ISK handout.

These days, the only capsuleers that still suffered from the now fabled ‘pod sickness’ were black market capsuleers. Pilots that were illegally cloned for the first time. Pilots that were illegally registered in CONCORD’s records. Pilots like Rettic.

Another white flash. But this time it wasn’t the windows. Rettic vomited again.

He yearned for solid ground. Not just dirt beneath his feet, but an existential ground. A home, or the closest thing he knew to it. He wanted his sister. A single reminder of her always brought back a cascade of memories that seemed more fogged every day: his father hunting in golden wheat fields, Aloraluna laughing in the creek. Clouds. Clouds that made his child mind know with piece of mind that Villore was the center of the universe.

Now his reality was twisted. There was no down, there was no up, and there sure as hell wasn’t a center to his universe.

Aloraluna, I’m dying. Where are you?

Rettic’s Log are the accounts of Rettic in-character, his history, and the story of my experiences in New Eden as seen through his eyes. Read all of them here.