Read all chapters here.
Rettic entered a small office, its downward facing windows granting a hazed view of the raucous bar. A Seibestor man sat at a desk, leaning back in a leather chair. Quite a costly item, being skinned of land-born game, noted Rettic, but by far the only article of worth in the room. This man’s attempt to project an air of status deceived him.
The escorting guards gathered behind the desk on either side of the Seibestor.
“You’re breaking a lot of rules here, Ekko,” Rettic said as he sat in the chair across from the man. “Can I still call you Ekko? Or, while we’re dismissing anonymity, do you want to tell me your real name too?”
The man immediately pulled out a handgun and pointed it directly at Rettic’s head.
“Woah, watch it!” Rettic slid back in his chair, the legs screeching on the metal floor. The bodyguards shifted their weight as if preparing to pounce on cue. “I ain’t breaking the rules here. And I’m the one gladly paying here so there’s no need to rob me. I just need my answers…”
“You fucking with me, sonny?” said Ekko in a raspy, thick accent.
Rettic stared back in a thorough state of confusion. “Ah, no. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say you’re the one fucking with me.”
“Shut… your mouth.” Ekko sat forward and spoke quietly. “Listen to me, boyo, I run a serious business here. It comes with risks, and when it comes to searching for things, namely people, we like to complete the job. Completing jobs ties up loose ends,” Ekko mockingly gestured with his fingers. “Incomplete jobs leave dust…debris…that could lead back to us. You get me?”
Rettic stayed motionless, returning the stare with equal intensity.
“So you pay me to find someone, but with some serious lookin’, all we come to find is that there ain’t no one to find. Rules was broken when you gave us a shit job. So, again, I’ma ask you. Are you fucking with me?”
Rettic’s head began to stir. Anger was boiling over in him. The feelings of the sickness climbed up his spine—the engines of disorientation fueled by rage. He closed his eyes and spoke clearly, “So you didn’t…finish…the job.”
“What I’m saying, boyo, was that there wan’t…no…job…to finish,” Ekko coughed.
Rettic jumped forward and grabbed the man’s gun, nearly breaking his wrists as he turned and shoved it under his chin before the guards had a moment to react. Ekko breathed through his teeth and he smelled the ion smoke seeping from the gun barrel. He calmly motioned his hands for the guards to stand down.
Rettic continued to speak slowly, with deliberation. “I pay you millions upon millions of kredits to simply locate my sister in any reach of known-space, and you point a gun at my head because you couldn’t finish the fucking job.” He cocked the gun. “Where is my sister?”
Ekko began to smile as realization came over him. “So, you really weren’t fucking with me huh?” He raised his eyebrows toward the two guards before returning his gaze. “You really don’t know, do you? The fuck is wrong with you?”
Rettic looked back and forth to the other men, who began to laugh under their breath. His stomach began to churn. Why is the sickness returning? It hasn’t been long enough. This clone isn’t a day old.
“…You don’t look to good neither, sonny. I’m thinkin’ it’s been a while since you got your stabilization meds? Your clone ain’t treating you too right is it?” He continued to laugh as Rettic’s loosening grip eased the gun from his neck.
“What don’t I know?” Rettic said, feigning disbelief. He already knew. He knew all along. In some depth of his consciousness, he knew all along. This was the root of his crashing mind-state. This was his sickness—the descent of time as the universe bends around him.
“Your sister…” The Locator stared at Rettic with a slight air of sympathy, as one would look at a lost child. “…she’s been dead for over fourty years, brother.”
Black.
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.
Read all chapters here.
Rettic’s camera drone eyes were fixed on a nebulae cloud’s eternal dance through the stars. Eternity. What a concept. And how long have you been reaching across these heavens, old cloud? What are you reaching for?
His daze was interrupted by the shadow of a Megathron class boat passing overhead. He was close enough to feel the turbine thrusters reverberate across the hull of his ship, like nerves would feel a low wind brushing over the skin. He returned his camera eyes forward to see the station—Trust Partners Warehouse. It was of Minmatar build, protruding antennae and raw solar panels raking the surrounding space. Aside from the Megathron and a few docking cruisers, it was quiet. There were no apparent signs of any of these ships looking to engage his Myrmidon.
After being released from his pod, he kneeled on the metal grated floor for a moment, allowing himself to take a few slow, deep breaths. It hasn’t started yet. So far, this fresh clone had reset his bearings, relieving him of the debilitating nausea and extreme disorientation he had suffered for countless months in previous clones. It would return though. It’s only a matter of time.
He wandered the station looking for the nearest public space. That’s where they’d meet him—where there was a crowd. It’s always safest that way.
In an open mall area littered with rusty shoppe signs, one in particular seemed to be winning the hearts of the stationsiders: Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo. Matari loved to tease a little elegance with ancient dialect.
“Step back, coat open,” said the Sebiestor doorman as he gestured with a metal pipe. Weapon checks. This is definitely the place. The guard took extra time inspecting Rettic, as he certainly stood out amongst the body tattooed, leather strapped crowd. Rettic opened his grey overcoat showing an empty holster attached to his mexallon mesh body suit, glinting a dusty green in the dim light.
The bodyguard nodded for Rettic to enter.
He sat at an empty table far from the commotion at the bar. The room was pulsing with the heartbeat rhythms of Vherokiorian music as women danced above on walkways that doubled as rafters supporting the height of the reaching ceiling.
Some in the room were capsuleers, most were capsuleer crew, which, in null sec, are an equally dangerous lot. Any crew fearless enough to support a pilot’s ship in the outer rim is as unafraid of death as your average clone. They’ve not only accepted their temporary stay here in space…they embrace it.
The sound of breaking bottles nearly drowned out the music. It wasn’t but a minute longer before three men approached Rettic.
“I stand out that much, huh.”
“You need to come with us, Gally,” spoke the tallest one. “He requests to see you in private.”
“The rule was to meet in public.”
“Rules changed.”
Rettic nodded in defeat, put out his cigar and stood to follow them through a guarded corridor past the crowd.
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.
Read Part 1 here.
Rettic is standing in the hangar of a space station. He hears the noise of the crowd, feels the pedestrian masses pass him by, somehow knows which are capsuleers and which are only flesh—Is that all they are to you now, Rettic? Fleshy organisms?—but he sees no one. He looks down at his hands and they’re sculpted of tritanium. Am I no longer flesh?
The station is an atrium. There are floors of wheat and a wind sways them as it pulses through the surrounding corridors as if through ventricles of a heart. There is life here. But whose?
In the middle of the atrium are fifteen moons surrounding a single large planet. They bounce around like child’s toys. He even hears the voices of kids playing, tossing worlds between them like a game. Villore IV. He approached the planet, inspected its surface but only from a distance. He wanted to get closer but couldn’t. This was my home.
But it changed. As he looked closer he realized it wasn’t a planet at all, but the nucleolus of a cell. A cell in the heart of the station.
With a flash of light, Rettic was violently ripped from the heart. Veins burst and blood as deep as oil erupted as tiny orbs in a vacuum. He could observe the heart bursting for only a moment before being ripped back further. Flesh. Flesh soft and unharmed. Real, human flesh. Unlike his own. He ripped back once again to see the face of the organism. Aloraluna. His sister staring blankly into his eyes. She, larger than worlds, but infinitely broken.
Alora, say something.
With her ivory hand she lifted a gun to her chin and pulled the tri—
“NOOOOOOOO!” Rettic awoke in a sweat drenched bed, a dim light from the Crielere star peeking through the blinders on the window. The capsuleer’s sickness had reached the peak of its cycle again. This clone would have to die soon, or his mind would be lost.
As Rettic threw his sheets to the floor, he noticed the mirror over the sink flashed a projection in the corner. It was a message.
We have information as you had requested. Please meet me in M-MD3B IV - Trust Partners Warehouse at your earliest convenience. Make sure no CONCORD follows you out of their jurisdiction.
-x
Rettic deleted the message and walked to the window. He opened the blinders and allowed the star’s light to hit his skin. It felt sensitive, having not seen the light of day for what felt like years.
I’m coming to help you Alora, as I know you can help me.
He lifted a blaster to his head and pulled the trigger.
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.
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.
