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"No flourishes today, I’m afraid. Just inquiry and answer.
“First questions from one “Duke Shasta”, who as I’ve been told has taken an interest in my activities. Not sure why, but everything I’ve heard in my channels suggests he’s above board. In any case, my answers won’t be anything that I haven’t already said, or can’t say at present. Anyway, first up:”
"I am Mahazkei Kiijata, born Sakabkei Kiijata. I was raised on a habitable moon by both parents, and I have two siblings, a sister and an adopted brother. Basic stuff. Once I was old enough, I sought service like my dad, and quickly got into engineering.
"A few designs later, and I made what could be considered today as a prototype Block. That went well until it blew up fighting Nation invaders. I lost an arm, and didn’t see any frontline service for a few years, instead going to the logisitcal chain, mining belts and breaking down salvage.
"After the prototype things weren’t great, and then the Drifters came along. I signed onto the early Alpha clone program, fully expecting to make a bigger impact. Like many in those early days, I was among the few to survive an encounter, and live to tell about it. After participating in a smash op, I was released to go independent. Met some guys shortly after who showed me the ropes, and I settled into belt and contract ratting.
"Things were slow until the Trigs came along. Not wanting to be left behind and be more useless than a corvette in a capital fight, I did some dangerous experiments with a Perun Trig suit to try and offset my… instability in abyssal deadspace, and ended up having it be all but grafted to my biology. Most people know that story by now. Couldn’t take it off or transfer clones without serious drawbacks that would have in all likelihood have lead to my final death, or would have set back any infomorphic backups by a few years. So I was grounded, or limited to low risk abyssal runs, and then…
"I met Lauralite Brezia. And the rest is history.
"As for why there’s two of me, there are and are not.
"Myself, sitting here, conversing with you, am a warclone model with a different first name, the origins of which are another story. The other, Sakabkei Kiijata, is for all intents and purposes, the original man with the plan, and he spends his time at home, raising the kids.
"Why are we two people? When the situation at Skarkon was brought to my attention - speaking for both of us - I had just witnessed the birth of my kids. I knew that I should stay home and raise them, but I had been working on a pet project for years that I thought would help save a lot of lives. So my mind was split on the issue.
"Literally, to save us the trouble of doubt and uncertainty in our choices.
"Suffice it to say making duplicates of yourself, and being a capsuleer is illegal, there are several loopholes that allow similar, and divergent infomorphic copies under different liscences.
“So while he’s mostly retired, Saka is a capsuleer, and I am not.”
"See the above. But to expand on that, it was also a part of the paperwork, since we can’t both have the same name on file. For all intents and purposes, we’re effectively genetic twins with a few tweaks. The story of my name, however, is one I won’t be covering anytime soon in detail, but to give you something, here’s this:
“It mean to change its meaning from what it was to something better, through deed, being here. It’s less of a first name, as it is a title of sorts, a designation as one might shout a rank.”
"Ah, the meat and potatoes of my whole IGS presence.
"Block is a lot of things. If I were to say that Block is a tank, that would not be a lie, but in saying so it would be an underestimation, like saying that a carrier is a ship.
"Block is an up-armored MCC, that’s Mobile Command Center for those not in the know, and her usage is not unlike a standard MCC.
"Except she doesn’t fly. Not unless we push her to. She can, but when she does she looks like a floating brick the size of a firebase.
"Her functions are many, and most I would not say for opsec’s sake if nothing else, but she is mostly self-sufficient for an operation duration of a few years. After that I’d recommend she goes home with me to get all the dust blown out and get a new coat, and do some tests to see how well she did.
"She’s AI mounted, nothing above Aura level, for frame of reference, and that eases a lot of the automation processes ongoing at any one moment in time. That cuts down on minimal crew requirements substantially, and it’s meant we can stay out here almost indenfinitely.
“Wouldn’t know where we’d be without her.”
"See above. When the Trigs first revealed themselves, I wanted in on the action as quick as I could manage it, and I didn’t want a repeat of the Drifters and my first encounter with them.
"So I dove. Unfortunately, for reasons we still don’t understand, myself and abyssal deadspace do not get along. I got horrible shakes and panic attacks and ran on instinct just trying to get through single encounters, let alone the whole thing.
"We’re still not sure if it’s the result of overstimulisaton or specific stimuli, but it was bad. We didn’t get many artifacts of note or much in the way of concrete data because of those problems.
"So I get this idea. The Trigs have likely spent much of their existence in abyssal deadspace, and have adapted to survive its… unique environmental conditions. I figured that’s what parts of the suit were for.
"So after a few dives, and pulling some strings, I got a suit, and put it on.
"It’s pretty well adapted for capsuleer physiology, and it did definitely reduce the negative responses I had before, but it wasn’t all there.
"A few tests in, we get some results, and I call it a day.
"The real trouble was trying to take it off.
"I get it off, and go to take a shave and shower. Few minutes in, and the tremors are back. Except I’m in highsec. And it’s not stopping. And it was escalating.
"I ended up nearly aspyxiating myself and causing heart failure due to my uninhibited screaming, of which I had no control over. Sedation did little to change that, so they hauled my body over and put me back in.
"Turns out the suits are made to alter brain and biochemistry to better deal with abyssal conditions, and a few other things I won’t bring up now. What happened to me was a malfunction of sorts, caused by my misuse of the suit, and failure to read the user manual.
"Of which none exist.
“So that was a thing for a while. Couldn’t clone jump either since it did something to my infomorph that’s still being studied today. But that leads to the next question.”
"Here’s where things get tricky. See, There were no other cases like mine, since everybody else did the smart thing and gutted the suits to a basic plate, hood, mask, and jacket before puting the damn things on, so to my knowledge before the advent of Kybernauts there wasn’t anything else like me.
"So in order to get some straight answers, we went and found some Triglavians who were willing to help me out.
"Actually, that’s a lie, we snared their ship, and interned their crew.
"Bear in mind this was when Trigs were starting to show up in K-space, but before the motherships started getting built and deployed, so there wasn’t much to worry about in terms of scale of difficulty. By that time I had been with the UNF for a year or more, and when I told them my plan they agreed to help execute it.
"We cleared the field of everything save for one one Vedmak which we isolated, webbed, scrammed, nos’ed, and hit with every neut and ewar package we could fit, until we could board it.
"When we did, the crew didn’t resist, and seemed more curious than anything. So we took them, and the ship, and had them contained for a few months while we looked for a specialist to try and communicate with them.
"That specialist turned out to be Thuri Actusmargo, and one of my closest friends to date.
"She got a few of them to talk for a bit, and then…
"Well she went away for a while. When she came back she had their ear, and with the rest of the crew assembled, they had this to say to me.
"Turns out what I had one was start a process of conversion, of sorts, but I had not willingly done so to fully become a member of the Collective. So they gave me a choice.
"Revert, and don’t ever wear the tech again without the desire to join.
"Stay as I was, and suffer the consequences of my misuse for as long as I would live.
"Or consign myself to them to fully integrate.
"Academically speaking, I was excited b the prospect of learning more by joining, but they informed me I wouldn’t b able to relay my discoveries. And that I would have to give up most of my life to them in order to learn anything further.
"Before the UNF, I’d have taken that offer in a heartbeat. Things weren’t looking good then, and my mental state was tenuous at best, so their offer held more stability for me than the empires could at the time.
"But after the UNF? I couldn’t. I had made a family with them, even before the children.
"I made my choice, but not before I got some insight from them which has informed me to this day on how to conduct myself around them when trying to get things done.
"I, Mahazkei, put on the suit again and went back to being an “in between half-Trig” in order to deal with the environments on Skarkon, and so far it’s worked. But per the agreement and understanding, the Collective does not recognise me as Triglavian, or Kybernaut, so they still shoot at me if I get too close.
"Information being what it is today, some things are still less clear than before, but for the most part if I have to put myself between someone and a Trig, I know how to do so without drawing all of their attention and firepower down on my head.
“I think I’m something of a curiosity to them now, and it hasn’t backfired yet, so my condition has been beneficial to our operations to date.”
"Pretty successful. A lot of people are still stuck, and that’s mostly due to quarantine and trying to limit how many leave at the same time to reduce potential losses, and try not to draw too much attention from folks who would do them harm.
"That does mean that we’re stuck in limbo, sort of, trying to study the condition of the mutadapted, but most of the family groups are still in one piece, and being treated well while we sort them out. Since they’re not in immediate danger anymore, most of them are willing to understand and play nice until we can ship them out to wherever they want to go from here.
"As for the second part, I discussed a case of how our efforts are met, but for the most part all of our meetings have been like that. Some want to leave, some don’t. Those that don’t, we try to help them along as best we can to assist in their life style. If they really don’t want our help - and there haven’t been many cases like that, but they do happen - we keep a wide berth, and leave them alone.
“And we’re not going to force them. If that’s how they want to live, let them. Trying to fight that brings nothing but trouble, and doesn’t reflect well on us and our efforts to be an enabler for getting off-world, or improving a situation.”
"Go home. Take Block with me, go home, merge my infomorph with Saka’s, and live out the rest of my “existence” as memories from a distant world while Saka has a normal life.
"Before a follow up or something comes around, we’ve both agreed that we’re the same person, and two of us when there doesn’t need to be is conterproductive, and brings more scrutiny to our lives than we need, trying to raise children.
“So that’s that. When my time is up, I get to reunite with my family.”
He clears his throat, and sounds significantly different. This is a different section of the recording, and may have been recorded on a different date.
“The next questions are from one of my family members back home, Gies, and some repeat questions from her sisters. It’s been a long time since I saw her last, and I’m eager to hear from her again.”
“As well as one can, on rations and the occasional home cooking. Not much to say there. I don’t want to put my fist through the nearest wall, like I’ve been eating the same food for a year or more, if that’s what you’re asking. There’s enough variety to keep myself and everyone else sane around here. And definitely a balance to keep us fit.”
" A while, but not as long as you would think. Sometimes there are long stretches of nothing as far as outside activity goes, so we have a lot of spare time to go around for a while.
"Sometimes we don’t get that luxury, so we can’t do much.
“But I assure you I’m making time when I can to lay down and talk to your sister over here. She helps me out a lot.”
“Dear, if I come back, no, when, it’ll be to stay.”
"When I’m back and merged, give them all to Saka. He will need it. I hope you’ve been helping him take care of the kids. He’s hellbent on trying to do it himself, and he needs support. My time here taught me that.
"I think I’ll end the questions here. Anything else comes up, I’ll write back when I make time, but these questions have taken a lot out of me. I gotta get back to focusing on work. But this was good. Reminds me of why I’m here. Mahazkei out.