Photon emission requires energy not being transferred as heat. It’s possible to have friction at extremely small scales that does not meet the required level, even at the extremes of radio frequencies. You’d need a wavelength of extreme size, probably longer than the infinite redshift threshold, and obviously it would need to, you know, not continue long enough hit the period of that wavelength, but it’s possible. And that’s all I was saying.
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“What Is This Place?”
Yesterday I found myself in a darkness flooded with strange light, a sort of violet-tinged twilight that seemed to extend forever. The luminous clouds that so often fill this space were only a faint twinkling against that sea of muted light, barely visible.
For the most part, I’ve spent enough time in the Dark to become resistant to its charms and matter-of-fact about the business at hand, but it still has at times the power to astonish, as when a flash of light in what seemed a perfect, featureless darkness catches my eye, and then another, and I realize (while wrestling with a squadron of power-munching Lancers) that I’m seeing the faint light of the local star reflecting from crystal formations tens of kilometers long jutting from an asteroid that would dwarf even a Drifter Hive-- invisible in the velvet dark.
Where are we, when we dive into the Abyss? Comms and cloning systems continue to function. Local goes dark. There’s always a star whose system we must be in, but-- what star? And why is it always so far away?
And, being as it is so far away (and our ships usually deal with solar gravity casually even when we’re virtually hugging the solar surface), what is causing the gravitational flux (or whatever the word might be) that creates these strange pockets?
The pocket isn’t fully natural. It’s bounded by a field of energy, and we’re not the only ones depending on it; Drifters, rogue drones, Triglavian ships–none of them will leave it. I’ve even heard reports that suggest that they can’t-- that it acts like a solid wall that their shields bounce off of. It seems like a reasonable safety feature, really, although it also feels like it denies them some potentially useful tactical options (ducking outside isn’t instantly fatal, as I’ve accidentally learned).
The Triglavians’ singularity-based power systems might give us a clue to what sort of thing causes such a strange warping of gravity and spacetime-- this is probably something to do with black holes. Only, aren’t the physics of black holes sort of more … predictable, than this? The Abyss is full of drifting objects, many of them broken by the turbulence but really pretty surprisingly intact and stable considering what they’re adrift in. And those crystal formations-- are those really Isogen-10? (If so, it might need to be reclassified from “rare” to “virtually inaccessible.” Those crystals are palatial. Actually I’m sure some of them dwarf any Imperial palace ever built.)
Not even Anoikis begs the question, “Where am I?” so strongly. Where is the Abyss? Where are the pockets? It seems like, if they were close by, we should be able to see them somehow; local environmental conditions are really unsubtle. Shouldn’t a Firestorm system, for example, be blazing like Caroline’s Star? (About which: Hmm.)
But they don’t. We can’t see them. They’re not on the charts.
When I dive the Abyss, where am I?
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“A Passing Thought”
Something’s been bothering me: it’s clear that Drifter ships don’t fare particularly well in the Abyss. What we’ve been seeing isn’t the Drifters at their best at all, and it looks like the Triglavians are fighting them to a standstill, if not defeating them outright. (After all, this is the Collective’s home ground.)
So why are they there?
Have we ever really confirmed what caused Caroline’s Star? What became of the Jove? Why the Drifters and Triglavians are fighting? Why CONCORD thinks the Triglavians are enough of a threat to sic us on them?
For so long we assumed we were the main focus of the Drifters’ attention. That was natural enough-- with the Jove gone silent it didn’t seem there was anyone else for them to focus on. But what if we’re not even what the Drifters were most concerned with in the first place?
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We don’t know. So we should kill everything to be sure.
… I think that’s how the reasoning goes in these parts.
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Something you might want to consider: We’ve seen the fleets of damaged Drifter battleships. We wondered just what the devil they were fighting that left them in that condition. We get those fragmented video segments that get reassembled into images of the Drifters and Trigs fighting. Then CONCORD announces the Trig discovery.
So we do what we’re expected to do: we go in. We go in and we get into fights and we recover new things and we make them valuable because they’re new and different and we want them… but other than because we want them, these things have no value. The Empires aren’t clamoring to get Leshaks. If they were, they’d reverse engineer their own versions of them, and their weapons. They sure as fek don’t care about Triglavian gangsta style.
We assume the Trigs are the ones responsible for the massive fleets of damaged Drifters. We don’t know that, though. And we’re only assuming CONCORD considers them to be a real threat. For all we know… they don’t. They’re sending us in there under these controlled conditions. If they really thought this was a threat, they’d be looking for ways to do more than just lose completely disposable agents in there who can’t do a damned thing to either study or degrade the facilities we encounter—the gates.
These Trigs haven’t demonstrated any intention to come out of their pockets to attack us or the Drifters in k-space. We haven’t seen them in Anoikis attacking the Hives. Every piece of analysis we can do on what we’re seeing and experiencing seems, right now, to point to controlled experimentation and observation. It’s likely on us. It might not be just us.
We don’t know they’re actually at war. The footage we’ve seen could very well be from exactly the same kind of controlled conditions we’re going into. The Drifters might be just as much test subjects as we are. They might be going in there of their own volition, just like we are.
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Well … it’s not exactly the same, though, because they’re diving (if they’re diving) with whole fleets of ship classes we don’t get to use. We do it solo, cruisers only. Also, for whatever reason we’ve never seen either Scylla or Kyribdis outside the Abyss.
Can’t agree that the artifacts we’re recovering are valuable only because we want them (though that’s also a true statement, but mostly just to the degree that it’s true of everything). We don’t know that the empires aren’t aiming to get their hands on the same materials, and CONCORD, for one, is actually literally buying Abyssal survey data from us. We might be performing a rite or a test; CONCORD appears to be preparing to actually chart it and maybe open the way for colonization there.
And it’s not clear that we’re not the only ones who can easily afford, or properly use, the materials we need to do this seriously. There are military capsuleers, but I’m not sure they can be spared for this kind of duty, or that the militaries are prepared to outfit them in stuff like mid-grade Crystals. Then again, we also don’t know that the national militaries aren’t diving the Abyss, themselves.
Are we being experimented on? … Maybe. Is it weird if I mostly only care from the point of view of trying to understand the situation better?
Is CONCORD working with the Triglavians to run these tests or whatever they are? … I kinda doubt it. They probably wouldn’t need us to be getting survey data back for them if the Triglavians were talking to them willingly, and the fact that they want this data suggests that they’re planning to try to find ways to either give us broader access to the Abyss or get it themselves. That’s potentially the beginnings of an actual invasion, instead of these short raids or whatever we’re being sent on.
It doesn’t feel like a pact to me. I realize that’s a pretty intuitive statement, but, it’s true. It feels like the beginnings of exploring what’s basically a deeply-hostile, unexplored territory.
(I would still really like an explanation of exactly where this place we’re diving into actually is. The answer probably will have a lot to say about why we’re doing this.)
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Nope, it’s not the same. But… we also don’t know how long they’ve been doing this. In a year, will we still be going in solo? Will we still be limited to cruisers? Or will we have the option of going in there for longer periods of time, in small groups, with a variety of hull sizes… to potentially be the challenges in someone else’s test?
As for the survey data… why’s it even there, Aria? It’s being fed to us, same as anything else in those caches. If the Triglavians are as hung up on testing, evaluation, and competition as the evidence appears to show so far… they’re not going to cooperate directly. They’re going to make CONCORD earn the mapping data they want—the mapping data that has no other reason to exist in these caches in the form we recover it.
I mean, the Trigs don’t need to get it from these caches. They already have it. And nobody else we’ve encountered in there seems interested in the caches at all. It’s the piece of cheese in the maze.
As for where the Abyss is… it’s ‘there’. The answer to where, exactly, ‘there’ really is… will say nothing about why we’re doing this. It may say something about why CONCORD enabled it… but why we are doing it will remain, well…
At least, that’s you. And it’s a pretty good reason, really. For me, it’s a whole lot of curiosity, and a nearly-as-big desire to get my hands on some really amazingly advanced technology and tinker with it in ways that probably aren’t quite safe or legal. 
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The center of a black hole? My closet? The void in Napkin’s soul where love should be? We may never know.
Uh … I have to report that this bit of his soul isn’t actually empty.
It might make some stuff easier if it were. For example, the Achura might not be officially considered Minmatar by the Naupliite cult (active membership: 1-3) if he hadn’t had feelings for one or two of us.
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Thank you, Ms. Jenneth. That was a very nice thing of you to say.
So Nauplius had feelings for a Matari eh?
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It’s not like he didn’t spend years waxing poetic about ‘the thighs of the Vherokior’.
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He had a thing for “1-2 Achurans” then declared them Matari. How long until Nauplius decides he’s Matari and is simply trying to level the dating scene so he has a chance?
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He won’t. He’s too insecure to do anything but cling to his ‘Chosen’ nonsense.
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Lust =/= love
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Thanks for reminding me…
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Maybe this isn’t the best thread to rehash that tired old thing in, hmm?
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“Ephemera”
There’s something about these places we’re visiting. Descending into? I won’t claim it’s a reality unto itself; it’s something shadowy, subjective-- just a feeling.
It’s a feeling that we’re leaving our safe, known world of natural laws and explainable phenomena for something … else. Even in just this short time, I’ve noticed myself growing superstitious. I find myself lighting not only my usual daily candle, but incense as well, and murmuring prayers like I think someone will really hear me. Plunging into such unknown territory, having to depend on luck in such a way-- I guess I feel like, even with my own care in preparing, the only people I can really ask to ensure my safety, and my crew’s, are the gods.
That’s if the gods have any say over the places we now walk. There’s nothing very celestial about them. The feel of it is closer to…
Barren, toxic, inimical to life, yet in places flooded with … are these shining clouds … organisms? Crushing pressures, vast environments flooded with gamma rays, charged or superheated plasmas, gamma rays, “dark matter,” or even stranger substances: every one barren, and violent beyond our ships’ ability to withstand, these are domains out of nightmare. Or religion.
I don’t really expect that an infestation of evil spirits is the sort of contamination CONCORD’s worried about at the deeper depths (I’m guessing extremophile organisms), but still, it’s not too hard to imagine finding Mr. Nauplius’s “god” floating near a Triglavian cache in a greenish haze of exotic particles. (If I do find such a thing, I’ll be switching to Rage munitions and overloading the racks.)
The Triglavians aren’t bhaalgorns, though; their ships are very much physical vessels. If this were the spirit world of Achura, these places would be extensions of those poor lost or wicked spirits that make them their home, but I don’t think the Triglavians are responsible for shaping these realities we’re plunging into. More likely, it’s their environment that shaped them.
What calamity would be so terrible as to drive a people into these places? What reward could be so enticing as to make them want to stay, and not just to keep going back, but to disappear into them, to vanish from the world we’ve known with barely a ripple?
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So in the last, even the flat world was another layer of deception, and the true nature of SFRIM’s work in the Abyss is now revealed:
Deicide.