SHATTERED FRAGMENTS OF A BROKEN DREAM: THE CHRONICLE OF THE DRIFTERS
Canto 1: Architects of the Mirror Sky (The Construct)
Where ozone melted and the silicon decayed,
Old Jovians wove the shroud where souls were laid.
First Empire’s scientists, with skin of fading grace,
Plunged neural cords to flee the bounds of time and space.
They grew so sick of heavy bone and rusted chime,
They built a world above the flesh, untouched by time.
The Construct woke — a vast and bottomless array,
Where mental cities shone in flawless, bright display.
There streams of silver data ran beneath the night,
And neon spun a million minds in emerald light.
Pure sorcery of thought within a grand domain,
Where billions lived in bliss, forgetting mortal pain.
While in the real world, terminal keys were worn away,
As civilization slowly fell into decay.
But even this sweet, silver dream was bound to break:
The low-frequency hum of server racks would wake.
It throbbed like pulses in the bones they bore inside,
Reminding them that from the dark they could not hide.
Canto 2: Guardians of the Leaden Crypts (Exodus into W-space)
To flee biological decay, they sealed the tombs,
And dragged their cryo-baths into the cosmic glooms.
For centuries, their blind and silent drones would steer,
Through crimson nebulae where stars would disappear.
The heavy carbon soot was baked upon the hull,
And deep meteorite scars made the metal dull.
Inside the crypts, beneath the salt and ancient grime,
The bodies lay in white, forgot by space and time.
Their rubber hoses froze to glass within the chill,
The matte canvas of suits was warped against their will.
The cosmos seemed a liquid canvas, dark and deep,
While ruthless AI lines their combat watch would keep.
But if a stranger dared to cross the wormhole gate,
The sleeping metal woke to execute their fate.
The sensor lenses burst with fierce, fluorescent glare,
Refracting emerald light through nitrogen out there.
The ether tore apart from soul-destruction shocks,
The wail of coils drowned all the screams upon the rocks.
Canto 3: Paradise Ravaged (The Triglavian Invasion)
But immortality is vain when frames decay,
A biomechanical nightmare found its bloody way.
From Pochven’s dark, Abyssal depths the fleets were spilled,
With oily slime and dampness all their ships were filled.
They did not come for gold, they sought the living mind,
To weave it into circuits, leaving flesh behind.
With savage shrieks, the capsule glass was ripped and torn,
And nutrient gel turned into bloody snow, forlorn.
Triglavians stripped the suits from emaciated skin,
As butcher hooks of steel carved deep to get within.
The Sleeper tombs were drowned in bright, singular rays,
That burned out camera eyes in dark, dead-ended ways.
Inside the Construct then, the mental cities fell,
The flawless white of marble turned to ash of hell.
Through dying minds, the failing bays began to wheeze,
And snapping wires sang of death upon the breeze.
The rustle of erased terabytes like poison spread,
It was the total liquidation of the dead.
Interlude: The Drifter Protocol
When the last thread went cold and paradise was gone,
The Central Hive Mind spoke before the final dawn.
The project is undone. The hosts are burned to ash.
Awake the ancient ark amidst the system crash.
And in the hidden docks where vacuum cold was dense,
The old assemblers stirred with fury and intense.
The remnants of torn souls that howled inside the net,
The AI gathered up with beams of silver sweat.
They were no longer men. Their code was like a cry,
Now grafted into steel beneath a bitter sky.
Organics fused with metal, polymer and bone,
Behind the midnight glass they stepped into the zone.
Canto 4: Risen from the Ashes (Awakening of the Drifters)
But from those very same ravaged crypts, where digital flesh once wept,
Rose the Drifters — machines of wrath, while the cold cosmos slept.
Their titans glided out of dark docks, gleaming with shields of might,
Their matte alloy covered in scars and frozen in distant night.
The Drifter pilots — pale sem-organics with faces of opaque dread,
Had rubber interfaces grown into scruffs, where ancient malice fed.
When Drifters went out to battle, the space around them cried,
Their toxic green fluorescent spirals extinguished the stars that died.
The moment the bow Doomsday weapon accumulated mortal might,
A blinding white laser flash shot through, preparing the grave in the night.
This beam scattered into thousands of neon and punishing sparks in space,
Burning out optical matrices, turning the world into ash in their face.
And the radio ether was hacked by a guttural choir of gears,
The soul-chilling beep of target locks stripping the pilots of fears.
And then came a second of silence, and the wail of coils in the skies
Crushed the titanium hulls of ships like worthless toys before eyes.
The Drifters avenged their broken sleep, walking through fire ahead,
And their algorithms of war were just as unyielding and blind as the dead.
Canto 5: Fall of the Amarr Throne (Retribution in Safizon)
In Safizon system — the triumph of a blinding, proud day shone bright,
There the Sarum flagship — an Avatar titan — hovered with majestic might.
But the air in Jamyl’s cabin grows heavy from mental strain and sighs,
She is on her knees, clutching her temples, to hide from the steel in her eyes.
Inside her thoughts for many years, an ancient darkness ruled without a hitch —
There whispers The Other — a bodiless bastard of the cold network’s ditch.
He beats in her synapses, mocks her, calls himself Infinitum with a sneer:
"Did you think, Jamyl, you were God’s chosen? You are my vessel here!
Look past the glass, your redeemers await, they call me Distortion in grace.
They will not forgive that I stole you away from the crypts of J-space,
Look how their dead, punishing fleet has ripped through Safizon’s place!"
“Shut up, False Architect!” gasps the Empress, swallowing blood from the blow,
“You are the filth of the Construct, a fiend, a faceless, unseen foe…”
The wormhole flared like a scar. A hundred black vessels in a line
Of the Drifters emerged from the vacuum. Apollo and Artemis lead this design.
Their Doomsday Weapons tied the space into a tight knot of fire,
And a white laser volley turned the Avatar into ash on a funeral pyre.
Canto 6: On the Bones of Titans (Scavenging for T3-Production)
Meanwhile, in Empire shipyards, in the smoke of boiling sheds,
Capsuleers were already tearing at prey, knowing no mental dreads.
It reeked of hot iron, soldering flux, and acrid acid all around,
Where engineers cut the legacy of a race with a hollow sound.
On workbenches lay sawed-up AI cores, covered in soot and grime,
And the oily hydraulic fluid of Sleepers ran, wasted in time.
Robot manipulators with a screech grafted blocks into frames of machines,
And thus Tengu and Loki were born — the new kings of dangerous scenes.
The joints between titanium and polymers were welded with rough seams,
From which scale flaked off in heaps, emitting toxic vapor streams.
The workshops were flooded with crimson neon of welding arcs and glows,
And new ships changed geometry right in the docks, as the blueprint goes.
And when a T3-cruiser first fired up its modified reactor core,
A guttural, low-frequency hum echoed — the Sleeper’s ghost from before.
During transformation of subsystems, a wheeze of plates would rise,
And the piercing shriek of magnetic coils sang of someone else’s demise.
The ultrasonic beep of processors merged into one continuous sound,
Which rang in the pilot’s capsule: the one who made these wings is underground.
Canto 7: The Last Lullaby of the Abyss (The Prowler’s Berthing)
Switched on the T2 cloaking device. In Prowler’s cabin — soot and steam.
The engine hisses, the cooling line has blown again, ruining the dream.
On the deck underfoot — black carbon soot, caked grime from the heat,
The cargo hold is empty, and hydraulics of the airlock went to sleep, beat.
There, strapped in with belts like a corpse, a Sleeper suit silently lies,
Worn out by centuries, hardened by frost in the deep, pitch-black skies.
And from torn connectors onto the flooring, drops of dark gel crawl,
Freezing as if the ancient spacesuit gives its dead blood from its wall.
Beyond the viewing glass — a magnetar’s pupil, a black hole spun wide,
There an ultramarine nebula twisted, and purple gas billows inside.
And when the cloaking layer is activated, the crimson neon begins to break,
And phosphorescent emerald flashes swirl, leaving a trail in their wake.
In the empty helmet smolders a green fire — a dead civilization’s spark.
In the sealed cockpit, the vacuum outside is forgotten, the cloak hums low in the dark,
The bolts on the dashboard tremble, and pumps wheeze from air that is stark.
And in this ominous silence, an ultrasonic beep suddenly flew —
It was the diagnostic stand hacking a dying info-disk out of the blue.
The ship’s speakers shattered the air, broadcasting an echo of old times to the head,
Where through the screech of metal broke the last, broken groan of the dead.
Epilogue: The Living Salt of New Eden
For millions of miles around — silent J-space, a blind navigation chart.
And in neuro-interface, a storm of mental stress beats hard against your heart.
You hear this recording through screeching, through the hum of coils strained:
It is not a machine weeping — it is the cry of the last mother among worlds drained.
Before your eyes rises a crumbling paradise, where white monoliths die.
She held her digital child by the hand, whispering: “Goodbye,” to the crimson sky.
The boy had no body, he was only pure code, and the mother pressed him to her chest,
Knowing that cryo-chambers would soon be smashed, and her child would fade to rest.
And this impulse of love shocks the pilot’s capsule like current, burning nodes deep,
You feel with every single cell how this ancient human lost her child to keep.
The recording cuts off with a dry click, the green light on the helmet fades into night,
And the race of Sleepers dissolved, becoming an empty icon inside Prowler’s might.
But beyond cockpit glass, where purple gas froze, a shadow suddenly flashed near.
It is a Drifter hovering just meters away, scanning your trail with emerald beam clear.
He does not strike. He only looks through armor, watching how killer of children cries,
And in the wordless cosmic void, you share the grief of people beneath the skies.
You reach out your hand, touching cold polymer, and your fingers stumble near.
It is not oil, nor preservation gel — it is frozen salt of human tears.
And on ninetieth day of your life in New Eden, in an icy grave where no one will hear,
A capsuleer’s hot tear washes away cold shadows, realizing this truth with fear.
AUTHOR’S REVERENCE
Dedicated to all the lost souls of wormhole space, the silent guardians of J-space, and those who still hear the echo of the Sleepers’ broken dream amidst the cold stars of New Eden!
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