Altered States

Dear Mom,

I killed someone today for the first time. Figure I won't beat around the bush; you always did hate that. The school sent me out on a mission to stop a vandal or saboteur or bored kid or whatever you want to call him; it doesn't matter. He fired on me and I killed him. Cause and effect, like you always told me when you were explaining thrusters, or the market.

I didn't think about it; I reacted on instinct, like the school taught me. I'd been worried when I first came out here about whether it was right or wrong, but none of that occurred to me when the firing started. I was surprised that it took such a short time; I thought it was much longer while it was happening. We fired until finally he quit, and I took his stuff.

What I don't understand is that I'm not sad or happy over it. That surprises me; that it doesn't matter whether he was a kid or not. He was the guy shooting at me. Is this a side effect of the books I've injected? Is this part of the  rewiring that virus is doing to me?

Anyway, that's how things are. Hope to hear back from you soon and hear you are doing well. Say hey to Dad.

***************************

I sat for a while after I finished, playing the message over again. The wreckage was drifting away, inertia carrying it off, eventually into deep space. They say the pod has made us immortal; that we can't die as long as we have a clone parked in a station somewhere. The pilot of that craft was a mere human, his meat still trapped in what was left of his ship; setting out on a journey of thousands and thousands of years probably. Would I still be around one day when he finally reached another system; would I be able to look in at his frozen, mangled body and say "I know you. You were my first" ?

"Close file." "Would you like me to send it now, Captain?" the ship asked. "I have found 200 Bailey Morels in the Luminaire system if you would like to--"

"Delete file. Confirm delete file." My parents probably wouldn't even open the file if it ever reached them; not since they'd found religion. I don't know if they'd even have understood it anymore. "Take us back to dock, ship. Contact my agent and let him know the mission is accomplished. Then prepare to uninstall me."

I felt like being with a mere human tonight, and having a real drink in my belly.

Naked Notes 12: Dancing Bears

Only one good thing about stomach flu and vomiting; if you're gonna miss work and have to sit on the couch, might as well shoot some rocks while you do it.

Inadvertently went out on my first corp mining op this evening because of being home sick; I know it will amaze a lot of folks to hear it was fun. No I'm not running a fever or stoned on cough medicine. When you have corp chat to while away the time it goes by really quick; not to mention you find out how many other folks fly while drinking, too :) I hope I was able to give as favorable an impression as I got. Even if everyone else was in Hulks and Retrievers and my Navitas was only slightly larger than their drones; the DSIS Flea Bite accounted well for herself I hope.

Hmmm, I have visions of the dancing bears from the Disney cartoon....

Pew Pew
Break the asteroid up, shove it in a can
Pew Pew
Break the asteroid up, shove it in a can
Pew Pew
That's how mining goes, it's a lot of fun
Pew Pew

Ok, maybe Nyquil and sake wasn't such a good idea....

Naked Notes 11: There Are No Flat Tires in Baseball !

New story time later today, yay.

I've had 3 family members pick WoW back up this month; amazing how much more interesting a game can be when you have a shared group to talk about it outside the screen :-)  Now, if their attention spans don't wander off in a month or two like certain ones *cough cough yes I'm looking at you* tend to do...

Speaking of shared group experiences, Eve has been a lot more entertaining now that I'm in a corp...  tends to be a bit quiet when I've been on lately, but I've also kept some peculiar hours because of my job. I'll be glad when my schedule gets a little less frantic and I can be on at a more reasonable hour and take part in some of the fleet ops. Even if it is 'just' shooting rocks ;-)

And I still need to max my Inn League faction in LOTRO.

In RL: flat tires are a b****. Especially at 4am.

Naked Notes 10: Curriculum

Operations maps, learning how to use Evemon, reading pages and pages of sticky threads and forum posts; so much to learn for the corp...  I think this may be a large reason why EVE is so intriguing to me; it gives me the fresh eyed wonder feeling that nothing has given me since my ancient Everquest days... It is so different from all the other MMOs I've played that it gives me that excitement rush of the new I had back in EQ when I didn't know what the hell was going on and couldn't tell the difference between a PC and a NPC (true story: the NPCs back then didn't have a merchant or vendor tag on them, only a name floating over their head just like the PCs... So I thought all the folks standing around inside of the inns and taverns were PC toons that were "asleep" after their player logged out... :) Took me a week to learn how to buy and sell stuff... ah, those were the days... )

Plus, who doesn't want to play with little toy spaceships?

Naked Notes 9: I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends

Been accepted into the corp for the 30 day trial membership :)  Now a proud (hopefully-) member of Sturmgrenadier. Working my way through all the security clearances now, background checks, DNA filings, booster tests, anal probing, etc., and then hopefully will get to start working.

In addition, LOTRO and WoW both have their Halloween events going on, prepping my den for painting, Mythbusters/Dirty Jobs/Dexter all in new seasons, and RL work is hopping busy.

I have never understood people who can claim to be bored....

Expectation Is Not Just a River in Amarr

The job's simple enough: take down some scum out wrecking stuff. They say it's pirates; could just as easily be miners' kids. I can remember being so bored out of my skull on a few trips that I'd have taken a mining laser and tagged a harvester or two. Serpentis, name doesn't mean anything. File says they make illegal boosters; I probably know more than a few miners that are their customers.

Geez, what a position to be in. Probably going out to shoot at some bored kids on the premise that some corp doesn't like that their parents do boosters. And do I think the corp really cares? Let me see, who'd they give this assignment to: a capsuleer fresh out of the Academy?

I'm sure the Serpentis are shaking with fear.

"Ship, take me to the harvester." Hard heel to port; feels like muscles flexing. Bizarre that I still feel that there's an up and down out here; the piloting virus can only rewire our brains so much. Maybe another million years when we've evolved into a purely null-g race it can dispense with the gravitic illusions; but for now it's the only frame of reference we understand.

"Warp Drive Active." Everyone has phrases you hear over and over that if you charted at the end of your life would far outweigh all the others. 'Good morning.' 'May I help you.' 'Thank you.' If you're lucky 'I love you'; if not so lucky 'I'm sorry.' The graph for a capsuleer would have an enormous spike far outstripping all others, like the spike for veldspar in a belt scan. 'Warp Drive Active.' Even the good phrases become rote and ignored with time and repetition. But ours never becomes trite; it can't when it has such a profound effect on mind and body.

Roar in the ears, a kick in the butt. I swear I'm shorter; not a pleasant feeling, and the tickling of the gravitic waves around me is not helping. All experiences your normal crew never have to feel. Of course, they cannot begin to match the control I have over my ship.

The pod giveth, and the pod taketh away.

The drives cut out and I feel my guts shift up for a moment, a fullness at the back of my throat like just before you vomit; something must be not be quite strapped down in the holds. Except I don't have anything in my holds. Damn C students. I'll have to have that looked into when I get back.

Nothing out here; harvester, billboard... ah, there he is. An Impairor, typical Amarr rookie ship. Not that that means shit; sure, you'll see mostly Gallante in these systems, but a galactic market means you'll see everything fly by if you wait long enough. I'm not gonna blow some miner's kid out of the sky, orders be damned.

"Impairor, this is Agent Morel with the C.A.S." Like he would know the truth. "You will offline all nonessential functions and follow me back to the station. My guns are--" A sudden light, and a hot flash down my left side like a bad sunburn, my shields taking a hit. That was no mining laser.

Son of a mudder is shooting at me!

Naked Notes 8: Keep on truckin'

Today marks my one month anniversary of being back in the game :) Really enjoying it this time around.

Assuming my new corp accepts me, I ended up moving from Gallante space over to the far side of Amarr.  Loaded up everthing I owned (except a couple ships) into my Iteron and hoofed it on over. 30 jumps, 7 or 8 through 0.5 space where I actually got chased by someone :)  He would try and lock on and I'd warp to the next gate and he'd arrive as I jumped, then he'd pop in as I'm aligning to the next gate and try to lock on again... guess he finally either got tired or we moved into too highsec for him, but it was a fun little chase and quite a thrill to be looking over my shoulder all the time :)

In character story continues later tonight after I get some yardwork done.

Naked Notes 7: For the Horde!!

Bleh, hate being sick...at least I've been at work for most of it so I'm getting paid to feel lousy.

Well, signing up now with my first corp; gonna be in the 30 day trial period :) Excited about it and getting to see the "real" EVE experience, but it's gonna be quite a journey across the Empire :)  Road trip!!

Several days off coming up soon, so more in character posts coming.

Naked Notes 6: Why Can't We Be Friends

Well, I've taken the step of applying to a corporation at last. This is an enormous step for me, as I tend to be rather shy when it comes to social steps like joining guilds; in the past all the guilds I've belonged to in games were either family guilds or had friends in them that I knew and who served as a gateway into the guild. This is the first time I've approached strangers; looking at their recruitment postings and forum site however they look like a cool group and hopefully I'll find that home in EVE I know I need to advance beyond the beginner stage.

Not to mention mining gets awful lonely with only your ship to talk to ;)

Addendum: Oh, had another noob first as well: arrived out at an encounter space to kill pirates in a mission, found I'd forgotten to load ammo in my guns...  :)

Squoze Out

This is taking forever.

FTL communications, but undocking still has a queue. Amazing the amount of traffic in a hub system; pod forbid, what must Jita be like? I'll definitely have to find an out of the way, dead end system with only a single gate and soon. Scanning around with my cameras I see haulers, miners, frigates, the occasional cruiser, and more than a few other Navitas and Velators making their slow way through the wide channel. Those two ships infest school systems in the Federation like pirates in a roid belt. How many of these ships have pods, I wonder... 1%, maybe 2? It's so easy inside this egg to forget why standard ships are so slow and unresponsive and make docking so much more difficult than it needs to be.

Why can't they let capsuleers have their own docking tube... yeah, that would certainly quell the complaints and accusations of capsuleers feeling elite and privileged. Can't be the first one to ever have that idea.

Out and a quick peel up and to starboard...along with about a third of the line with the same directions. No wonder they call it Squeeze Out. But I'm finally outside.

"Ship, what are local conditions?" "We are clear to depart, Captain. Standard local traffic." No threats in the immediate area on overview. What else would I expect to see in a 1.0 sec system? Any red popping up this close to the station and under Concord guns would have to be a war fleet or insane or both; either way we'd all be well and truly screwed.

"Ship, pull up journal entry on Agent Mission." "Aye, Captain. If it will help, you may call me Aur--" "STOP!" My brain shouts out the command; I feel I can almost feel the pod echo with the force. "That name will not be mentioned on board any ship i am in command of. Understood?"

"Understood, Captain. Entry on screen."

I almost believe I can hear hurt in her voice.

Naked Notes 5: Fellowshipping

I will soon make it out of the station in the in-character part of the blog, been a bit busy with RL work and with in-game work... trying to get two characters working through the tutorial and noob system stuff so I can get screenies of what happens on those missions :)

Add to that I've just had a friend pick up LOTRO, so I've started a new alt to help her along and show her the ropes, lot of gaming goodness going on but so little time.

Labor Pains

So this is the inside of my pod. Smells of plastic and chemicals; much better than the training pods at flight academy: even when cleaned and sterilized, you could smell fear and stress. Stretching my arms out my fingers just touch the walls, the alloy slick and sticky at the same time; one of so many things about pod life are just... wrong. It was only after I started the academy that I understood why my father looks the way he does, the nervousness, the distant gaze, the constant cocking of his head when he's alone as if he were straining to hear a distant voice.

"Welcome aboard, Captain" the ship says in my COSMOS implant. "When you are ready, I will begin installation." When I first heard those words in school, it took a moment to realize she didn't mean injecting a VirAware program through my port. In a pod, I am the program. But I won't go so far as to call myself a virus, I'll save that term for the pies and rats.

"When you are ready, I will begin installation." Alright, alright. Pushy ship. I quickly strip off, tossing my clothes into the recycler just outside the pod iris. Turning to face the front of the pod, I can hear cables slithering off the walls behind me, electrical tentacles reaching for my sockets and orifices. Yeah, this part is never pleasant. Nothing *hurts* mind you, the plugs and tubes have an instant anesthetic; it's the pressure you still feel as everything slides and worms into place. And then the mask that reaches for your face, the sensation of headbutting a block of jelly as it envelopes the front half of my head. I would probably be in a blind panic of suffocation if my face didn't go numb a moment later, my lungs thinking they are continuing to process oxygen supplied through the mask material oozed into my mouth and nostrils when actually it is coming from the OxyFlow liquid drizzled straight into my blood stream from one of the sockets on my back. The flaccid muscles feel like they are sliding off my skull; installation feels a lot like having a stroke. Pity some pilots continue to fly that way after wards.

"Sync up initiated. Sync up complete" the voice shifts between the two sentences from the COSMOS speakers embedded in my ears to sounding as if she is in my head with me. I suppose more accurately, I'm inside her head. I can feel the ship all around me; not in an "as one" sensation of being the ship, but I am aware of every part of it, every subsystem, wire, and thruster. My own body has disappeared for me; I know that the capsule is filling rapidly with the inertial gel that suspends my body in its protective cocoon, but that is just another blip of data coming in the stream from the ships sensors. I am the disembodied controller, the ghost in the machine. Amazingly, everything seems to be right and in place; I guess those C students knew what they were doing. Or got lucky.

"Awaiting instructions, Captain." There is no real voice in my head; the piloting VirAware I was injected with at the beginning of school rearranged my neurons to translate incoming information into a form I can comprehend. It is still rearranging neurons as the hours and days go by, awake or asleep; improving, strengthening, and multiplying connections. It also causes my brain to imagine it is talking back to her. "Request Squeeze Out. Oh, and don't call me Captain. My name is Fischer."

"Squeeze out request accepted, Captain" she continues in the same attractive yet even tone as before. I knew it wouldn't happen, but I had to test it. The VirAware geneticists implanted a few specific safeguards in their software after the first couple of batches went out. A statistically significant number of early capsuleers had fallen in love with their ship's AI and couldn't stand to be uninstalled from them. Ironic, as the personality is as entirely a fictional creation of the brain as the voice is; yet another coping mechanism. DNA was spliced, and our brain's piloting software is no longer capable of turning our ship into the woman or man of our subconscious dreams.

"Undock". I feel all the latches and umbilici separating from the port and we drift under power out of the niche into the main bay. I am a natural resident of it now, a part of the ebb and flow of traffic within and the space of the main bay no longer disturbs me; it just is. I fall into the outward stream, my sensors straining to reach out far beyond the station walls, beyond the pinhole in space that is C.V.12. I am no longer human; I am capsuleer.

Then the euphoria fades as mood stabilizers are injected. Whew. "I am capsuleer," damn, that was cheesy even for me.

Naked Notes 4: RAWWWRRR!!!

Out trying jetcan mining for the first time this morning. Dropped 4 cans from my Navitas as an experiment, warped back to the station to get my Iteron, came back to find all but one can gone, it flipped and a pie in a Jaguar flashing red. Warped back to station.

Noted him for the future. Amazed how quickly the phrase HTFU becomes perfectly clear. This carebear wants some teeth  >:-)

Naked Notes 3: Blind Leading the Blind

Working the next couple of days, so doubt they'll be much time for playing or posting. Couple funny things happened last night, though:

• Logged in to my first server queue in EVE (was #19 on the list, took only a couple minutes to get in)

• Went out mining, and found every damn asteroid gone! Thought "well, high sec space is pretty jumping, and I've already been in a queue tonight, let's move on to the next system." Jumped, same problem, every belt empty... did that 4 more times. "This is impossible! There ain't no way the systems could be stripped, don't see any big  hulks or anything anywhere!" Then a strange hunch to check my overview settings came over me... I know I didn't ever turn off all asteroids in my overview settings!  :) No idea how that happened...

Well, hope to get back on soon; I'm sure the way work has been I'll definitely be ready to.

Vertigo

I can't believe how long it takes to get anywhere in this station, and how far apart everything is. My parents would take me on mining trips spanning dozens of AU but distances on this place feel insane. Trams are only slightly better than walking; the corp that invents an in station warp will own the universe.

Turns out Monsieur Feritte is a CAS corporate agent, so his office is out in the up scale, hammer head of the station. Turns out he is a very low standing agent, so his office is way out at the tip of the hammer head. Naturally, student quarters are way out on the end of one of the opposite arms. When I figure out why you put the two locations students spend the most time at on opposite ends of the station, I'll demand an elite Entrepeneur cert. pour libre.

The tram drops me off at Concourse Y4. No observation deck or lounge down here; no tourists or bored people wander down to the grubby areas of the station. The green grey walls and exposed ducts sneer "Service personnel only. Oh yeah, *students* too... snicker." Three flights of metal stairs, stairs mind you, a long hall, and the doors slide open to the extended catwalk. At least the doors are automatic.

Oh, sweet pod... the vertigo! I quickly close my eyes and grab the rail with white nuckles. Opening them to a squint, I stare at the catwalk and quickly make my way out to my ship. Even a niche bay is huge, but manageable to the brain; it's the immense emptiness of the main bay I can see past my ship that flips my stomach.

Space is big, but you can't get any scale of it, might as well be in a room painted black. To get a true feeling of massiveness, you need to be in a void like the main bay, something with a wall so far away it makes your head spin and your stomach flop. The light of ships moving about the bay look like toys. Just keep thinking about the catwalk. And hit the pod lock.

The hand pad scans and accepts my dna pattern. "Identity accepted" coos a sexy voice in my ear. At least the engineering students got that part plugged in correctly. I think one of the students may have been a bit frustrated and thinking of other plug ins, however; I may need to dial the voice back a bit. Distracting. I step into the access way and turn right, away from the live berths and up to the pod in the bow. The hatch irises open, and I step in to become a capsuleer for the first time.

Naked Notes 2: Rainy Days and Mondays

Raining for 2 days here now, giving me nice excuses not to go outside and do yard work :)

Second part of the continuing adventure up later today. It's officially been one month in game now, if you count the two week trial I did last November. 1,523,573 Skill Points and 2,361,136 ISK in the bank, with perhaps another quarter to half million spent on various skill books maybe.  I own the pink slips on a velator, 3 navitas, and an iteron. I've been to about a dozen systems, I've made hair raising mining trips in 0.4 and 0.3 space, and I've had a good deal of fun. Next up I plan to start looking for a corp, possible Eve Uni, and then start following some of the boring advice and train the learning skills up to 5 :)

Still need to keep working on my faction in Lothlorien, too...

C.V.12

Cistuvaert V. Moon 12. What a shit hole.

From the station it looks much like every other ball of rock I've ever seen. What terrible lives mudders must live. My parents are miners, the backbone of the Federation; their feet have never touched dirt. Neither have mine.

I can't understand mudders; who could trust a life not surrounded by metal, nothing between me and the cold but a thin layer of air? I get queasy just thinking about it; a cold sweat breaking out so fierce I'm surprised my sockets don't loosen. I know all about gravity; my parents trained me to slingshot well lips in case my drive ever quit and I could probably do the math in my head. Don't tell me shit about gravity; I've been in station when the plates failed and everything went flying: I trust gravity as far as I can warp it. My brain understands, it's my mind that wouldn't be caught dead mud side; it's my gut that knows it's wrong living under a thin blue haze of exhaust. Let's do an experiment: I'll take getting shot at in my ship anyday and you get shot at under an atmosphere; we'll see who lives longer.

C.V.12 is a beautiful station; but whether human or station, beauty always comes with problems. It was designed to look like a dromis, one of the reptilian gliders back on Gallente; its double hammer head faces the moon, stylized wings swept back behind it in two graceful arcs curving around the central docking spine. Almost anywhere you go in here you have a clear view of space, the moon, or the multitude of ships coming and going constantly from the dock. This also means it takes forever to get anywhere, riding the tram on the long trip along the spinal arcs. Give me a squat, ugly tin can station anyday that I can cut straight along the diameter of and bam I'm where I want to be. Better yet, let me stay out of stations as much as possible. I'm only here now because I've got to get my certs. I'll bet my parents have taught me more about mining than most of the profs here at CAS have known, but the Feds won't hire you, and the corps won't take the time to shoot at you, unless you've got the certs to back it up; so CAS will own my body for a while.

At least they are fairly generous. Taxes can allow you to be that way I suppose. I've been given a room, a cybernetics book, and a Velator tucked off in a very out of the way niche of the bay. Artisticly designed stations have plenty of out of the way niches, and this one is naturally a long tram ride from my room. If I know CAS, the Velator is stored along with about a thousand others, the product of engineering classes at the school. Nothing'll give you confidence in your equipment like a ship constructed by C students.

Gotta go now. Someone named Jarck Feritte has left a message on COSMOS and wants to talk to me.

Naked Notes 1: Welcome and background

Welcome! A quick introduction, I'm fairly new to the EVE universe; I first tried the 2 week trial back in November of 08 when a friend was also trying it out, and while I found the game quite interesting it didn't get its hooks into me deep enough. So when my friend decided not to join, I too left in order to explore the mines of Moria :) Having now made it to level 60 in LOTRO (I am the definition of casual player) I decided to give EVE another go and this time something clicked. Indulging in several of the blogs and podcasts has helped whet my appetite for the game as well as my desire to give back by posting my experience of the game as a noob who has done a little homework :) I'm finishing up my first week for this go around.

My MMO history has included about 6 months in UO, EQ from just after launch up to when GoD came out, a few months in EQ2/AO/DAOC/WoW, and currently LOTRO from launch. I've always loved the Elites, the Star Controls, MOOs, SMAC, StarFlight, and other space games, so it's about time that this game gets a fair try :)