Ecliptic Rift

I don’t think I need to say much more about Seyllin. Everyone else in the world has already said so much, and most of it ends up being pretentiously obvious stuff anyway.

However, these worm holes opening up everywhere really have grabbed my interest. I already spent quite a bit of time flying around in my Buzzard and probing out sites of various sorts, so when I got the word, I took off into space. Took me a bit, but Metropolis space evidently has a fairly high density of them, for whatever reason.

Some of them took me to places like Sota and Pakhshi from deep in Metropolis high-sec, but I did find several that led to this other new place (cluster? galaxy?) that has everyone up in arms. As I really just wanted to explore, I didn’t take along any sort of combat ship or armaments, so I did manage to bring back some imagery from the other side. (That sounds spookier than I intended. No, I lie, I did intend that.)

Wormhole Entrance

Sleeper Facility

Emergent Defender

Awakened Defender

However, that doesn’t pay the bills. I’ve heard a lot of stories about those drone-like Sleeper ships putting up quite a fight, more than I could handle. I fully intend on going back and gathering more data for later analysis, though.

So instead, I’ve tooled around looking for rogue drones to observe and abandoned (or not) data centers. Evidently those rogue drones defended the Minmatars from a Revelation construction site. Though I put a stop to that; scientific inquiry doesn’t mean I want to see drones flying a dreadnought near my home. And a few of the drones there identified themselves as “sentient”, though I didn’t see any behavior that matched that label. Maybe next time.

Drone Revelation site

Koronakesh and I discussed the relative merits of trying to decode the rogue drone transmissions. Personally, I think we should try to understand them a little more before just destroying them. This shouldn’t downplay the importance of self-defense or even saving other human life, but if we could maybe figure out what makes them tick or how to communicate reliably with them, who knows what we might learn? Or at least stop the attacks.

During my patrol tonight, I ran across a habitation under rogue drone attack, and I got the following transmission:

01001010010100100010010100100011100100100100101001001000100111010101001

That appears to translate to something like

JR%#’JH�)

which of course doesn’t mean much. Yesterday, my research team achieved some breakthroughs on our codebreaker modules, so we’re soldering some quantum microprocessors and other bits onto them for a much improved version. I’ll run this and my other scan data through them when the manufacturing facility finishes its work.

I tracked down a radar site, and Aura told me something interesting about it:

Half-broken remnants of technology drift aimlessly throughout the vacuum; the end result of infighting, CONCORD raids or one of a thousand other common fates suffered by pirate outfits across the cluster. A codebreaker module will be invaluable in uncovering the secrets that are likely hidden here, locked away inside data vaults and semi-functional computerized networks.

Well, that sounds familiar! Looked like an old Angel Cartel mainframe to me, and I know my way around them pretty well. They had some sort of operation handbook and a skill book on Minmatar encryption methods. Not much but not bad.

Angel Mainframe

Related posts:

1. Notes from 111.02.14-15
2. 111.09.03 Journal
3. Talocan Outpost