Homo Homini Lupus

Author: Yarrion Yuwen / Grey Y

Original post: https://darkeyebags.blogspot.com/2014/12/homo-homini-lupus-story-for-eve-online.html

Entry for the YC116 Pod and Planet Fiction Contest in the Eight Thousand Suns in New Eden category.

I demonstrate in the first place, that the state of men without civil society is nothing else but a mere war of all against all; and in that war all men have equal right unto all things.
Hobbes, De Cive

“Homo homini lupus,” Cartin Lorx says.

What does that mean? I have no idea. I don’t think anyone does. That is the way Cartin likes things.

Those three words are exactly what he uttered a month ago when we last met. Some sort of ‘parting puzzle’ for the next meeting. As if it amounts to anything. As if there is anyone who cares. I hate him. I mean, I would take a meson bolt in the head for him, but I would just as easily burn his face off with the blaster on my hip. It will happen any one of these days, I’m quite sure of it. Half a day on I would probably apologise to him and then, with some message filters in place, get no end of grief from him. Not that it will make me buy him a new ship. He is such a cheapskate with his backups I don’t even want to know. But shooting him in the face — I won’t even be remotely the first to do that.

I look away, begin to study the hangar around us, the structural design of the station itself. There is beauty where we want to find it. My glance go to the ship looming behind him. A prime example of how a man’s possession can surpass him in popularity, Cartin’s assault frigate is a testament that even fools are allowed a fine taste in vessel selection. I make it quite obvious my attention is on his vessel. That is, of course, a mistake.

He catches my shift in gaze and his face lights up with that notorious grin of his. “I’ll give you that! It counts as a first guess and you’ve actually managed to get it right. I must say I’m impressed.”

My control slips a little. “What? Ship?”

“No — Wolf. The last word means ‘wolf’.”

I close my eyes this time. There is nowhere safe. The urge to shoot him right through that row of teeth is taking hold of me. If I cannot escape the droning of his words, I can at least shut off that smug look on his face. Of course he doesn’t stop. The stream of verbal garbage keeps coming. It is the same every time. He does some useless research on his latest pet obsession about some ancient culture and he unloads it on me. Among the senseless stream I fail to tune out something about Man, and then something about the mythical beast, the Wolf. He may as well be talking about the Thin Jove, the stalker of children who are unworthy of becoming capsuleers.

I give up what I came here to do, which is to tell him about the incident. Two weeks is still too raw for me. But he had asked, in his rare moment of curiosity in others, about what happened. No one else knows. None. I am sure of that. I’ve had to dirty my own hands on five Clone-less, partly to keep this a secret and partly because their rubbish equipment started this whole fecal tempest. Quite an irony that the medical staff themselves don’t have backups.

“Wolf,” I say. “So it’s fantasy monsters now. Grew tired of those shadows in the cave?”

He gives an expression like I’m the crazy one, like I’m the one who never dared to venture into Null-Sec. Another time and I would probably be able to sit through this. But this is not the day. Not giving him a chance to utter another syllable in my face I get up, unholster my blaster — barrel first — and place it gently on the table between us, and I start to walk away towards my hangar. I don’t need my cam-drones to tell me he’s staring at my back, not sure to be amused or outraged.

He cannot even tell I’m in a new body.

I am almost out in the corridor before he responds. “I thought you wanted to meet to tell me something.”

“Yes”, I say without turning around. “I came to tell you you need to shove that meson blaster up where the solar winds don’t blow, because I can’t bring myself to do it even though every single cell in this body is telling me to.”

No reply. It’s fine, I’ll get his “You’re an ingrate” message soon enough, subtly reminding me how he was the one who sponsored me into immortality. And it is that thought, ironically, that I cannot discuss about now right. Not like this.

My hangar isn’t far away since our ships are all the same size. I make no eye contact with anyone, man or machine, flashing the palm of my hand to get through every security process. Good thing about Ishukone stations — they never suffer from glitches. My walk is smooth and uninterrupted. By the time I get into my hangar my hand is trembling, and not from the scans or the meagre effort to raise my arm.

Alone in the hangar space my Harpy stands before me, with all the allure of a new bride still unfaded. It should be another couple of more weeks before the euphoria goes away, but right now it’s still my baby. Here I have privacy, very much unlike the cruiser pilots who have so many of the Clone-less sharing their space they may as well include game tables on board. My baby is my own. Her teeth are my own. Her kills are my own. When her anti-matter charges tore through the Angel’s transport yesterday I tasted the blood of their crew on my tongue. The best maiden voyage for my killer girl. Just looking at her brings up the thrill and fear of death, the power we wield that makes us gods. I guess it’s different for the Clone-less, the caste of ordinaries to whom death is a norm. It is a thing in their world. For us, it is an unwelcome intruder. An abomination.

Damn Cartin. If he would just shut up and listen. That moron just can’t stop talking for two minutes for me get this out of my system.

I climb into my pod and jack in without activating the rest of the ship. The interface lights up to tell me seventeen unread messages await my attention — twelve of which are from the cloning facility— and I can give them none right now. Something is wrong there. When I arrived at this station I swore I had eighteen messages. True, I’m pretty shaken these days, but it’s way too soon for dementia to step in. New pod, new glitches, I suppose.

There is no new message from that guy.

I have no idea who he is any more than the dozen or so market specialists I encounter every week or two trying to scam me into a con job. Both messages from him have been deleted and there is nothing new so far. “Market specialists” irritate me. But incoherent lunatics sending messages to me make me furious. I am an immortal slaughterer of thousands, and still there are people who send me messages like read, “Do you remember your childhood? The first voices you heard?” and “Do you know your reflection from someone else’s?” There are always idiots like him. Some more manifested than others.

It’s not so bad now. At least anger cancels out fear. I don’t need a listening ear. I don’t need fools like Cartin. Fears need to be faced. Maybe reliving it will drive it away.

Time to wake the baby. Ship, I address the pod. Access recorded file ID 262-BlackRise-07. Playback from the anchor marked ‘site detection’.

The feed starts, and immediately I feel the shiver down my spine right from the interface cable. Vids and audio are clear as reality. There I was, waiting for the confirmation of results from the scan I just ran. I remember it taking a while, and that I took the time to double check on my quarry. It was a pitiful sight for the end of a bounty chased through four systems for a bunch of pirates and low-lives. No glorious conclusion for this hero. Instead it was just an old shipyard with a meagre colony of Guristas non-combatants etching out a pathetic existence within the State.

What trail I followed had gone cold, and I dished out the wrath of us gods to the bunker installations there. My guns blazed, and my harpy screamed her silent screams in the void. Five bunkers. They were Clone-less, fulfilling their role to us well enough regardless of their affiliations. But what rage the destruction placated came with the disappointment of what equipment — or lack thereof — they had. Nothing I could recover or salvage. Pathetic, yes. Not even enough to cover the cost of ammo.

That was when the scanner confirmation came in. There really was a new site in the system, some 18.51 AU away. But all data records about it were inaccessible. This was a prohibited site. A ghost site.

They have never been common, but I have heard of them.

“Hello.”

I freeze. With a thought I pause the playback. A glance at the interface reveal an incoming convo request via the coms. Text only, with neither video or audio enabled. And it is not even an FTL signal. It’s him. The Idiot. Not only is he in the same system, he is in the same station. What kind of raving madman is he?

I catch myself just short of yelling. “Who the hell— no, wait. I don’t care who you are. I’m not interested in whatever you’re offering. In fact, later today I am going to hunt you down and kill you and your family.”

“You’re just a lost soul on the wrong path—”

“I will make you watch, my friend. You get to watch.”

Ship, kill the chat, I command. For five seconds I sit in my pod contemplating leaving the station. There is really nothing he can do to me. I stare a while at his name. His identity doesn’t even make sense. Just a series of numbers strung together. Masked ID or not, there is no way he can touch me.

Ship, resume playback.

I remember the thoughts running through my head evaluating the pros and the cons. Now with hindsight comes regret and anguish. I am a child again. Getting to the site was no issue at all. It wasn’t dead space, and the entirety of the place wasn’t big. Staring right at what was obviously a covert research facility was no issue either. The place was compact in a way that gave no value to living space. What constituted an issue was the challenge to crack into the secure installations to see, to know, and ultimately to take whatever I could. My ship’s AI was up to it. We had slipped past tougher challenges before. Ultimately it was the blood-lust, the need to recover and recover high from a failed hunt. We dove in with more bravado than competence. Which, of course, led straight to some sort of self-destruct protocol they had. The shock wave of the explosion cut straight through to me, obliterating everything. My pod buffered most of the impact that should have smashed me into a paste.

Everything so far is verified information, solid memory I brought over. After this it dips into the area of good, but not exactly complete, reliability.

I felt the crack before I saw it. It ran across the main virtual window, scarring the span of the stars before the simulated view flickered off. Everything else was gone — the ship, the research installation. But the sight that caught the attention of my eye, my mind, my soul was the little flashing display at the bottom corner.

CLONE TRANSNEURAL PROTOCOL MALFUNCTION

Freeze playback, dammit!

My heartbeat is way too fast now, and I need to control my breathing. I am turning into the type of people I laugh at. Part of me is simply angry because almost all of those people don’t have the right to be this afraid. They are Clone-less; they are meant to die. They are meant to die for real and without any hope for a return.

Anyone who becomes an immortal will know on his first day that there are two subprocesses to the transneural protocol. When death is imminent, the scan is done within 45.28 nanoseconds. At the fiftieth nanosecond, the brain is destroyed. This in turn triggers the FTL transmission to the backup, be it half a galaxy away. A leads to B; B leads to C. One perfect chain.

“I’m coming to meet you now.”

What. I feel my heart skip a beat. What’s going now, ship? How—

I almost jump out of the pod. How’s the Idiot cutting through my filter? Did this pod even pass basic CONCORD tests?

“Listen here, you piece of—”

The words continue to scroll. “I can tell you what Lupus means.”

I bite back the next word I wanted to say. My brain speed through the basic game of logic. Cartin. Cartin’s associates. Who else is in this? Someone is bypassing my access commands and none of the pod, ship or station alarms are triggered.

“I don’t know who you are,” I say via audio. “But I know no sane person listens to Cartin, And by association you are not entirely sane.”

“Sanity can be many things. Cartin hangs on to his own with his search for philosophy.”

“Is that what it is? I heard him talk about how ‘Women and children are difficult to clone’ from someone called Confused Us and I came to a different conclusion.”

A short pause. And then he continues, “You have killed thousands. Some would call that pretty insane.”

“Ah, so this is about revenge. That gnawing hunger that eats at you. I should have known.”

“How do I take revenge on my own stupidity? We see ourselves as gods, but we are no smarter than any other Clone-less. In fact when we make mistakes they are colossal.”

The circle has shrunk considerably. Not many still use the term “Clones-less”. To be precise, none. Cartin knows what I’m talking about but I’ve not heard him use it himself.

The audio feed come on. “Homo Homini Lupus.”

I know that voice. How can he even use it?

The hangar door opens, sending an alert right to my pod as a caution not to attempt undocking. My hand went to my empty holster and I curse Cartin again. This is wrong. My anger wells up. Anger, wrath, rage, overriding my fear.

“The first two words mean Man. I checked. I don’t know why they use two words to mean the same thing. Man Man Wolf. But I can only guess it means a transition. Man becomes a man. Another man, for better or for worse. And after that he becomes a wolf. Degenerates into a wolf. A beast that was once real, a predator without remorse.”

I slam open my pod with fury ruling my head. He waits for me with three things that belong to me — the blaster I left behind, my face, and my voice. “The transneural protocol. I wouldn’t insult myself by telling you which subprocess failed and how far it failed.”

“We can work this out,” I say. The clarity is beginning to cut into me like knife. “You know how smart we are. I’m your continuation. You don’t really mean what you said just now.”

“But I do. A Sister saved me. A Clone-less woman pilot, if you want to know. She had no reason to. My cargo was gone and my pod was streaming atmosphere. But she told me she saw a man in the pod, not a wolf. To her I guess the transneural protocol did destroy something, and left behind something else. In the past two weeks I have learnt more than you did from your implants and your neural feeds. Meanwhile you killed more people in that time than the Sisters have saved. People like me.”

The backup. There is no backup like this. Has there even been a precedent like this? I’m no longer the backup. I’m the extra.

“I’m still a man,” he says. He raises his weapon. “I plan now to remain as one. But you, you are a wolf. I don’t know if I should apologise to myself or to you. I’m just … sorry.”

Stupid Cartin. I wanted so much to go as a man.