Category Archives: Fiction

Today was about The Job. It was always about The Job. You could wax philosophical about the state of relations between the Empires. You could talk about that strange star on the holoreels. You could moan about the unjust advantages capsuleers obliviously flaunted over those with just a single body, a single life. But it really just came down to isk. To get isk, you had to do The Job. Currently The Job was both lucrative and immensely frustrating. Jen was snugly inside her corporation-issued Resource Extrication and Exploitation Platform. The C-REEP, or just the Creeper, as most of her fellow contractors called them. The name was fitting for the device. Jen was working as a contractor on a high-risk planetary exploitation deployment, and the chosen device to conduct said exploitation was a modular exosuit. The base of the platform was a simple pressure and temperature regulated suit. Kind of like a diving suit or a space suit. What made it the Creeper was the vast array of alternate configurations and attachments. Drill arms, filament nets, extended legs for swampy or boggy terrain, jets, thrusters, pretty much any adaptation was available for whatever planet, biome, and problem a contractor could Continue Reading →

Lights blinked on the control console, illuminating the dark cabin with a staccato pattern of various colors. Various displays fed constant streams of information to a pilot sitting alone in the sole chair in the cabin. For his part the pilot glanced at the screens occasionally, but mostly he stared out of the viewport that dominated the bulkhead before him. A single star shone, flanked by a deep blue nebula. In the near ground a planet was slowly spinning, complete with attendant moons. The vista had a cold, majestic beauty which seemed to be distracting the pilot. Of course this was all an illusion. The pilot sitting in the command chair was not actually sitting in beaten leather seat. The pilot was suspended in a pool of shock-absorbing and life sustaining fluid, connected to the powerful computers of the ship he piloted via a series of cables and leads connected to his central nervous system. The chair and command center it occupied were simply a nifty piece of software that modeled a real environment, and fed that information into the pilot’s optic, aural, and haptic nerve centers. The chair, the view out of the cabin into space, and the blinking Continue Reading →