CCP Delegate Zero dropped a lore bomb on EVE today in the form of the Inheritance chronicle. Please take a few minutes to read it. It is worth the time and has a tremendous amount of information in it. The story picks up after the events of the destruction of the Society of Conscious Thought Gnosis by Jamyl Sarum a few months ago. I happened to have been in the system when this one occurred and had documented it with a post. Mentor Raish, the focus of this Chronicle, is the same from that live event. Here are a few things that I learned from this story
1. The Jove are alive
The story opens with Mentor Raish being woken in his clone after being podded at the event. He is greeted by Veniel, a Jovian member of the SoCT. If you were looking for a concrete statement on the fate of the Jove, this is it.
2. Jamyl Sarum was inhabited by another
The conversation of the two men quickly turns to the events that preceded Mentor waking up in his clone. He recounts the results of his scans of Jamyl's ship, the SoCT's ongoing monitoring of her, and his conclusion that she has been inhabited by another entity, namely "The Other". They also talk about their desire to assassinate her due to the danger this presents.
3. There is/was a Dyson sphere in Jove space
The story shifts perspective, going back to 250 BYC (this notation means 250 years before YC 0 - it is currently YC 117) and describing the observations of a Jovian ship in the W477-P. You may recall that W477-P is the system where Caroline's star was determined to have been. The pilot, a Jove by the name of Ouria, discovers that an enormous structure has been built around this star, namely a Dyson Sphere. The scope of this construct is mind boggling, as expected, but it is presumed to have been built for the purposes of solar power collection and transformation.
Not only was the sphere discovered, but a number of wormhole gates were found to be embedded in the sphere. Over the next 50 years, the Jove would analyze this structure, send probes into the wormhole gates, until Veniel was chosen to join Ouria on the first manned journey through a gate.
Back in the present, Veniel reveals to Mentor that the Talocan built the sphere as he describes their entrance into Anoikis (wormhole space) and docking at a Sleeper Enclave. Here he reveals that in 200 BYC, they already had discovered "Others" within the Sleeper Hives. Veniel and Ouria discovered that the Sleeper Enclaves, while retaining their One Mind, One Body provision while in their self-created virtual construct, had also made efforts to account for their physical bodies decaying. These Hives are the structures that have been and are being discovered and plundered by wormholers and other capsuleers. The connection they make, however, is that the past actions by the Amarr Empire to plunder those resources may have then been specifically directed by The Other within Jamyl Sarum for unknown purposes. This leads Mentor to conclude...
Not only was the sphere discovered, but a number of wormhole gates were found to be embedded in the sphere. Over the next 50 years, the Jove would analyze this structure, send probes into the wormhole gates, until Veniel was chosen to join Ouria on the first manned journey through a gate.
Back in the present, Veniel reveals to Mentor that the Talocan built the sphere as he describes their entrance into Anoikis (wormhole space) and docking at a Sleeper Enclave. Here he reveals that in 200 BYC, they already had discovered "Others" within the Sleeper Hives. Veniel and Ouria discovered that the Sleeper Enclaves, while retaining their One Mind, One Body provision while in their self-created virtual construct, had also made efforts to account for their physical bodies decaying. These Hives are the structures that have been and are being discovered and plundered by wormholers and other capsuleers. The connection they make, however, is that the past actions by the Amarr Empire to plunder those resources may have then been specifically directed by The Other within Jamyl Sarum for unknown purposes. This leads Mentor to conclude...
4. The Drifters are Others
Mentor concludes that the harvesting of Hives, also evidenced in the Drifter wormholes, is clear indication that the Drifters are Others that have now taken on newly generated clone bodies and/or other bodies harvested.
5. The Seyllin incident broke the sphere
The superluminal explosion in W477-P was the result of the Dyson Sphere in the system collapsing. The cause of that collapse, as told in the chronicle, stems from the Seyllin Incident which opened wormhole space to New Eden. The star in W477-P was dying and the Jove, after retreating from wormhole space for two centuries, had taken to monitoring the star and the sphere. When the Seyllin Incident occured, fifty of the gates around W477-P were destroyed sending energy into the star, twenty-seven other gates were destroyed by a resulting solar mass ejection. Over time, many other gates and structures were wrecked or destroyed as the sphere destabilized but did not result in the entire structure collapsing. There isn't any indication that the number of gates referenced here correlate to anything else in New Eden or Anoikis...yet.
6. The Jove have wormhole generators
Often desired by capsuleers and used by the Sansha, Veniel confirms the existence of Jovian technology to create direct wormhole connections between systems when he takes Mentor, using a Jovian cruiser, back to Jove space.
7. There are less than a thousand Jove left
Before recounting the events of YC116, Veniel reveals that between the Seyllin incident and Caroline's Star, the number of Jove declined from 10,000 to a mere thousand. It doesn't seem that he meant they were dying out but instead they were leaving, knowing that the destruction of W477-P was imminent. He mentions the remaining Jove staying within their best shielded stations within Jove space.
8. Caroline's Star was the Dyson sphere collapsing
The event known as Caroline's Star was the destruction of the Dyson Sphere in W477-P which also destroyed the Jovian stargate network. Veniel describes that the stargate network was the most significant effect in Jove space other than some un-maintained stations.
9. Anoikis is artificial
The bombshell of the chronicle (to me at least) was Veniel's declaration that Anoikis was, at one time, an artificially connected set of star systems that would not have otherwise supported any time of connectivity. The Talocan had built the Dyson sphere in W-477P and created an interconnected network of systems using wormhole gates. There was much speculation by Veniel regarding the timing of this discovery, how it relates to the Jovian Second and Third Empires as well as the Sleepers. Many questions remained here with few answers.
10. The Jove are active in CONCORD
The chronicle ends with Mentor Raish revealing himself to the CONCORD inner circle as the representative of the Jove, reactivating their relationship. Not just as an individual, but the Society of Conscious Thought inherited the mantle of representative of the Jove from the Jove Directorate. It all ends with a rather ominous request from Raish for information on the Upwell Consortium. What this means, we shall see...