Habitual Life

Bold Pilot Log, Entry #14

We capsuleers are so much different from the people that die for real when killed. Well, we act like we were different. In truth, there is more to this. When you stop dying, some things change. For instance, I no longer fear for anything. I consider myself and my assets already gone because both body and the battleship surrounding it is made of something I can replace. It is certainly an inconvenience, but it's good for the economy.

The crew, on the other hand, is another matter. Those people die when the hull crumbles. The sad thing in this all is that I don't really care. There are thousands more who dream of being part of an Abaddon class battleship's town-sized crew. I can replace them, too. Ethics and morals matter little to most capsuleers. They delude themselves that they fight for something honorable, though in many cases it's their own interest that is motivating them. ISK, Loyality points, more ISK, admiration, new ships, domination of a territory - ISK again. People have yet to see themselves for the animals they are.

Capsuleers are not only no less selfish than ordinary people are, they have something dangerous in common with them: habits. Some have the habit of self-destructing their ship. This is relatively harmless, since the sequence allows most of the crew to evacuate. Some have the habit of killing everything on sight. What we enjoy is not always what we do, however, we pursue our own habits. I for one, have the rather expensive habit of buying new ships over and over. I don't really need them, my trusty old battleships and haulers are up to the job for the most occasions. It's just ISK burns. I must spend it on my experiments.

Take Quintessence, the new Legion class strategic cruiser I built, for example. I didn't need it per say, yet it has five hundred millions or more in it. I wanted a ship that is mobile yet durable. It is a costly and extremely strong vessel for its size, not mentioning all the luxury that Tech level 3 equipment comes with. I really enjoyed the time I was perfecting my technique with it, the piloting it involves to allow it to emerge unscathed from the most missions classified as level four. It is especially effective against the swarms of rouge drones that like to deploy small crafts in large numbers. But functionally speaking, it only is really more useful than a battleship if you have long distances to cover. Otherwise the firepower is far from what the Abaddon sports.

What I want to emphasize with this is that even capsuleers are human, just losing grip due to the lifting of some limitations. I have a habit of experimenting with equipment and my trained crew really enjoys it. However, I know of a group that have an even nastier habit. The Jovians. They experiment on others. By others, meaning whole empires. I was wondering why did they give the capsule to the childish human races? When I think of habits, I now know the answer.

We are a fucking experiment. A large part of intelligence in humans comes from the awareness of death and fear of the unknown. They tried to take away them, to see how people would change. By this move, they exaggerated our tendency to live by habits. They made us more like the animals we thrive to leave behind.

The disease that lurks in them is that of indifference. Somehow the people that have it start to lose interest in anything. Life becomes a habit for them, they live because they haven't died yet, until they can't even be bothered to breathe. They probably try to understand this part of the human nature, the animal that they so fervently sought to purge with their genetic modifications. The ones suffering from the jovian disease, they are a sad reminder that instinct and consciousness should never be separated. We, capsuleers may well be the experiment to make them understand instinct, something they lost in pursuit of false superiority.

So in the end I can only conclude with one statement that may have been said when they thought of this:
"Let's see what happens."

Sessym out.