So on discord you many see me running about with the name Carcosa Hali, on occasion. The name itself is a reference to Robert M. Chambers book, The King in Yellow a play that drives it's audience to madness, mentioned only in passing throughout his works. It has been featured quite regularly in Lovecraft Mythos fiction and game products.

I was trying out this MMO called EVE: Online, science-fiction universe of -staggering- depth; and needed a character name, and that was the one I came up with.. Most fortuitous.

When I first started playing, I had no idea what I was doing. It was my first MMO. I liked forum-based roleplay though, and one of the lesser factions in the game took my fancy: The Cyber-Zombies, aka Sansha's Nation. These are not one of the character races, but that doesn't stop roleplayers one bit. There was a very small, rather disorganized effort among role-players who gravitated to the idea of cyber-zombies who lived in service to a destroyed messianic figure from the past.

I would go through their many forum posts, and the thing that I noticed, was that they lacked a unifying story on which to base their role-play. There was precious-little within the game itself, as the Sansha was just another throw-away antagonist fleet to be destroyed as part of the dungeons common to all MMO's.

So I wrote One.

I cast the Sansha as holocaust survivors, victims of a galaxy-wide genocide carried out by the Factions (player-races) for economic reasons. The result was.. amazing. I got private messages from devs talking about how everyone at the corporate office was blown away by it.

And so were the Sansha roleplayers. Together, this rag-tag group of artists and writers literally changed the course of a game-expansion. I even got confirmation (off the record, ofcourse) of this by the boss of the canon-fiction dept at CCP during a meetup that I went to. WE ALTERED HISTORY. It fucking rocked!

That was many years ago, and ofcourse the game has progressed long since it happened. Now it's ancient history, but what follows is the story. It makes heavy references to In-Game events and fiction, as it was written for the more scholarly EVE players.

Just about everything you read here is the intellectual property of CCP, the developers of EVE: Online. If you want to find an MMO and really lose yourself in it.. This is the way to go.

I just thought I would share it, because.. ya know.. Stuff.

Enjoy.

Edited by: Carcosa Hali on 18/02/2008 04:18:46
The Secret History of Sansha's Nation

I’m writing this in response to some misconceptions that have been spread about Gal-Net recently. The information I’m presenting here isn’t really a secret… Traces lie scattered across the oceans of Net flotsam, among public records, combat memorials and even forgotten profiles from social networking sites. It can be found by anyone who is able to leave their preconceptions behind and look with eyes unclouded by hate. While you read this, keep one thing in mind. It is the Winners who write history, and they are not given to admitting their faults.

I can’t really fault the people who repeat the commonly known “truths” about the Sansha, as most have no idea what happened, their only reference being a crappy one-page summary of a war that unified New Eden, written by an overblown pundit who knows only what he reads in the Oursulaert Post. I’ve included this article here for your convenience. In it, the author boils down an extremely complex event into a simple story of “Good Guys vs. Bad Guys”. Life just isn’t that simple.

This is the story of Sansha’s Nation.

The Dream.

That the Nation rose to power so quickly says much about the state of intercluster society at that time. Libertarian circles among the Intaki: increasingly appalled by their governments’ violations against the Caldari State. Newly freed Matari: desperately searching for an oasis of strength and security as the newborn Republic threatened to disintegrate every passing day. Caldari veterans: sickened by the manner in which the Mega corps blithely filed the records of their sacrifices as ‘collateral damage’. And broken-hearted Imperial citizens: faced with the impossible concept that perhaps their God had forsaken them.

It was from these people that the Nation drew its ranks. The dispossessed and downtrodden were legion in those days, stripped of their pride and dignity, resigned to simply try and survive one more day in the absence of their friends and family lost to a war of attrition. In the end, the four warring cultures were forced into a fragile peace. A peace won not by victory or diplomacy, not bravery nor heroism; but by simple exhaustion.

Their anger and resentment was not spent, their vengeance never satisfied. The only thing that remained was a wound that none could ever seal. For many, it was as if the world had ended, as the whole of human civilization teetered on the edge of a nihil that would consume them all. These were the darkest times in recorded history with everything mankind had accomplished threatening to slip away. And from that darkness, there came a Light.

Sansha Kuvakei. Already bald at forty-five, and though not possessed of great stature, nor an imposing voice he nevertheless arrested the attention of all who heard him. Not so much the man, as the idea that he championed. The idea was very quiet, very honest. The idea was a Place. A place where the past could be forgotten and the future could begin. Glorious in its simplicity, it was the idea of a place where people could simply Be.

It began with the realization that at the bottom of things, after one’s concepts of race and creed had been burned away by years of total war that people were basically just the same. As Kuvakei used to joke, in the end all people were possessed of “Two eyes, two ears, and big mouth”. Though it might seem naïve to some in these days of prosperity, this facet of Truth is not wasted on those who are truly acquainted with hardship. At the basest of levels, all are One.

The Truth resonated deeply among the people of New Eden. Many were those who chose to abandon the preconceptions and ideologies, which had brought ruin to the empires and follow this ideal. Choosing an empty and inhospitable place among the stars, they set forth to make the Dream a reality. And to the surprise of many... they succeeded.

At first one, and then shortly thereafter another, and another began to see that the Dream could be realized, that Truth was more than just another polemic coming from a man with something to sell. The Dream was real, and the nation was born. In ever increasing numbers, people from all the empires flocked to the region now known as Paragon Soul, lending their hands and intellects in the effort to build something which none of the empires could give them. Hope.

Edited by: Carcosa Hali on 11/02/2008 19:42:07
In a very short time, the Nation had risen from a group of idyllic pioneers to become a small but growing player in the worlds of defense contracting and mining industry, with a reputation for exceeding the expectations of clients. This and the rate at which new technologies were being produced led many business interests to invest heavily in the Nation, allowing Sansha to open new factories on a near-weekly basis. All of these things led to a vast migration of itinerant workers left unemployed by the chaos at the end of the Empire wars.

It was not long before the influx of people began to strain the resources available to the Sansha, but they handled their burdens admirably, always finding a way to overcome every challenge. With each colony filling faster than the last, the Nation raced to stay ahead of its meteoric population growth. When the habitable moons of Ehressf were filled, they moved on to Sylou, and then Doularm. And when Stain could hold no more, they went to Esoteria. It was tireless, sometimes backbreaking work, but under the guidance of Sansha, and with many kind donations from charities across the cluster, it was done. In just a few years, they had accomplished the impossible.

The demands of such tremendous responsibilities began to wear on Kuvakei and his lieutenants. It was during this time of expansion that Kuvakei made a fateful choice, setting him on the road to his ultimate downfall. It was becoming more and more difficult to balance the apportionment of the labor force between civic and industrial duties. The explosion of immigration began to strain the resources and ingenuity of even Sansha himself. Although he first rejected proposals of slave labor outright, over time the ready availability of low-cost labor began to gnaw at the capitalist in his heart.

Following an epic board meeting that lasted 52 hours and resulted in the resignations of two council members, it was decided that the Nation would purchase slaves from the Amarr in order to alleviate the stresses placed on the populace, with the caveat that all slaves would be treated in as humane a fashion as possible. There would be no whips or VITOC, instead the slaves would be implanted with intercranial microcontrollers and hard drives, originally designed as a method of dealing with severe autism and mental illness. Working in tandem with Ishukone, the Nation developed a method in which a slave could be enabled with skills and education directly uploaded to the cerebral cortex, providing them with the knowledge to perform a specialized profession almost instantly.

In addition, it would be possible to upload “situational content”, effectively causing the slaves to feel secure, motivated and valued, thereby eliminating the need of guards and overseers. Further yet, the slaves would able to work toward their eventual freedom, and perhaps someday take ownership of the structures they created. In effect, they were building their own future homes and workplaces. While not perfect, this was seen as a fair deal among the people of the Nation. Such was the nature of the people that hundreds of thousands volunteered to assist the incoming slaves or refugees as they were then being called.

Other entities were intrigued by this concept as well. In particular, the Dark Amarr took interest in this manner of control, as it would result in vastly reducing the overhead involved with keeping a captive populace. Also, certain elements among the law enforcement communities of New Eden formed projects to investigate the possibilities of behavioral modification among violent repeat offenders. For instance, given the problems inherent with chemical castration, if it were possible to permanently correct the predatory appetites of a pederast, then both the community and the criminal would benefit from this technology. For a time it seemed that everything Sansha touched turned into gold.

Edited by: Carcosa Hali on 12/02/2008 15:18:42
The Fall.

Inevitably, the massing of such wealth and industry attracted the interest of criminal organizations around the cluster. Before long, pirate raids became an increasing irritant to the Nation. Sansha sought to hire mercenaries to deal with the pirates, but before long the sheer volume of raiders began to overwhelm even these professional soldiers. On some occasions, the mercenaries themselves began to assist the pirates, seeing an opportunity for profit far beyond their normal means. Though the Nation was fully capable of meeting all the needs generated by its citizens, it was not so skilled at maintaining the safety of those citizens. Something had to be done.

Kuvakei had never been fond of space travel. Though his business dealings and the founding of the Nation required him to travel almost constantly, he always preferred to have his feet on solid ground. In the wild days of the Gallente-Caldari War he had often borne witness to starship combat and the terrors of evading deep-space patrols. These experiences left him with a keen distaste for shipboard life.

Ironically, starships were an area that Sansha excelled at. Having made his fortune during the Empire wars as an arms manufacturer, Kuvakei began developing wondrous new devices, such as advanced shield hardening systems facilitated by a series of protruding vanes that served to augment the fields’ resistance to kinetic and explosive damage. Coupled with advances in tachyon pulse emitters and target acquisition software, he was confident that these new ships would easily be able to overpower the pirate organizations that plagued the south in those days. As it turned out, they weren’t.

Given the sorts of people who were attracted to the rather liberal nature of Sansha’s vision, and the more conservative bent of military politics; the Nation had a deficit of seasoned military personnel to draw from. The police and defense fleets were therefore composed largely of young, inexperienced pilots, in turn being directed by young, inexperienced officers. Though it worked for a time, it was a recipe for disaster. And disaster soon came.

After a series of raids by the Sanguine Palm, a now-defunct Sani Sabik cult, resulted in the loss of several industrials in the Aeltrir constellation, a fleet of National ships was sent to guard a research facility in orbit at Sasnakra VI. When contact with the outpost was lost 3 weeks later, a patrol dispatched to investigate returned news that a small fleet of Palm ships had disrupted communications and divided the defensive fleet. Despite their numerical and technological advantage, the Sansha forces had overcompensated, allowing a much larger force slip into the system and overtake the outpost. Over three thousand personnel were lost, either butchered or abducted by the cultists. None were spared.

The news of this event shocked the young nation. Emboldened by their success, the cultists grew ever more daring in their raids, pushing the strength of the Sansha Navy to its limits. This did not come as bad news to some. As word spread about the ineffectiveness of the National forces, other criminal organizations flooded into Sansha space. In response, corporations began to withdraw assets from the region, further damaging the confidence of his investors. During its remarkable growth, the Nation had upset the plans of many corporations and special interests, which then moved to block efforts among the Empires to send military aide.

This fact, coupled with the cultural upheavals of post war reconstruction led the Factions to turn a blind eye as the situation worsened in the south… Eventually, news of pirate raids filled the holo-nets on a nightly basis, leading many among the Empires to conclude that the Nation would soon be forced to implore one of the factions for aid, becoming just another of the vassal-states among the cluster.

Fully aware of this, and adamantly opposed to becoming dependent on the Empires for safety, Sansha Kuvakei turned his massive intellect to the task of finding a remedy to the failures plaguing his armed forces. Reviewing battle reports and sensor data from the engagements, he slowly realized that the problem lay not in the Nations’ ships or systems, but in the pilots. The problem was fear. In clash after clash, the inexperienced defense personnel erred due to a failure to recognize tactical opportunities and respond accordingly, placing them in a disadvantage when faced with pirate captains seasoned in the Empire wars. This troubled him greatly, for though you could create an answer to a mechanical problem, you could never produce a pilot immune to fear. Or could you

While Sansha and his advisors pondered these questions in secrecy, pirates and slavers were assaulting the outer colonies one by one. The discovery of a massing Palm fleet, a seeming prelude to full-scale invasion rocked the Nation yet again. With the populace on the edge of panic, and unable to find a solution that didn’t involve bowing to the Empires, Kuvakei announced that the augmented slaves’ were to be uploaded with starship combat skills and tactics, and their emotional responses to be temporarily suppressed.

This was not well received by much of the nation, as the Matari in particular raged that their brethren’s promised liberty would so easily be snatched away from them. Construction ground to a halt as riots sparked on many worlds, further exacerbating the need for peacekeeping forces. Amidst these circumstances, Sansha gravely gave the order for the uploading to begin.

The riots stopped dead in their tracks. As if a switch had been thrown, all augmented slaves turned and began walking to the space-ports, there to board transport ships bound for the naval bases. With the bulk of their number now leaving, what remained of the rioters simply stopped, unable to believe their eyes. Many then raced directly home, gathering what mementos they could as they ushered their families to their own transports, these bound for the Empires. Most citizens however, simply stayed in their homes, trying to determine what to do next.

As the first Nationals began leaving the Sansha space, fighters now piloted by the first True Slaves escorted them. Not a single transport was lost. In the following days, working like a finely honed instrument, the True Slave armadas struck down Sanguine Palm fleets with startling effectiveness. Within a few short weeks, constellations once infested with chatter from pirate bases were now quiet as the grave. Frankly unprepared for the speed with which this turn of events took place, the shocked populaces of Stain, Esoteria and Paragon Soul slowly came to accept the True Slaves as a necessary evil for the continued prosperity of the Nation. Entire communities were sundered by their convictions on this issue. It was a most bitter and ugly compromise.

If the series of tragedies had stopped there, it is difficult to determine what might have happened next. Given the divisive wound to the Nation’s identity it is likely that there would have been at least a partial disintegration of the society. While each citizen still held Truth as an ideal, few were those who didn’t wonder if perhaps they had gone astray. Many chose to leave, their hopes lost on the Dream they had striven for. With the pirate incursion now under control, and the safety of the Nation assured, rumors began to circulate that Kuvakei was considering the decommissioning and emancipation of all but the most necessary of True Slaves. All of these possibilities became moot, as the shadow of a threat far greater than the Palm, the Serpentis or even the Arch-Angels arose.

The Factions had taken notice of his solution to pilot error, and they were not pleased.

The Sansha War.

There is no question why the Factions chose to make war on the Nation. The ease with which the riots had been broken up appalled the Federation, to whom the right of expression is most dear. Even more disturbing were the True Slaves themselves, their coordination so great that entire fleets moved as one being; a force that only the capsuleers could withstand. The Caldari recognized this, and joined the Coalition a scant few hours after the Republic pledged themselves to the cause. Finally, seeing a threat more ideological than physical, the traitorous Amarr turned against us, unable to tolerate any Truth that was not their own.

After a burst of hastily convened meetings to negotiate rules of engagement, including, at the insistence of the Federation, the disarmament of the Nation with the minimum necessary force, the coalition set about declaring cluster-wide embargoes against the Nation. Bank accounts were frozen, credit lines revoked, and the Factions moved once again to war.

Thus began the greatest mobilization of military forces in the known history of New Eden. I won’t spend time here recounting the thousands of engagements that took place in those black days, as I could barely scratch the surface. Battle-reports and fleet movements of the various Navies can be found in any library database; military histories, written by the winners, hold many stories of brave pilots and glorious battles.

Most of the accounts are accurate, of the systematic taking of National territories, the neutralization of our key resources, the slow but inexorable pressure built until the entire Nation was in flames or retreating to Esoteria. Instead I will tell of the little things that military histories so often fail to convey. Little forgotten details found in the vast backlogs of diary entries, medical records and mental health insurance claims, and especially among the memoirs of veterans lost in the forgotten corners of the holo-net. In a time of slaughter, little things make all the difference.

Like the Matari pilots, croaking the names of long dead friends as they guided Einherji fighters into suicide courses. Or voices among the intercepted communications between Gallente bombardiers, excitedly repeating the motto “Let the planet burn!” as they shelled the cities of Tekeli-li. A motto first coined in orbit around Caldari Prime shortly after the tragedy of Nouvelle Rouvenor.

In a series of titanic battles, the Coalition succeeded in breaking the front lines of the National forces and sending the Sansha into a retreat. It was during this lull in the fighting that the Empires quickly fell into the roles for which they have become renowned.

The Caldari utilized their hordes of new commissioned frigates to intercept all supplies and reinforcements still in route to Sansha holdings. With almost exclusive possession of Jovian capsule technology at the time, they could accomplish with one ship what would take the other empires and entire fleet. Though they did not engage the Sansha fleets in the regions of Stain and Paragon Soul as directly as the other Empires, this left them free to perform informational warfare; disrupting communications, feeding false co-ordinates to National forces, and reporting naval movements to the coalition forces.

Meanwhile the Matari concentrated almost solely on engagements against the Sansha Armada, seeking to grant their kinsman the solace of death, if not freedom. In the early weeks of the war they led the way, conducting a series of devastating hit and run attacks against satellites and shipyards, driving back the True Slaves and tying up the planetary defenses long enough for the Federation to bring its slower, relatively vulnerable Capital ships into place around the Sansha homeworlds.

Somewhere, as the weeks of ferocious battles that lasted days and spanned whole systems ground onward, the Coalition forces stopped fighting the Nation, and began fighting something else entirely; an enemy that could not be killed no matter how fiercely they tried. Flying in formation with their most hated of enemies, surrounded by those they so bitterly wished to kill, yet whose aide they desperately needed to survive… they found another avenue. In the black spaces between thoughts; as post traumatic stress disorder mixed with the fever of battle, pilots and crewmembers resumed waging the wars they had never been able to finish, with the Sansha as their proxy.

The psychological phenomenon of Transference is well known among individuals. Unable to cope with ugly realities, a person will choose a scapegoat, often someone only marginally associated to those anxieties themselves. This can also occur on a community level, wherein some unlucky individual just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and is made a victim of the hobgoblins that afflict the cultural mind.

And sometimes, in the wake of great tragedy, it seizes entire societies. History is rife with these events, such as when the Federation sought to destroy much of Caldari Prime in response to Nouvelle Rouvenor; a whole civilization blamed for the actions of an extremist group. In this pogrom at least, the Gallente failed.

In a manner, which might be difficult for some to understand Sansha’s Nation became the focal point for the frustrations of every faction within the cluster. The Federation: chaffing at their inability to prevent the Caldari separation. The Minmatar: driven mad by nine centuries of slavery. The Caldari: desperately scrambling for any edge against the Gallente. The Amarr: bruised and broken, suffering the torments of a crisis of faith on a societal level. And the imagined howling of the spectres of those whose lives were consumed in the fury of the Empire wars. It was the weight of these injuries, humiliations, and terrors which drove the factions to genocide; all of their darkest fears exorcised in a moment of stupefying brutality.

It was as if the whole of New Eden had gone mad.

The Gallente, then, were the ones who provided the killing blows to Sansha’s Nation, as their orbital bombardment platforms lay waste to the population centers of Stain and Paragon Soul… who detonated Cobalt bombs above the forests in which the Sansha had run to take shelter. Like terrible furnaces in the sky, their strikes ground cities into dust, leaving great, irradiated sheets of glass like scars upon the earth. Millions died on these black days, their names lost to us forever.

In the wake of these holocausts, the tasks of surface pacification and police actions fell to the Amarr, a role they were thoroughly acquainted with. Due to the proximity of the Empire, the Amarr flooded into Sansha space like the wolves of ancient myth, screaming battle-hymns until their throats were raw and their lips bloody. In the following weeks the Kameira and their Khanid masters ‘rescued’ hundreds of millions of Nationals. Few were ever seen again.

Even those who sought to flee were not spared, as industrial ships, crowded thick with Nationals were warp-scrambled and cored by the missiles of the Caldari patrols. Or else captured by the Amarr and carried of into the night. Or most terrible of all, those whose transports were piloted by True Slaves, that would soon turn to lead them to the grimmest of fates.

Sansha Kuvakei perished during the final assault on the world of True Hope, still trying to coordinate the retreat of Paragon Soul. It is tempting to think of Sansha’s death in romantic terms, to craft a great story of his bravery at the end, dying well, wreathed in glory in a manner similar to Tovil-Toba. But the truth is that people don’t die well. They just die.

Some escaped of course, fleeing deep into the Sea where no stargates could follow. And there were others who rushed into the furthest wilds of deadspace, seldom to be heard from again. And still others, who reintegrated with the societies of the Factions, living in terror that they would someday be discovered. These are the only remnants of the once great Nation. People who knowing Truth; must hide lest they be the subject of a new Pogrom.

Finally, the most terrible tragedy of all is that with all the might of the cluster behind them, after they had killed and enslaved millions in their rage; the Factions failed so utterly at their chosen task.

The Relics.

Without doubt the greatest obstacle facing the True Sansha at this time are the Relics, the nightmare that grew forth from the True Slaves that survived the holocaust. Though they fly beneath our banner, and call themselves True, they are not us. They are nothing but a most horrid mockery of the Dream. A nightmare set loose by the actions of those who sought to destroy them.

Once the Caldari hackers gained access to the National security grid, they set about their goal of retrieving every last blueprint, schematic and secret in the possession of the Nation before crashing the systems they had infiltrated. They also began sending out false alarms, bogus telemetry and sightings, everything they could to disrupt communications between the True Slaves and Command. Once it became known that the lines of communication had been breached, the order was given to place the True Slaves on “autopilot” locking them into a state of red alert where they would ignore all orders that didn’t contained a certain code sequence.

All tactical and strategic decisions were left to the True Slave commanders, their hard-drives heavy with all the knowledge gained by mankind’s obsession with war. They were brilliant beyond imagining, and they had only three simple rules which they were hardwired to follow. They would defend the Nation, attempt to drive back the invaders and retake ground, and they would resupply when necessary. And they would not stop until they received the properly coded sequence. A sequence of code that was lost with the destruction of Sansha’s Nation, buried somewhere beneath a million tons of irradiated concrete.

The Relics continue on then, still locked in the nightmare of a war that can never be won, waiting for a stand-down order than will never be sent. They do as they were told. They fight to gain ground, and build stations and defenses with which to hold it. They re-supply when needed, making new ships, new weapons, and even new troops as necessary. In the early days after the war ended, determining themselves to be low on reinforcements, they called back the refugee transports that were piloted by True Slaves, bringing the survivors to be conscripted in the service of the Nation. This was the greatest irony, that the surviving True would finally be butchered by those who were meant to protect them. The Relics ground onward, degenerating into the mislead beasts that plague New Eden to this day.

Aftermath.

Each of the Empires profited greatly by the destruction of the Nation, their culpability a topic they are most reluctant to discuss.

The Amarr and Caldari have benefited in the most visible sense. There is no argument from the Amarr as to having gained millions of new slaves at the time of the war. Furthermore, Sansha genes have doubtless proven valuable in their joint eugenics program to create the perfect workhorse. Genetic testing has confirmed that certain ‘products’ of the crèches carry National DNA within their ancestry. Who knows, you may even have a little Sansha in you.

That the Caldari have made use of technologies stolen from the Sansha is no secret. Though True Power has progressed much further in the last century, a simple glance at schematics reveals the similarity between the two. Also, the recent release of Ishukones’ transcranial microprocessors, almost identical in form and function to the implants used by the Sansha a century ago, cannot simply be explained away as mere coincidence. It will be interesting to see what ‘new’ products they release in the years to come.

The Gallente and Minmatar Factions rewards were less well defined, oddly making their contributions to genocide even less understandable. But rewards they did receive, as follows.

Fresh out of a devastating war with the Caldari, which ended in more of a draw than a victory; Gallente society was rife with civil unrest and dissatisfaction. After the Councils failure to achieve victory and re-integrate the Caldari State into the Federation, the Gallente leaders were in dire need of some unifying idea. They desperately need a ‘win’. The Sansha War was an extremely convenient event for the Gallente Senate, allowing the administration to once again paint it's warriors as valiant defenders of justice, while simultaneously reinforcing the Federation’s stance against slavery. They certainly got their 'win'.

There is also the minute yet compelling possibility that the people of the Federation felt subconsciously threatened by the concept of an egalitarian society that existed without the benefit of democracy, a concept which they regarded as simply irrational. More than any other faction, the Gallente’ failure to reign in their forces displayed a terrible breach of logic and federal ideology. Rather than nurturing a growing culture, they stamped it out. Instead of wielding political strength, they resorted to violence first. Finally, contrary to their goal of “Freedom for All!” they delivered several billion innocents into the waiting arms of the Amarr.

Of the allied forces, the least culpable is undoubtedly the Minmatar. Still reeling from their emancipation from the Amarr, they quite legitimately sought to free every member of their race. Their behavior is not wholly without fault though. That fact that the Amarr ‘rescued’ several hundred million Nationals from the constellations of Esoteria was not lost of the Matari. They chose, however to turn a blind eye to the very crimes which they had come to avenge. Crimes they promised themselves they would never let be repeated.

It seems that “Justice” was most poetic, in those days.

The fires of the past have cooled now, and the remnants of our metropoli sit empty, home to nothing more than what pale, mutated wretches may have survived. Worlds once illuminated by cities are now radiant with the spectral light of plutonium fallout as it silently waits out the millennia for its rendezvous with lead.

Other places, among the vast craters produced as antimatter collided with the soil, are not so quiet as one might wish. Purged by the bombardment of gamma rays, these areas now teem with a life unlike our own, the surviving nanites of our industrial complexes seemingly having taken steps toward their own societies. Perhaps one terrible day they will reach the triumph of escape velocity themselves, and go to join the drone intelligences of Cobalt Edge. It is hard to say.

Of the True Sansha themselves, precious little remains. Even the names of our worlds have been wiped from all but the oldest of star-charts. Ehressf, Oundei, Tsath-yo, all of these places are now forgotten, lost in the alphanumeric soup of CONCORD’s naming convention. The Nation itself is now a heterogeneous mixture of bitterness and acceptance, rationalist and maniac. Some seek to re-establish the Nation as it once was, with True-Slaves carrying out dangerous tasks while the majority of humanity concerns itself with more pressing issues. Others, diametrically opposed, seek to return to a wholly agrarian society, bound by the tenets of Luddhism. Most of those now living among the Empires simply wish to be left alone.

The Relics, still a part of us despite their terrible dementia, press onward to carry out their orders. There is an effort by diverse groups of True descendents who seek the Lost Sequence for various purposes. Certain fundamentalist groups wish to marshal the Relics to their will, to gain revenge against the Empires.

Conversely, there are movements committed to using it to order a stand-down, and bring the War to a final close. Some among the Ambients have dedicated their entire lives to this, processing quintillions of calculations per second in pursuit of this goal; many driving themselves mad or perishing from file-corruption in the process.

We are hardly the monolithic terror presented on tabloid news-feeds such as Nugoeihuvi Live, Glamour Network or The Scope. Once again, life just isn’t that simple.

Analysis.

Finally, we arrive at the most important of questions. What does it all mean?
Given the state of affairs among the Empires today, one cannot help but wonder… If the Nation had arisen today, would the Factions have raced to quickly to the slaughter?

With CONCORD’s recent legalization of transcranial microcontrollers Ishukone have become the clusters premiere supplier of ‘A New You’. The Khanid have finally received what they longed for a century ago. Indeed there were reports that thousands of slaves requested these devices, seeking to escape the whips that had scarred them. A hundred years later, it’s still not perfect, but given the choice, situational content seemed much better than to them than the option of VITOC.

Likewise, the Gallente populace seems to have overcome its aversion to perceptual modification. I can’t help but wonder if they knew the terrible legacy of their grandfathers’ actions, would they engage so readily in their chip-orgies. And with great irony, they have now created a glut of demand, raising TCM prices so high that less fortunate people cannot even dream of affording them… turning trans-micros into just another drug, taken like everything else, to excess.

Perhaps the greatest (and most subtle) legacy of the Sansha War is the ongoing peace between the Empires. The Pogroms completion came upon the young Factions as a vast catharsis, allowing them to distance themselves from their past, and focus upon tomorrow. In the midst of the Sansha war, they had confronted the destiny that lay before them if they remained as they were. Extinction. Despite the violence and destruction of this chapter in history, the most tenuous of bonds was established, allowing them to see that there could be a future, if they would allow themselves to have one. Though it cost the lives of an entire culture; in the one bright spot of the entire monstrous affair, they chose to move on.

And so it leaves just one final question to be pondered by every minority of the cluster; be they a Thukker nomad, an Intaki incarna, or brave Capsuleer. How long before diplomacy falls before hate? How long before hysteria drives the populace of the New Eden to call once again for the blood of a people they do not understand?

How long before the Factions require a new sacrifice?