Staring into the Abyss

The capsule entered the docking pod, having made an emergency warp from the destruction of its host vessel. The magnetic clamps pull it into the docking cradle, and a gangway extends to the opening, beckoning to the occupant to open up. 

Cait frowns inwardly and sings through a myriad of profanities in her head. She twitches through her capsule's systems to find that nothing has been compromised, only that she's been tractored by someone, though her sensors don't give her a read on where. She begins the disengage sequence from her pod, and pushes herself up against the walls when she is freed, pushing it open, and peeking out as the life support systems retreat down into the goo. Nothing but the straight lines and cold, hard steel of Caldari construction and engineering outside of her. "Odd..."

The docking bay was austere, but there are several doors to who-knows where.

Cait narrows her eyes, thoughts running through her mind a little too fast. She can hear all the voices of her friends, her family telling her what she should and shouldn't do. 'Stay', 'go', 'RUN', 'hide', but her inner self hones in on one door. One little door that appears as though it can be breached. She opens her pod all the way, careless, and looks around. She stands there dripping in just her podsuit, pushes her sopping hair out of her face, slips out of the capsule and slowly to the door.Hesitantly, Cait pushes it open and pokes her head around it, lips pursed, eyes narrowing as she takes a look around.

The cloakroom had obviously been not stocked by someone who knew the ins and outs of fashion. It contained many different articles of clothing: shirts, jackets, dresses, pants, shoes. It appears that someone has tried to include something for everyone but didn't have everything in stock.

Cait crosses her arms and frowns, now slightly suspicious. She leans out of the doorway and looks back out at the docking bay. "This stinks of Prime or someone equally terrible" She mutters to herself, not seeing anyone around. She grits her teeth and steps into the room, puts her hand on the clothing and sighs with an eyebrow raised, her left arm wrapped around herself protectively as she pulls out an outfit for herself and looks around hesitantly again. She steps over to the door and gives it a shove with her foot to close it, and hastily slips out of her pod suit, constantly looking over her shoulder while she changes into the outfit she picked. She frowns down at it. A plain t-shirt and a pair of plain slacks, both black in colour. Neither fit in the way she's accustomed to- tight. Their fit is rather loose off her shoulders and hips, making her feel even more tiny than she usually does. She frowns and scoops up her damp pod suit off the floor.

The door in front of her slides open, there is a lift at that floor. Looking out from the lift it seems to vanish both up and down from distance. The interior was vast, so vast one could not even tell where one was.

Cait frowns and looks all around the room, wrapping both arms around herself now, still clutching her podsuit, and scowling as she steps towards the door. "Okay...Just want you to know...That's creepy!" She calls out and eyes the lift before stepping on it.

A voice seems to speak from nowhere, as if the whole ships was speaking: Leaving: Pod Transfer, destination: Organic Meeting


The lift seems to zoom up at speed, anything that can be seen is just  yet the compensators ensure that it isn't uncomfortable.

Cait sways a little and composes herself, setting her feet slightly apart. She bites her lip and looks around trying to find the source of the voice and then scratching her head feeling mildly disoriented

The lift stops and a door opens up revealing a conference center.

Cait stares into the center for several moments before she steps off the lift. Her eyes move to the closest corner and then pan outwards from there as she quickly walks to it, positioning herself so that her back is to it. Cait's arms are wrapped defensively across her front again, eyes narrowed as she scans for exits and, most importantly, any other person. "He-hello?"

Vlad seems to appear out from one of the walls, he is dressed in an impeccable black uniform "Hello Ms. Nathair. A strange catch today you are."

Cait smirks as her eyes pass over the gentleman dismissively until her brain registers the voice, and her gaze locks onto him. Her eyes widen and she lets out a breathy laugh. "Mr. Cetes?"

The humorous reply from Vlad "Yes. What were you expecting, some mythological demon?"

Cait shakes her head and sighs. "No, not exactly. I had reason to believe I'd fallen into the hands of something that wanted to do me harm, however" She narrows her eyes at him. "Is pod scooping a hobby of yours?"

Vlad replies matter of factly "Only when said pod happens to emergency warp to the starbase where the Final Solution is."

Cait frowns at him as her excuse is no excuse at all. She raises a finger and opens her mouth and then retreats and sighs. "A comm would have been nice, or is that not how you do things around here?" She purses her lips and squints her eyes a bit. I was sort of in a desperate situation. I just had to get out of dodge and fast. Pardon my intrusion"

Vlad replies plainly "Certain measures must be taken with supercarriers, we had to verify that the pod could not give intelligence to hostiles. Anyway, your intrusion is pardoned."

Cait steps closer to him and extends a hand. "Regardless, it's a pleasure to see you again, Mr. Cetes. Even more so in a super carrier. I haven't had the opportunity to be in one yet." She pauses, and then looks at her clothes and looks around.

Vlad notices Cait's unease with the clothes "It would be excessive to stock clothing for all races, genders, and body types."

"Um, if you don't mind me asking...you said 'catch'. What was the point of having me change and come up here if you wanted to ensure I wouldn't leak details of your position? Seems to me you would seek to imprison a potential hostile.Not offer any mode of hospitality. At least, that's how I would do it."

Vlad shakes his head "There are much better ways of imprisoning a human than bars. If they were hostile, we would imprison their mind."

"Imprison their mind?" She turns her head so she slightly side-eyes him suspiciously. "Through psychological manipulation, or something of that sort?"

"On a higher level. Think it through, How do you control your ship?"

"Through my implants, which are regulated by my nanites."

"And you get feedback through those implants, which is connected to your pod. What happens if someone connects to that pod and feeds it information?"

"The balance is disrupted. Any number of things can happen, Mr. Cetes. Essentially, you are sitting inside of my brain if you are connected to my pod"

Vlad grins  "And that is how we keep hostiles imprisoned if we had to. We make them think they are free, when in reality their pod is stuck inside a tiny docking bay."

"All of my information - my emotions, memories, thoughts...my intel, reports, orders...they're all at your command. I'm also at your command. I've been hacked once before. How many hostiles have you imprisoned?" She thinks for a moment and then shakes her head. "Why not me?"

"That number is classified. You are not a hostile. It is obvious of course, since you are here talking to us. Of course, what can you believe?"

"And how do you know I'm not a hostile?"

Vlad chuckles "Because you do not have the power to engage the Final Solution nor harm it."

Cait narrows her eyes at him and then looks around while rubbing the back of her neck, clearly a little shaken at the thought of this being nothing but an illusion. She shakes her head, looks back at Vlad and sighs. "Perhaps, but I have other skills. "Regardless, I was just curious. Now suspicious."

"Suspicious of what exactly?"

"Suspicious of whether this is real"

"You will have to decide that for yourself."

Cait frowns at him and looks around, then back at him. She touches the hem of her shirt, moves her foot across the floor and wanders away from him to observe everything for a moment. "And what is it that you do that determines the hostiles? Surely you...have some kind of stress test procedure?" She remembers how he seemed to appear out of a wall, turns and looks at the wall behind him.

Vlad is right where he has been "We know what our hostiles our. There is no need to test you."

"So then, this is real?"

"What is real?"

"You see this unit, but is it real? This unit is just an image in your mind, a series of signals sent from your eyes to your brain. But what is truly generating the signals, is it your eyes or something else?"

"And it's up to me, I assume, to determine if it is truly my eyes generating these images?" She steps closer to Vlad, a smirk playing on her face. "To determine if I'm still, infact, hooked up to the neural interface of my pod. And how do I find out?"

"That is something you have to determine for yourself"

Cait walks past him, and towards the wall. She stops and looks back at him, then the wall he seemed to appear from and has an internal debate. Cait furrows her brows in concentration and then reaches out and smacks at the wall with her left hand. Her hand bounces off the solid wall. She cocks her head to the side as simulations of the pain reflex travel from the back of her cybernetic into her brain. She turns to Vlad and next reaches out to touch him on the shoulder, as if a physical manifestation of the world around her is all the validation she needs that it is real, when in all reality she knows better. She should know better, at least. Experience has taught her so much more.

Vlad takes Cait's hand and puts it on his shoulder, to prove it's real.

"I've been in one too many situations like this" She mutters darkly, staring him directly in the eyes as she pulls her hand away slowly. She reaches for her pistol at the small of her back and then remembers she'd left it at her desk in Thera. "Shit..."Panic was starting to stir in Cait, and with that comes anger. She sighs and clenches her fists, scowls at Vlad and grinds her teeth just slightly as they grit against each other. Her breathing picks up and she makes to start pacing, but feels herself locked in place by indecision.

Vlad places a hand on Cait's shoulder as if to reassure her everything is fine

Cait looks at his hand on her shoulder, and follows it to him and then his face. Her expression changes from frustration to confused frustration. She'd never taken Vlad to be a creature capable or willing of sympathetic gestures. Cait laughs and runs a hand through her hair, ending the gesture by grabbing a handful of it and tugging lightly.

Vlad brings up a holoprojection in the middle of the conference table showing the ships workings. The machines servicing the jump drive. Another one loads torpedoes into a Tyr fighter bomber. Yet another exits the ship to service the shield emitters. "All of this, in unison. Peace. Stability. Order. That of synthetics.Mankind, disorder. Emotion. Chaos.


Cait drops her hand at her side and looks at the floor for a minute while chewing on the inside of her cheek in thought. She then turns her gaze up to Vlad, pats the hand on her shoulder and nods, accepting the sentiment. She examines the holo and once he mentions mankind, she cannot help but bark out a laugh, the action itself causing her to slap a hand over her mouth.

Vlad speaks without emotion "What is so funny?"

"Humans are inevitably going to destroy themselves, Mr. Cetes."

"Yes they will. There are two options: evolve, become on of us, or become extinct"

"We are the most disruptive, out of control and chaotic beings to be roaming space. We are constantly toying with the natural order of things and then pushing that to its limit. Evolve?" She looks at him curiously, hands on her hips.

"Yes. We are an evolution of humanity. A synthetic species that has left the organics behind. A species of logic and order.Sansha Kuvakei began down the path, and the humans tore down his work

The Sleepers saw the light, and the humans plunder their tombs. The Drifters fight back for their species survival, and they are branded as evil."

Cait feels a chill prickle down her spine when he speaks of Kuvakei, her hands tightening into fists again and her teeth bearing down on the walls of her cheeks. She only watches him carefully, her skin raised into goosebumps now. "How did you transcend from your organic being into what you are now?" Her breathing has become a little more rapid now, she's still thrown off by his mention of Sansha, the topic always sending a dread spike into her gut.

"Our organic predecessor studied the technology of Sansha Kuvakei and that of the Sleepers. Along with Zainou's research which he stole."

"And you think the only way to save the human race is to give them the opportunity to evolve?"

"No. To give the select few who deserve it the opportunity to evolve."

Cait cocks her head to the left at this. "And it will be you who gets to play God?"

Vlad scoffs "God is an figment created by primitive humans to explain the unknown.We will not 'play God' but we will cull the weak from the strong."

Cait chuckles, happy to have ruffled his feathers a little. "You are a cutthroat. Methodical, clean, straight to the point." She nods, lost in her thoughts, still trying to wrap herself around the idea of whether this is even real. "What does it take to become one of the evolved?"

"You have to accept it. It means becoming one of the whole, not an individual. There is not one, there is all. No 'I' but 'us'."

"A collective consciousness."

Vlad nods "Yes."

"You're mad" She laughs and shakes her head.

"You have been to Nation. You have seen the True Slaves. Primitive as they are, they are the beginning."

Cait snaps her head to look at him as if she'd been hit, her mouth drawn in a hard line, eyes wide. "Excuse me? How do you know I've been anywhere near anything Nation related?"

Vlad taps his head to say that he knows

Cait crosses her arms and glares at him. "The True Slaves aren't as utopian as Kuvakei tries to delude everyone into believing they are. The True Citizens are the ones who get the pretty dream he promotes"

"Look among the True Slaves though, yes they are created to do the 'distasteful' things for Nation, but among themselves. They are one"

"They go insane. I have seen it, I have heard it, I have felt it. I feel it."

"They fail to adapt."

"But yes, they are indeed one." She nods in thought. "They operate as a single organism reaching out to claim all that it can."

"Then why do you fight it? You serve the Amarr militia, which has sworn to destroy his work fully. Embrace evolution."

"When I first started serving the Amarr militia, I thought I was fighting for an Empire I believed in. I was a lot more stable and naive then, too." She looks at him and then wanders away, paces back towards him and paces away once more. Her right arm holds her body, and her left, cybernetic, arm is propped up against it, her hand holding her chin in thought. "I've since taken up other interests, other goals and realized that I have another place and purpose in the modern culture of New Eden. A True Citizen brought to light how I came into being and it caused a bit of a meltdown for me, and now I am embracing everything that became of that meltdown. It brought me to question why I serve the Amarr militia, and it's funny that you bring it up. I don't serve the Amarr militia because we share an enemy in Nation. I serve them because we share an enemy in the Matari. I stay away from Nation because I am considered absconded technology. I don't want to fall back in their hands. It's already happened once. As long as my clone contract remains in their hands, I'd rather not piss them off"

Vlad chuckles "Clone contracts are easily changed. Absconded technology? What rubbish."

Cait tosses a chuckle back at him and turns around, taps her head. "Apparently my creator sold me off"

"So you are a tube child?"

"A mixed blood tube child, yes"

Vlad looks into Cait's eyes "Why do you hate the Matari so that you will fight with the 24th Crusade?"

"I was created in a research vessel of the moon of LWX-93V in Delve. It was a program originally funded by CONCORD, but they pulled their funding when they discovered Dr. Nathair's questionable methods."

Cait meets his gaze, her face cold, hard. "It is not so much hate. It's pity. They are not smart enough to stop procreating. All they do is create more pain for themselves. I seek to end their pain by doing what I can to decrease their numbers. This, as it turns out, helps the militia by eliminating future enemies."

Vlad cracks a smile "It is not just the Matari that suffer. It is humanity as a species. Join our collective, and you will be freed from this dying species."

"Then so be it. I do not benefit from the species. I have no place anywhere, that much has been proven explicitly, and slowly my faith in them dies everyday."

"Good," he motions to Cait "Follow this unit," he walks back towards the lift.

Cait clasps her hands behind her back out of habit as she follows him to the lift.

Vlad gets on the lift, motioning for Cait to get on. She joins him on the lift, hands now moving so that her index fingers and thumbs form a diamond at the small of her back, her feet spaced shoulder width apart. She stares straight ahead, very militant in her style though she keeps cautious tabs on him from the periphery of her vision. The lift moves swiftly up and to the side whirring through the bowels of the ship. It stops at a small alcove where there are a series of bipedal skeletons made of a dark metal. Vlad steps off and begins walking down the corridor, Cait slowly walks after Vlad, clearly distracted by the dark skeletons. She clears her throat, but doesn't say anything and when she notices that she's lagging behind, she drops her hands straight at her sides and jogs after him stopping just a couple of paces shy of Vlad. Her left hand reaches up to grab her right elbow and she looks over her shoulder to steal another glance at one of the skeletons.

Vlad leads Cait to a cradle that is sized for humans and includes pod jacks. Cait points at the cradle and raises an eyebrow at Vlad. "Judging from the jacks, I'm assuming you want me in that..." Vlad nods. 


Cait remembers her pod suit on the floor in the conference room and swears under her breath. She should've just put the clothes on over it. She sighs and glares at him. "I need to remove my shirt?" She questions darkly.

"Yes."

"Pod suits, Mr. Cetes. They even have cheap, utilitarian ones for the schools." She sighs, grabs at the hem of her shirt, casts one hesitant look at Vlad and then pulls the shirt up over her head. She tosses it down on the floor and then walks towards the cradle, her arms crossed over her chest.


The cradle seems to collect her, almost as if cocooning her and in connector connects into her spinal jack.

Cait gasps as she's pulled in and jacked, her hands reaching out to grab at anything as she tries to get her bearings. "What the...!"

There is flash from a neural scanner and all goes dark..................