EVE Fiction

I was bored during a POS bash once, which combined with my love of EVE and it's associated morbidity, led to this little piece. I'd like to cut it down some but wasn't in the mood for serious editing, so here goes:


It wasn’t natural, watching oneself die.

Her first death was still the most real. Like the second and third, it wasn’t as intimate as the fourth or the seventh, but it was still the one that she remembered most vividly. Watching yourself die could never be the same as experiencing it first-hand. But after you discovered that death wasn’t the end, it lost a lot of its mystery. Death was the final adventure. That was what her mother had told her brother to when their father died, and she had took it to heart. But there was no adventure for her now, she knew, not while her brother lived.

Sister, I am sorry, but I must kill you, he had said. His voice was loving and sad, wistful and comforting, and so very wise. That
was the last time she had seen him, the real him, as he stood beside her bed. She must have been sedated at the time, because she took her strange surroundings in calmly. His skin was white and hairless, shining like the antiseptic plastic of the room. Metal sockets showed on his shaved skull. But what she noticed through the haze of her thoughts was his eyes, which shone with an inner peace and dignity. She took comfort in his eyes. She knew those eyes. Those eyes would never hurt her.

If she had once had that same light in her eyes, it was long since lost. Her eyes in the mirror were dull and empty, which she found rather fitting. She looked down to the razor in her right hand. It was a strangely simple thing, the metal honed to an exquisite edge by uncaring machines in some distant factory. She felt a certain kinship with it, fancying that both her and it were unsuited to modern life, shaped by forces far beyond their conception.

She was told that some of the richest Gallente preferred to use these metal razors. She was told that to them, using primitive tools was a sign of wealth and status. Primitive, that is, like the metal razors she and her brother had grown up despising in the camps. She accepted this oddity, as she did all oddities now. She had long ago ceased marveling at the strangeness of the universe.

In the swirling reflections on the razor, she watched her Mammoth approach the blockade. She lay on the table where she had woken up, a viewscreen above her. Her brother had departed, but only after letting her know what was to come, and so she was not surprised to see, HERSELF, on the screen, wryly refusing the calibrated desperation of her brother’s pleas for her to stop her ship. It was odd, knowing that she, for that one impossible moment, was in two places at once. For some time after, she had wondered which her was the original, but had been too afraid to ask. And after awhile, it stopped mattering.

Her brother had bought her the razor without question when she requested it. He had given up trying to keep her safe after her fourth death, when she severed her torso under a closing bulkhead during a combat drill. There were too many ways to die on a starship, and afterall, death wasn’t that much of an issue anymore. The crew gave her a wide berth. She suspected this wasn’t a product of her brother’s meddling, but rather the little tiny truths that reached them about who she was and what she did. Either way, it suited her and it suited them.

She had been so certain of her cause then. The Minmatar rebels of the planet were her people, and they needed the supplies she was bringing. That the Republic had ceded this world to the Amarr in return for concessions elsewhere did not matter. What had mattered was that in doing so the Republic had disowned the rebels struggling upon it and refused them support. What had mattered was that the rebels refused to give up the fight, and that their own people, her brother, were blockading the planet in order to end their struggle. That injustice had mattered.

After the fourth death he had dismissed the caregivers and bound her to a floating metal machine, an octopus that grasped her head with tangled iron arms and kept her firmly grounded amongst the living. That was the only rule he imposed on her. She couldn’t harm the machine and thus try to end her immortal, unbroken consciousness. She had tried to break the rule, of course, but without success. The machine was tough, and if she touched it, or if he suspected she was going to, she’d wake on her bed, sedated and numb. And that feeling, of nothing, was the only thing she couldn’t endure anymore. So she left her silent guardian alone, knowing that it stood vigilant, ready to tear her consciousness away and deposit it unharmed in a new, intact self.

She leaned on the sink and pressed the razor idly to her wrists, letting the memories flow.