EVE Fiction

After my whole thread before about how the Jovian Disease seemed be dopamine-related and how I tried to think up an implant to treat it, I read up on the more recent lore and it's implied that the Jovians went extinct, completely, when their star gate network exploded and wiped out all life in the Jovian Empire controlled systems.

Am I the only one who finds this a bit odd that the most technologically advanced civilization in all of New Eden WOULDN'T have seen this coming? From what I understand, one of their system's stars went supernova, and then this cascaded an explosion through the gate network in the Jove systems that caused essentially a gamma ray burst, or some large-scale explosion, to blast through the Jovian systems, eradicating everything.

How did they, the Jovians, with such a massive technological edge, who had survived for tens of thousands of years, despite constant setbacks, illness, war, and so on get wiped out that which everyone else could have seen coming, especially since the ability to detect when a star is about to go supernova exists with CURRENT LEVELS OF TECHNOLOGY, as in IRL?

My new hypothesis: it's all been a lie.

The apparent recent destruction of the Jovians, the Jovian Disease, and so on might just have all been a total ruse.

Why?

Simple; so the "children", as the Jove call everyone, can grow and develop without having to fear a nigh all-powerful outside influence hanging over their heads, judging them constantly.

Think of it sort of like the zoo hypothesis; the notion that, IRL, alien cultures DO exist, but are purposefully staying out of this planet's development for the sake of allowing the people of this world to develop on their own without feeling threatened that some foreign power would swoop in unannounced, conquer them either socially, politically, or economically, and make them into a sort of servitor race, or perhaps the inverse, that the lesser developed culture doesn't try to take advantage of the superior technology of the alien culture to satiate their more primitive, selfish instincts.

Perhaps the Jove are doing the same thing.

The first attempt was the Jovian Disease, something that they might have just made up to make it seem like they were much, much weaker than they actually are, like they were going through some hard time and thus couldn't just swoop in and take over. Being secretive already causes paranoia enough, just look at "secret societies" today, like the Free Masons and so on; conspiracy theories abound about them, and a lot of them make them seem like some sort of world-controlling, ultra-powerful, top-secret, underground political machine when in fact they're really not.

So, the Jovian Disease "comes to light" and all Jove ambassadors and representatives agree to go along with the act, pretending that they made some huge mistake thousands of years ago that permanently screwed up their genomes to the point where they die of depression and not even they have the brain power to stop it, and it's wrecking their population.

Then, enter the age of the Capsuleer, and with us roaming about, scavenging things from stuff like Sleepers and whatnot in wormholes, as I frequently do, it might not have appeared too far fetched the the Jove would then speculate that their old trick wouldn't work for long, so they went ahead and faked their own deaths.

It's speculated that Jove starships don't need jump gates to get from system to system anyway; the big thing that I've heard about Jove ships is that proper Jovian ships, unlike the ones that they give and sell to us periodically (the Gnosis and so on), have essentially a much better version of a jump drive that doesn't need a cyno at the other end, or more specifically, a drive that can literally CREATE a wormhole that winds up in whatever system the ship is aligned to (and then every other Jove ship that needs to get there just piles into the hole behind the ship that made it; in short, every proper Jove ship can do bridging with no cyno required).

So, in short, if all, or at least most, of their ships can do this, or they have stationary installations at space stations that can generate wormholes directly outside of the next station in the next system over, then they'd have no need for older, more primitive methods of travel like star gates.

So they saw a double opportunity:

1: make everyone think they were dead so that no one would try to come into their home systems and bother them and/or make the rest of New Eden think that there was no longer a super-powerful alien force spying on them all the time.

and

2: decommission their no-longer-used, outdated star gate network which was really just something that was consuming resources for no reason anymore.

So, they hit the self destruct on all their star gates and then tell the Society of Conscious Thought to inform everyone that they're dead.

2 birds, 1 stone.



I'm not sure if this was the case or not, but part of my mind is telling me that this seems more likely than a hyper-advanced race like the Jovians bringing death upon themselves through self-inflicted genetic disease (when they'd completely mastered the art of gene therapy) and then dying off completely due to something that could be spotted coming a mile away, like a star about to go supernova.

https://community.eveonline.com/backstory/chronicles/inheritance/

The Jove empire was in decline for a long time, according to that there were maybe a few thousand left by the time of the Superluminal Stellar Anomaly of YC116 (informally known as and much to my chagrin "Caroline's star") event. They did see it coming, but clearly something else was at work as they weren't sure that their entire gate network would shut down - and were relieved that they had physically removed the gates leading to the rest of the cluster, effectively firewalling the cascade effect that disabled all stargates in Jove sovereign space. And this didn't wipe out life in the Jove systems, I don't think - at least that is not what killed the Jove, more on that later.... Just disabled the stargate network.

Also they can create wormholes, like you said, and that Sansha's Nation pilfered this technology from their abandoned stations, but unlike the Jove, Sansha "the thief" Kuvakei can only use a very violent, rudimentary form of it.

Also, I think, the Inheritance chronicle implies there are still possibly some hundred or less Jove living isolated and hidden around the cluster, but as a united people or a nation the Jovian Directorate simply does not exist anymore and barely existed for most of the time the game has been going on, so basically the last ten or so years. Their practical extinction soon to come, finally prompted Veniel to transfer control to their spiritual successor, the Society of Conscious Thought.
Interestingly, it also says that some of the remaining Jove had "gone" somewhere, whether this means literally left to some unkown parts of space, or the poetic way of saying they kicked the bucket, is up to interpretation.


Edit#infinity: About your theory on the Jovian Disease, I did once question that too - being the supposed masters of genetic manipulation, it always smelled beyond fishy to me that they couldn't fix their genome through studying the DNA of the four empires citizens. Maybe they were afraid they'd just screw it up even further, but then again, what could be worse than dying of lethargy regardless?

^ Seeing they knew of the Sleepers and the Drifters (or the "construct born", machine intelligences) since about 200-300 years ago, maybe that's the answer. That, or the Talocan. The chronicle does talk about them with quite a bit of dread.

The Jovian Sickness was not necessarily a biological problem. It could be the first appearance of a sickness that effects infomorphs on a digital level.