Lord Eidolon
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Posted - 2003.12.05 15:00:00 -
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Lord Eidolon walked up the steps to the Main Temple, looking up the construction with awe.
It was a Kitz, and the central chamber of studies at the Society of Conscious Thought on the planet Roua.
Inside he met with Ix Ranyor, the Jovian Elder who had recruited him into the Society years
ago.
"You have seen the EVE Galaxy for what it is," said Ranyor.
Lord Eidolon nodded. "I have. The constant in-fighting and lack of enlightenment staggers
me."
Ix Ranyor smiled. "I know why you're here, Eidolon, why you've seeked me out at this hour. You're looking for something. There's a question burning on your mind. You're looking for the answer to this question. It's the question that drives us all."
Eidolon swallowed dryly. "What is Tranquility?"
Ranyor stood, and began to pace around the room. "Tranquility is everywhere. You see it all around you, in the stars, in the planets, when you go NPC hunting and when you're mining. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."
"What truth?"
"That you are a slave, Eidolon. Slave to a system that you cannot see or touch." He looked out of a window at a group of Jovian students meditating in the courtyard. He took a deep breath, then turned to face Eidolon. "Unfortunately, no-one can be...told....what Tranquility is. You have to see it for yourself."
He reached into his pocket, and pulled out two capsules that looked like headache drugs.
"I'm giving you a choice to turn back at this point, Eidolon," Ranyor continued. "This is
your last chance. You take the blue pill, you wake up on your Thorax, and you believe anything you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you
how deep the rabbithole goes..."
As Eidolon reached for the red pill, Ranyor exclaimed "Remember Eidolon, all I offer you is the truth. Nothing more."
Eidolon swallowed the capsule with a gulp of water. Immediately, the room around him, the
people, the ships outside, became distorted, like an image composed of tiny squares or
pixels.
"You wanted to know what Tranquility is..."Ranyor whispered. "Tranquility is nothing more than a computer-generated dream world, where people live in captivity, ruled over by a corporation known as CCP. Tranquility is a system to turn people...into this." He held up a ten-dollar bill.
"No!" Eidolon shouted, backing off and shaking his head. "No! I don't believe it! No!!!"
Suddenly, the world became more distorted, words began to appear in his consciousness.
"Windows." "Start Menu." AAAARRgggh! What were these strange words filling his mind?
And then - he coughed and spluttered, and found himself in a dark room, slumped drearily
over a keyboard at a computer terminal. What the hell? He looked around, rubbing his eyes,
his consciousness beginning to stabilise. Around him were empty pizza boxes and coke cans littering the desk. And the computer - it looked ancient, thousands of years old in fact!
The door opened, and Ix Ranyor appeared, but he looked somehow different. His Jovian
features were gone - he looked Gallentean.
"Welcome...to the real world." He said. "You think it's the year 33,678 AD. In fact it's
2013 AD. The human race hasn't even left their homeplanet yet. Tranquility is in fact a
computer game, originally designed as a Massively Multiplayer Online game. It had humble beginnings - a few thousand players who were at first aware that it was a computer-generated reality. Then, after the CCP-Microsoft Wars of 2050, CCP was the largest megaconglomerate on the earth, and made its money by enslaving the human race. I never told you it would be easy, Eidolon, I only offered the truth."
"Nooooooooooo!"
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Lord Eidolon
The COSMOS Corporation
"Your ignorance...amuses me."
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