Into the Black

(Virtual room in NERV Headquarters)

“MASSIVE INSTABILITY COMING FROM THE EYE!”

“SHOCKWAVES AND EXPLOSIONS APPEARING ACROSS KNOWN SPACE!”

“PLANET THRAKI HAS MOVED! NEW LOCATION UNKNOWN!”

“THE MOON OF ABEDRRA IV IS NOW MADE OUT OF CHEESE!”

Isaac Hayes groaned as he listened to his subordinates running through the list of things that were rapidly going wrong, all related directly to the current disturbance in the Eye of Despair. Apparently, when the fabric of Hellspace is one where time is in constant flux, unleashing a weapon that stabilizes time in a large area can be VERY FUCKING DISRUPTIVE. Who’d have guessed?

Granted, he still wasn’t sure how the hellspace flare that had occurred on Abedrra IV’s moon had turned its surface into a kind of soft cheese. If he asked the AI, he was sure it would spit out some answer about it being a chaotic realignment of the molecules to become a new form. Either way, the moon, which had been inhabited at the time, was going to be in trouble. Depending how far down the cheese went, the whole thing might not be dense enough to retain what atmosphere it had, and the tidal forces on the planet would change. Hell, it would even throw off the orbital mechanics of the moon itself!

And that was just one of the problems he was currently facing.

There were currently 243 Hellspace flares causing trouble in the Known Space of the game world. 27 psychic shockwaves had burst forth from areas closest to the Eye of Despair, though thankfully most of them were localized in nature, and damage was minimal. The Eye of Despair surged forward a light-year all around its borders, before pulling back, three light-years from where it had been before! Oddly enough, though, the rift in Sol system remained completely stable and shut the whole time.

At any rate, while actual property damage to inhabited planets and moons (other than Abedrra IV), were minimal, when you looked at stations and starships, the damage was extensive. Not all of the Hellspace flares happened on planets, after all. One of the flares turned an orbital in Alliance space into a charnel house, for instance.

Every ship that was in FTL across the galactic stub was either thrown out of FTL or driven wildly off course. While most ships only needed a few hours of downtime to make repairs before continuing on, more than a few ships were disabled or destroyed by the tidal forces they were subjected to. Those that managed to get into FTL after the initial shock found that their computers had to compensate for drift leading towards the Eye of Despair.

All in all, Isaac was not having a great day. But that was fine. These were in-game problems, which meant there were in-game solutions. They’d already been monitoring the situation, and there were no hacks, no cheating involved. That meant that the chaos was not something that they would have to deal with externally.

“All right, everyone. Start working the problem. We have in-game fluctuations, thanks to events in the Eye. Of course, everyone has been warned that events in the Eye might have effects outside it, so we are going to treat this under random event rules.”

That got everyone’s attention. More importantly, people stopped freaking out at all the sudden chaos, and started working solutions and making sure there weren’t actual problems. Having the structure of the random event rules to use as procedures made it easier to handle the chaos.

He pointed out two of the GMs. “Marco, Alice. I want you two to step back and pass off your lists to the rest of your teams. You two are going to be preparing for the aftermath of this. Join me in the office.”

All three transferred to the virtual office that Isaac used when he wasn’t on the floor. A moment later, Morgan rezzed in. “Ah, Morgan, good, I was about to call you.”

“Is it about the shitstorm going down in the Eye?”

“Yes, actually. A weapon was fired inside Hellspace and had a very unfortunate interaction with the shield bubble holding the Hellspace energies at bay around one of the worlds swallowed by the Eye. I’ve done a check, and everything is aboveboard there. No cheats or hacks.”

“Then what were you going to call me about?”

“Well, there was an ancient alien base on the planet inside the bubble. Actually, the entire core of the planet was the alien base. And it can move. The bubble was actually caused by some defenses against Hellspace that were still running, after all this time.”

Morgan frowned. “All what time? How long are we talking about?”

Isaac checked his notes, given to him by the main game AI. “Since before any of the current player races were even evolved. The base was a Solshorr world at one point, but after one of the primeval wars, when the Solshorr became the Soulshorn, it was turned into a tomb world. Basically, a Death Star.”

“Ah, so, the reason you called me is because these Soulshorn are going to be opened to players?”

Isaac nodded. “The AI has worked most of it already, since that was the eventual plan, once the world progressed to that point. I just pulled Marco and Alice here to work out the tech side of things, so I’ll have them work with you to polish out any new issues from your end.”

Morgan nodded. “All right then.” Looking at the two developers, she smiled. “Let’s get to work!”