Names. Istvaan has so many names. So many, without a mnemonic implant, he'd forget most of them. Without a social implant, he'd forget who's who, or sometimes, even who he is. Thank goodness for technology.
Now, naturally, you're all assuming this refers to some upcoming heist, or hijacked clone. Not working on any such thing, so you can relax your sphincters. No, old Istvaan's always been into diversifying. Across fifty-odd inhabited worlds, some in the four empires, a few in nullsec, and a few I won't specify, exist small but effective criminal organizations.
Some are racketeering gangs and extortionists, some are networks of drug peddlers, some are gun-runners and tech brokers, others sell and extract information, and the rest are assorted scum largely unconcerned by law. Yet all these groups share a few unique traits as organizations: all are headed by an underboss, and all receive their orders from a boss no-one sees.
Some rumors circulated by those close to the gangs, say this unseen 'boss' is just a screen on a wall, issuing orders from off-world. Fewer rumors still, issued by those with access to interplanetary law enforcement records, might suggest that each image on the screen of each individual gang is different, and speaks with a different voice, suggesting either that many disparate crime bosses across New Eden prefer to detach themselves from their organizations and communicate with them only remotely, or the far less likely possibility that all these disparate organizations are being controlled by a single overseeing organization yet to reveal itself in any grand fashion.
Those with high level CONCORD security clearance might be privy to an even rarer rumor: the confirmation that all these disparate fingers connect to a single guiding hand, and that this guiding hand belongs to an individual who exists entirely beyond the feasible reach of law. Those foolish enough to spread the rumor, even in loose terms, know that this individual in fact poses such a singular threat, that if he detected the first hints of movement against his organization by any other, could implement such a terrifying response as to bring ruin to everyone from the SARO goons sent to enforce the order, to the very individual who signed it. Chances are, he'd hear the pen scratching against the smart-paper, and struck before the LCD finished displaying the signature.
Present orders at the highest echelons of CONCORD are simple: maintain surveillance, take plenty of notes, but for all the gods' sake, don't upset the people who can end CONCORD, and don't allow the general public of the CONCORD-trusting worlds to realize there's a group with the power to ignore their authority, traipsing about the galaxy completely uncontested. You will not hear rumors at this level, because everyone is far too well-trained to spread or abide them.
You will only hear a resigned acceptance of an irresolvable problem: the presence of an organization with no known limits or ends, which works through innumerable proxies, legal and illegal, with ability to kill or neutralize any other organization in existence with whimsical ease and minimal effort, and an agenda no-one can figure out. Amassing wealth is no longer a priority for this organization, for their wealth is effectively unlimited, and no longer applicable to existing economics - where an economic system would exist, this organization will simply have infinite money as a given. This organization is so audacious that it operates in the open, occasionally even calling attention to itself with brazen crimes, but CONCORD's highest echelons know all too well that to attempt apprehending any members of the Guiding Hand Social Club is to court disaster. For even the grandest of their public crimes, those that enrapture the galaxy and spawn holo-novels, pale in comparison to what they could do.
Because at the very highest of highest of levels, the levels where you're briefed on correct hand-washing procedures before shaking hands with a Jovian, they know the connection between the Guiding Hand Social Club, and Endless Corporation - a short lived Caldari megacorporation that rose to prominence and fizzled over a decade ago. They also know that like Endless Corporation, the Guiding Hand Social Club is, in itself, a front. They also know that the Endless Corporation was tearing holes in the fabric of space a decade before the events of Seyllin, holes that led to all-the-gods-know-where, and that they pulled something out, and that all this was under the direction of one man.
One man who has an unknown number of illicit clones scattered across the galaxy, clearly having taken inspiration from the method Sansha Kuvakei used to survive the first ruin of his Nation. One man who has the power to assassinate the heads of any of the four Empires, or seize power in a nation, yet has not chosen to, because such tiny matters no longer concern him. One man who is under constant CONCORD surveillance, and does little to conceal himself, almost daring authorities to take him with overt petty crimes like ill-concealed drug abuse, and whose constantly updated, meticulously studied, endlessly debated psychological profiles indicate a laundry list of mental ailments.
Because at those very highest of highest levels, there is a grand concern. Even the Jovians themselves are looking into it. The question most heavily pressing on the minds of a select, secret enclave of Jovian entheopsychologists, Caldari neuropsychologists, SOCT representatives, top-level-security-cleared Intaki Idama and one extremely, extremely old Minmatar is... is this how it happens?
All those names Istvaan answers to have given him the power of a god. Information, it turned out, was the key to apotheosis. Not only because the criminal gangs he controls give him ears everywhere, even by association to looser-lipped members of CONCORD, but because simultaneously hearing everything allowed him a top-down perspective, a god's eye view. Yet given the power of a god, command over space and time, omniscience and prophecy, and dominion over all men, what did he do with it? It doesn't take CONCORD clearance, or a surveillance agent in the back corner of a seedy nightclub to find out. Just be careful that Shogaatsu doesn't throw up on you during his seemingly unending narcotic binges - the extinction burst, the last desperate grasp for pleasure and sensation before the concept is abandoned forever, and the patient settles into the final stages of what they, these select few, all recognize to be the Jovian disease.
Is this how it happens, they ask? This is the man who saw Doriam die before he died, and saw that Jamyl did not die at all. This is the man who knows what is next. Has knowing sent him into this depression? Is what he knows terrifying enough that we'd do as many drugs as he did, if we knew? What horror dwells in the future that Istvaan Shogaatsu sees? Why does the man who poked holes in dimensions a decade ago... want to do his very best to avoid thinking, at all costs, today?
There is one more rumor about names I'd like to share with you. This rumor has never been heard by the humans of New Eden, whispered only among beings who can scarcely call themselves such, as they cling to the last genetic vestiges of their heritage. These beings, our shepherds across the millenia, our fathers, our cultivators, whisper of a name extracted from a brain scan conducted by a quantum-state determination engine (the technology doesn't exist yet in the four empires). This engine, one of the technological marvels of this vastly advanced yet faltering empire, was turned upon Istvaan Shogaatsu in the midst of one of his crash-induced seizures.
It was the name of a being unlike any other.
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Topic: Names, Titles, and Forms of Address (Read 3451 times)