The EVE Online Suicides

No one knows what happened. It was just another day with just another player-formed alliance in the MMORPG "EVE Online" going about their business. Or so you'd think.

My name is Robert Jonathan Walkers. People in EVE know me as "madbomber89". I'm just another player with 10 million skill points, and I used to be in the corporation that employed the players who died. I was one of the witnesses interviewed on CBS News, I lived in the same neighborhood as these guys andwe went to school together, all that jazz.

This story kicks off somewhere in February of 2011. We were sitting in our brand new outpost (player-owned station) we had built about 3 weeks ago, deep in null-security (or 0.0-security, that is, lawless space where there's no CONCORD police and no penalty for shooting players). Our entire corporation had logged in, we were about 37 players. My 4 best friends and I get together in the main chatroom on TeamSpeak and joined our own squad in the corporation fleet. The squad leader asks, "Who's up for some belt ratting?" And we all cheered like bastards. So there I was, in a Logistics ship (specifically Oneiros), supporting two Gallente Marauders (Kronos) and two Gallente Heavy Assault Cruisers (Deimos). We undock and squad-warp into one of the asteroid belts to start shooting NPC pirates. So we do and kill off two Guristas battleships and four frigates. When we warped to the next belt, we noticed there was an enemy player in there, flying a Nightmare battleship (I think that's a Sansha faction ship). But it was strange, we didn't notice him in Local Chat until now. His portrait was the weirdest – it had the usual baseless portrait of a player who didn't have one yet – a solid black silhouette of a man in front of a gray background. I didn't think it too weird, as the game would crap out sometimes and not load player portraits correctly and usually fix it when you clicked Show Info on them. But the player's name was stranger still, "QWERTY". Our leader typed in Local Chat to this player, "hey QWERTY ur trespasin".

He didn't respond, of course. "alright guys get ready to pod this fag" Our leader continued. This was when the enemy player responded, "I adore courage." In red letters. That disturbed me, because you can't type red letters in chat, only in your player biography. "Ok, open fire." Our leader announced on TeamSpeak, so we locked onto the Nightmare and started firing once we were within our individual optimal range. But no matter how much we shot him, the server just reported back "Your weapons strike QWERTY perfectly, wrecking for 0 damage." This QWERTY was just sitting there, too. When we tried to activate our target painters, weapon disruptors, jammers, stasis webifiers and warp scramblers, our modules instantly red-ringed and turned themselves off without affecting QWERTY, meanwhile all he was doing was target painting us back. "What the fuck is going on? Why can't we shoot this bastard?" One of the other guys reacted to this. Before we could do anything else, I saw the Nightmare tripping its ECM (Electronic Counter-Measure) Burst module, which bizarrely caught all of us in a 50-kilometer radius and disrupted our lock-ons, and then it cloaked up and disappeared. "Hey, what happened?" I blurted out over my mic. ECM Bursts only work at 6 kilometers, at most. That player was hacking, for sure.

Then I looked in Local, and the player was gone again. Probably logged off, I thought, the coward. "Fuck him, CCP will hang his hacker ass when they find him." Our leader dismissed it and ordered us around the belts.

The next day we went through the belts again. Nothing unusual from any players, except one noob who tried to sneak past us in a Shuttle. We were all too happy to return him to high-security space. By shooting his pod, that is. Then we did some exploration sites, got some decent salvage and modules to recycle at the station, you know, the usual works. "Wormhole's opened up into our system, it leads into enemy space." Some guy in the Intelligence channel reports. "Our system"? That meant the system we were in. "Let's go check that out." Our leader decides and we get bookmarks from the guy who scanned it down and then warp to it. Then there was that hacker again from last night, QWERTY. "u again? u gun get fucked nao" My leader keeps smacking in Local and we open fire again. Didn't even take one volley before his frigate exploded. Then that QWERTY dude wrote in Local again, "You passed the precipice of oblivion. Have a nice death. :)" Then the strangest thing happened. My ship jumped itself through a Titan jump bridge that appeared out of nowhere in front of us. "What the hell is going on?!" Our squad leader demanded. When we landed, we were in wormhole space. I looked in my upper left corner to see the system name, and it said "Kuolema". What a bilingual bonus for me because I speak Finnish and "Kuolema" means "Death". But this game was developed in Iceland, not Finland. "I can't believe this, we're stuck in this... Where is this?" I could scarcely believe what was going on. "Fuck's sake, I think my computer's caught a virus again." One of the Kronos pilots complained. "Well guys, you know what to do, self-destruct back to our system."

5 minutes later we had self-destructed our precious Tech 2 ships and our pods. Least we were capable of doing that, and knowing full-well we would wake up in our station again, safe and sound. Only, when our pods did self-destruct, it only sent us even deeper into this wormhole place. I sat there gobsmacked. This did not just happen to us. "Christ! What's that?!" One of the Deimos pilots shouted suddenly. I turned my camera over, and I saw a whole bunch of starbase sentry guns arranged in letters, "NO HOPE". Then my screen started to go funny. All the environmental decor, the orange clouds and such, they turned bright red. I turned my camera the other way and I saw more sentry guns spelling out more words, "DOOMSDAY". Then an infobox popped up; QWERTY wanted to start a private conversation with me. I don't know what came over me, but I felt compelled to accept. The private conversation appeared and I merged it into the other chat windows. QWERTY's portrait had changed, there were two red dots where the eyes should have been, and a big evil Cheshire Grin. He sent me one message, "You should have turned back when you had the chance. You will not save your fleet. Doomsday awaits." Then he left the conversation. I started feeling nauseous, really nauseous. Then I saw the sentry guns start to blink yellow; they were targeting me. If this wouldn't take us back to our station then we would have to petition a GM. But why couldn't I? Something stopped me from clicking the Help button. In fact, the Help button had disappeared from my neocom! I hit ESC to log out, but that only made another infobox pop up, "NO ESCAPE". I tried Alt-F4, Ctrl-Alt-Del, nothing would close the game. Then I pressed the reboot button on my PC, that did nothing too. "Screeeeee!!!" I heard the game warn me that my pod's Structure HP was breached. The sentries were firing on us. That's when I heard ear-piercing screams over my headphones. "AAAAAAAAAAHHH!! OH GOD IT HURTS! IT HURTS! IT HUUUURRRRTTS! PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN!" My squad leader kept screaming down his microphone. "MAKE IT STOP! SOMEBODY MAKE IT STOP!" One of the Kronos pilots did the same.

I just sat there, listening, not even muting my headphones. I knew when my friends were joking, but this time was nothing like that. I heard Laser turrets going off over the headphones, almost like the audio was bleeding from their games and into the headphones, but it sounded so real. I held my finger on the Alt Gr key to trip the push-to-talk, but I just... Couldn't do it. "PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN!" They kept shouting. Then my camera turned itself over to the right, and there was an Amarr titan ship staring right at me, only it was bright red instead of golden, and it was firing its Doomsday weapon at us. More precisely, me. My pod was destroyed and the screen went blank for a second or two, then I woke up in the station again. Everything went silent for a bit. Even my Winamp went dead. I just sat there, staring, pondering, wondering. Then I was jolted back to consciousness by the Neocom lady voice, "Skill training completed." What was that supposed to mean? I was still 9 days away from completing the skill I had queued up. I opened my Training Queue, and noticed my skill points were reset to 0. I had nothing left, except this one single skill that was training now. It was called, "Suicide (x0)", the description went, "Skill at dying. +133,2% bonus to ZALGO per level." Then the text went off into unintelligible mess further down, it looked kinda like ASCII, all I could make out was the word "ZALGO" repeated down the screen. "ZALGO"? What the fuck was that? Then I remembered my friends.

I promptly yanked the power cord out of my PC and rushed out of my room, hurriedly pulled my tennis shoes on and sprinted for dear life down the streets for about 12 minutes until I reached my squad leader's house. I just hoped that Henrick was ok, he sounded like he was being mauled IRL. When I reached his house, I didn't even bother with the doorbell, I just flung the front door open and almost tripped when I rushed down the basement stairs and into "the usual place" of ours. A garage whose doors went out to the lowered streets outside, had a couch and flatscreen TV for us to play consoles on. Always smelled faintly of diesel in here. I passed the door into the LAN room, and that's when I saw the most horrific thing I had ever seen in my life. Henrick was bent back in his chair with his eyes gouged out, bleeding like a pig. I couldn't even scream. His screen was completely taken up by a... I couldn't even fathom it at the time. It was stuck on the character creation screen, at the portrait screencap part. It depicted Henrick, down to the smallest detail, and not even in the game's graphics. I'm hesitant to say "hyper-realistic" because it looked plain realistic, like it really was him in there, if you looked away from the fact that this animated screencap of Henrick was STARING right at him. The room was already stinking up from Henrick's corpse. That's when I noticed he had several burn marks all over his body. Didn't even look like burn marks from open flames or anything. Echoes of the lasers I heard before rang in my head. What was going on?

"Guys? Guys, do you read?" I heard faintly from his headphones. Someone in the alliance was trying to get our attention on TeamSpeak. I grabbed Henrick's headphones and pressed Alt Gr, but I was so shaken up from all this. "Y-yeah?" Was all I could formulate right now. "I heard screaming. Did you guys get hotdropped?" The Russian diplomat on the other end asked. "Henrick-I mean, microjoules50..." I repeated Henrick's screen name to the diplomat, "He's... Dead."

"Henrick? Dinner time, I made your favorite!" I heard Henrick's mom upstairs. "Henrick?" She repeated before she came down into the room. Predictably she screamed like a banshee when she saw her own son dead in front of his computer. I was just standing there. Staring, not crying, not screaming, not even sobbing. Just... Standing there. I just looked at Henrick clothed in his olive pants, black sweater jacket and fur boots. He was slumped back in his chair, eyes clawed out like he'd been mauled by an animal. I looked back at the screen again. Red letters were dripping in front of the Staregineer-face of Henrick, "YOU WOULD NOT SAVE HIM" and the face had that same grin as that motherfucker QWERTY had. "Pang!" The PC popped suddenly and died, which was the first thing that made me jump so hard I fell on my ass, heart racing out of terror. Smoke filled the air as the screen was going crazy with static. I heard nonsensical voices in my head. It sounded like the Neocom lady. Then, it slowly started to make more sense.

"Your clone is insufficient."

"Guys?" I heard our diplomat on TeamSpeak again. Henrick's mom just embraced her dead boy in the chair. That's when I barged out of the garage door and ran. I ran. And ran. And just kept on running. My feet felt like I'd been in boot camp and yet I just kept running. I had to go to Jerry's house. Through the front doors, up the stairs and left one turn into his bedroom. But I was too late. I saw Jerry's dad hugging his dead son in the chair, sitting exactly the same way as Henrick was, eyes clawed out and everything. His screen too had that creepily realistic screencap of himself, with that crazy stare and grin. This time the red letters said, "YOU WOULD NOT SAVE HIM EITHER". I ran out again and tried Patrick's house. Through the front door, into the living room and right a turn, into the kitchen, right-hand side. Same result. Another dead friend, the same slumped posture, same realistic Staregineer-face on the screen. This time the screen said, "LOSE YOUR HOPE". That's when I snapped. I fell to my knees and just sobbed. I paid no attention to the world at all. Not to the yelling from across the street, not to the eventual police sirens or the officers who arrested me, nothing.

This email above here was forwarded to me, the narrator. My name is Ulrick and I knew Robert. Last I heard from him was over the phone immediately after he sent me this email. He talked all about how he heard the agonizing screams on TeamSpeak, the hacking in EVE, the creepy player, the apparent suicides and everything. He wanted me to come over to the looney bin to have a chat with him. How could I refuse? I somehow scored a deal with the looney bin guys and got taken to Robert's cell. Was a plain cement cell with a nice bed on it. Robert's straightjacket was undone. He was holding a piece of white chalk, which he had used to scrawl all over the walls. "No hope."

"He comes."

"Hide your children."

Crude drawing of a Staregineer, "HE SEES ALL"

Another crude drawing of an Amarr titan, "DOOMSDAY NOW"

"HE COMES"

"HE COMES"

"HE COMES"

This last one repeated itself the most down the wall just next to Robert. At one point it was vaguely written, faded and lazily scribbled.

I stood there, looking at Robert. Disturbed and robbed of words. His face was fixed in a crazy toothy grin. "Security, we've got a dead patient." The guard behind me made me snap awake again. I wanted to vow revenge on the fuckers who did this to my friends. I went back to my house and did some research. I logged into the game and typed "QWERTY" in the chatbox then Link -> Character.

"Your query returned no results."

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