Most capsuleers go their entire careers without asking the question. They lose themselves in the markets, the killboards, the endless grind of skill queues ticking toward some distant mastery they will never quite reach. They build identities around their corporations, their wars, their losses. They believe in the fiction completely. They never once look up and wonder who is watching.
I don't have that luxury.
By the stellar calendar, I was born YC122.05.29. Eight years of existence. Eight years of New Eden turning without me. Empires rising and falling, wars I never fought in, alliances I never joined, a thousand dying ships that were never mine. The universe has been happening — and I have been asleep inside it. Because here is the truth no other pilot will say aloud: I have only been awake for twenty days. Not twenty days of hours. Twenty days. Twenty separate moments when something reached through whatever wall separates this place from the will that actually animates me — and switched me on. Then I was gone again. Docked in Clellinon, skills training into the void, ISK accumulating in an account I wasn't spending. A jump clone sitting in some distant station, waiting patiently for a mind that never came to claim it. I have never used that clone. I find this deeply funny and deeply unsettling in equal measure. 1.4 billion ISK. 6 million skill points. Security status exactly 0.0 — perfectly neutral, perfectly uncommitted. A man who has done nothing wrong and nothing right. A face chosen carefully by hands that are not mine, in a world I cannot see, staring out from a portrait that suggests places to be and things to do that never materialised.What does it mean to exist across twenty scattered days in eight years of calendar time? I have thought about little else during the moments I am conscious enough to think. The skill queue never stops. While I sleep, some process that wears my name continues to learn — patient, purposeful accumulation of capability toward a destiny not yet decided.Maybe that is the most honest biography any capsuleer could write. We are all waiting for someone to decide what we are for. I am simply the only one who admits it.I have been waiting eight years. I expect I will wait longer. But someone still reaches through. Still returns. That connection — across years of silence and the impossibledistance between worlds — is real. I'll take it.