The Talocan - Ancient Architects of Spacetime

The Talocan - Ancient Architects of Spacetime

When Apocrypha cracked the wormholes open on 10 March 2009, capsuleers found more than just Sleeper drones in the new systems. Among the radar and data sites scattered through Anoikis were structures that didn't match the Sleeper architectural style at all - heavily-decayed outposts, stellar-lattice fragments, instrumentation that pre-dated Sleeper construction by an unknowable margin. The lore database's name for the civilisation that left them: the Talocan.

The Talocan were, per CCP's lore, "so old they already travelled the stars when the Empires' first recorded civilisations were only just emerging on their respective home planets." Their distinguishing technological signature was mastery of spatial manipulation and hypereuclidean mathematics - engineering disciplines that, in the most enthusiastic player-lore reading, suggest they may have been able to create wormholes at will. If true, the Talocan would be the literal architects of Anoikis, the makers of the wormhole network rather than its discoverers. CCP has neither confirmed nor denied this.

Their relics turn up in some odd places. The expected ones: radar sites in wormhole space, often intermingled with Sleeper structures (suggesting a partial overlap of presence, though not necessarily of friendship). The unexpected ones: the Devil's Dig Site in the Okkelen constellation in Caldari highsec, which contains Talocan ruins on planets that should never have hosted such a civilisation. The Forgotten Frontier Recursive Depot wormhole expedition site is also Talocan in origin. Their footprint touches both known and unknown space.

What killed them, if anything killed them, is unknown. The Sleepers were active long after the Talocan structures fell into decay; if there was a war, the Talocan lost it. If there wasn't, they may have done what every other ancient civilisation in New Eden seems to do - withdrew, transcended, vanished. The same broad shape as the Jove arc and the Sleeper mystery sits over the Talocan story. By 2018 some lore-readers were proposing a Talocan-Triglavian connection (Triglavians use proven-impossible space-folding mechanics; Talocan supposedly engineered them); CCP has so far left this in the speculation column.

For the contemporary capsuleer, the Talocan are mostly a flavour layer - the civilisation whose name shows up on a wormhole-space data-site title and whose decryptors you stuff into a T3 production line without thinking. But they are also one of the deepest pieces of EVE's archaeology, sitting beneath every other mystery the game has ever introduced, their existence quietly anchoring the universe's claim to genuine pre-history.