“You know what you have to do, right?” The Mittani shivered in the storage locker, a heavy coat around his shoulders as protection against the chilled and stale air.

Beside him stood the only other remaining Goon. Mittani wasn’t sure which part of the world the man came from, but the price of his plane ticket to travel to the States had put a sizeable dent in The Mittani’s bank account. He spoke with a slight accent which The Mittani thought might have been Russian, or perhaps Greek, but it was hard to tell. At least he’d agreed to the meeting, which was the hardest part. Convincing him of the rest of the plan should be easy.

“Tell me again, it still sounds a bit — crazy,” said the other man.

The Mittani leaned forward, removed one hand from his pocket and pulled the tarpaulin off the machine that occupied most of the storage locker in which they stood. “I know. But you have to trust me. It sounds crazy, but I’m telling you … this is a time machine. Don’t ask me how I got hold of it; you don’t need to know. All you have to know is that it works, and it’s not going to kill you when you use it.”

“Okay.”

“You are going to travel back in time to 2013, right before things started to go wrong for the Goonswarm. And your job is going to be to distract the community — those idiots from Reddit — from what we’re doing.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” asked the man.

“You’re going to start a new alliance. And this alliance is going to be the worst, most ineffective, most poorly run bunch of fuck-ups in the entire game. All you have to do is keep screwing up, again and again. The community will take care of the rest.”

“I don’t get it.”

The Mittani stroked his soul patch. “Those people, the ones on Reddit or the other sites, they need somebody to kick. They need to make themselves feel better about their own lack of accomplishments by shitting on whoever is lower on the totem pole. For the last three years that has been Goonswarm, and they’ve succeeded in virtually killing us off; we’re dead and buried. Now though, you have a chance to change all that. You’re going to create a new alternate timeline, one in which your new alliance has a target on their back so big that nobody is going to be able to resist.”

“Okay, I can do that,” said the other man, “and then what?”

“And then, in this new timeline, Goonswarm will prosper. Instead of failing in the glare of public attention, we’ll keep growing, keep taking more systems, bringing in more allies. While nobody watches, while their attention is occupied by the ridiculous antics of your new alliance, the last three years will be replaced by a new reality, a new truth. Instead of mocking us for failscading, it will be your alliance that people will be laughing at. I want you to make all the mistakes I have made over the last few years, the things I now realise were failures but that you will erase from our history; you will engineer coup after coup, by promoting anyone that cannot be trusted to director roles; you will accept anyone as a member without even the most cursory background checks; and you will parade those failures under the noses of the sorry individuals who would otherwise have focused their ire on me and my Goonswarm.”

“I understand,” said the man. He removed his jacket — he did not take off his sunglasses, The Mittani noticed — and stepped into the time machine, ducking his head slightly to avoid the rough, serrated edges of the door. Once inside, he turned to face his CEO. “What should I call it, this new alliance?”

The Mittani thought for a moment. In the past, when GSF was on the rise, he had prided himself on the cleverness of the names he gave to his organisations — names that evoked historical warriors, feared organisations — and he felt he could not miss this opportunity to put his personal stamp on this most audacious scheme yet, a time-traveling Trojan horse of a plan. He glanced down at his down-filled jacket, where the symbol of the Goons, a cigar-smoking bee, had been embroidered onto the breast.

“You will project an underdog persona, putting a brave face on your failures, and the people will hate you for it even more,” said The Mittani. “And when the time is right, and I reveal that I was behind this, the most audacious plot in the history of EVE Online — to literally rewrite history, under the noses of our enemies — I want people to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I … that we, the Goonswarm, were the ones behind it.”

“So?” said the man, “what’s the name?”

“You will name your alliance,” said The Mittani, leaving a slight pause for effect, “Brave New Bees.”

The man in the time machine nodded. “Got it.”

“You don’t want me to to write it down?”

“No — I got it.”