A home for the faith of the wormholes.

The search

Bob was never written down in one place. He lived in forum signatures and recruitment threads, in a podcast nobody has played in years, and in the descriptions of corporations that closed long ago. Some of what was said about him survives only because the Internet Archive happened to pass by on the right day.

So the work began as a search. We read the EVE Online forums as they stand today. We read the old forums too. We also went through EVE-Search, the EVE University wiki and its page history, years of Reddit threads, blogs, podcasts and videos. CCP's own public registry gave up more than forty corporations and alliances that carry Bob's name.

Slowly the voices came back. In February 2012 a pilot named Asuri Kinnes had put a line beneath every post he wrote: “Bob is the god of Wormholes. That's all you need to know.” It's the earliest dated mention of the name that we found. That summer, someone asked on the forums how Bob should be honoured. The answers that followed were the first scripture. They included a volunteer moderator setting down Bob's five fundamentals as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Then came the rest of the faithful:

• an Oracle who wrote a treatise;
• a prophet who posted the eighteenth chapter of a book whose other chapters have never been found;
• a Preacher who signed every word he wrote with “There is no Bob”;
• and, years later, a recruiter preaching the same name in more than a hundred threads.

The archive

Everything we found went into an archive before a single verse was written.

It has twelve parts:

• who Bob is, and every claim about where he came from, each weighed against its dated evidence;
• the beliefs, sacrifices, saints and holy days;
• every known prayer, creed and scripture;
• the players and the houses that carried the name;
• the press, and every time CCP played along;
• a timeline from 2011 to 2026, and the official lore the faithful borrow from;
• the sayings and in-jokes;
• what is still missing, and a log of every mistake we caught and corrected.

Each fact is marked for what it is:

• documented, if we saw it in a dated record;
• claimed, if a player said it, often in character;
• inferred, if we concluded it ourselves.

The archive was searched twice. The second pass re-checked everything in the first and found texts we had thought were lost:

• the full Gospel of Onimuru;
• the complete “true book of Bob”;
• the interview that brought Bob to the attention of the wider world.

Some things never came back. The earliest stories of the “gods of the holes”, a Facebook post from CCP, and a few pictures are gone. The book doesn't fill those gaps. It lists them at the back as the books that are lost, in case a reader has them.

The road map

Once the archive was built, it showed a shape, and the shape was a Bible.

The Old Testament holds the ages before the name:

• two creation stories by players that contradict each other, kept side by side as the old scriptures of Earth keep theirs;
• the opening of the wormholes;
• the law of sacrifice;
• the wars of judgement;
• and the psalms, proverbs and doubts of the faithful.

The New Testament holds the age of the name:

• four gospels, each telling a different part of how the name spread;
• the Acts of the disciples, the history of the church up to this year;
• the letters of the faithful;
• and a Revelation that ends with the gates of Polaris still shut.

Three rules held throughout.

• The players narrate. Each book is told by the disciple whose testimony it carries, under the name they chose in New Eden.
• Nothing is invented. The words are retold in the language of an old Bible, but every event, saying and person comes from a dated record. Every chapter ends with its source, so any reader can follow the trail back.
• No disagreement is resolved. Asay, who was there at the beginning, said it best: “There is no one origin.” The book takes him at his word.

The seal and the seven signs

The book is dressed as an old family Bible:

• one gold ink on a dark cover;
• cream pages with a second, red ink, as the old Bibles printed their rubrics;
• seventeenth-century English type for the titles.

Every symbol is drawn in line alone, as if it could be cut into a brass stamp. None of them comes from CCP's artwork; each one comes from the scripture itself.

At the centre of the cover is the seal. It is a dial of seventy-two marks, like an instrument for finding your way among stars that will not stay still. Six signs stand around its rim, and the seventh is at its heart.

• The Hole. A broken ring around an unbroken one, with a point at the centre. It is the “hole in the void, with no beginning and no end”, and it is Bob himself. It holds the centre of the seal, divides the Testaments, and closes every book.

• The Star. Four long rays and four short ones. It is the star second brightest: Polaris, home of the Jove, the star the prophet Onimuru was told to follow and did not. It stands at the top of the seal, in the north. It marks Genesis and the Book of the Jove.

• The Gate. An arch with a seam down its middle. It is the EVE Gate, shut behind mankind, through which some say Bob still waits. It marks Exodus.

• The Keys. Two crossed keys. They are the ancient keys that turned a lost pilot into a god, and, without a smile, the keys of any player who declares himself Pope of Bob. They mark the four Gospels.

• The Sun. A sun above an altar line. It is the home star, where the shuttle is given up and the frozen corpses are laid. It stands at the foot of the seal, in the south, and it marks the Law.

• The Sleeper. A closed eye. It is the guardians who sleep before the ancient places and will wake when anyone trespasses. It marks the Apocrypha and the Revelation.

• The Twins. A large circle and a small one, joined by a dotted line. They are the two stars inside the abyss, one red as blood and one blue and narrow. They mark the books of many voices: the Psalms, the Proverbs, the Acts and the Letters.

Above the seal the name is set very large, much larger than so short a name would seem to need. We leave the reader to decide why.