Purgatory, 11: Of Mind and Matter
17 Jan 2024Meowers
Warning: cruelty, disturbing detailed descriptions.
"Behind every word is a story. Behind every story is a life. Words have the power to immortalise stories, to let them reach people even after the life has ended."
Damn... Been too carried away by doing things, forgot to add something to the recording. So...
T + 51h 48min. It's been more than two days already, this mess is getting a little too long... Platoon gathered at the improvised defence point. Busy with everything that needs doing. Treating our wounded. Burying our dead. Checking the equipment. Then finally having some rest. Must think about what else we could do next, given that new set of information. Can't use our flashlights, dimmed them to weak candles, I've no idea about how many of those bastards might be lurking around. We're checking the thermals from time to time, still clear, but, you know. At least we don't expect any more predators inside the trapped perimeter.
And it's so... Dark in here. Dark and silent. Only quiet echoes of equipment clanking and rare muffled moans of the wounded. My soldiers, sat on the ground or fallen trees... Silhouettes. Barely moving. Surrounded with faint lights playing on the wet leaves, our armour and tiny raindrops reaching the ground. If you stop for a moment and hold your breath... This soft, quiet rustling of the leaves, shuffled by the eternal, neverending rain, it's like... Souls of the people whose lives ended here, they're trying to reach us, trying to tell us their fading stories before they're finally forgotten. Maybe some of them are now sitting next to us, the same vague silhouettes, but left here forever, existing only in the faint lights brought by those brave enough to come to this forsaken place. Telling us that if our paths are bound to end in this world too, we won't be alone, our souls won't be lost in this madness. Whispering. Soothing.
This is so... Strangely comforting.
Anyway, we've found a new piece of map but it doesn't have anything of... Higher level. Limited only to the A-class 'camps' and B-class 'labs', as far as I understand, though it has every one of them marked. That thing is huge, sometimes I wonder how many people do they have here, how many people die here every day, like... Almost thirty concentration camps and eight lab compounds. Some labs aren't connected to the camps directly, and that's odd. I think one of those should be our next waypoint.
Distraction team had also spotted a small group of captives making a run for it through the hole in the fence. Using the chaos and darkness around as a cover for the escape, they were so foolhardy that even the minefield didn't stop them, some of them tapped the mines on their way but the rest kept running, no looking back. My troops had also warned them about the trapped perimeter, but that's all, they were running fast, no time for chatter, only a few words: it seemed like the escapees wanted to make a camp of their own and lay low for a night. Also worth noticing, they didn't look like your common faint and weak camp prisoners and test subjects. They were rather okay, wore something closer to a proper outfit, some of them even had backpacks, but they weren't mercs. Those trainees, perhaps. Definitely worth searching later, in the morning, maybe they could tell us something.
More information... That David Buckley guy. Seems like he is, or was, the headman of that particular lab and the leading 'scientist' there. That's an alias anyway, there are some messages on the datapads... "Used the David Buckley ID to collect 534 units of timber, the ID is on delay now." Timber? They use this word for the captives. How amusing. A peaceful logging and woodworking business making toys and furniture on a jungle planet full of trees. These aren't the war criminals you're looking for, move along. Then the 'timber assessment results', another interesting piece of wackshit poetry, it said that they acquired 28 new 'dense' units, 31 'rotten', 47 'undersized', 425 'regular' and three... 'Blooming'? The heck...
"Took all three units of blooming timber for #24-6B and 6C treatment... limited positive effect on the sprouts..."
Okay. I got it now. Pregnant women. And that odd tumour on the lower abdomen I've seen on the subject was likely the effect of his 'experiments' with the fetus. And the 'undersized' ones were children before puberty. So that man rotting on the floor with his chest turned into bloody mush is Buckley himself. What can I say... He finally got what was coming for him.
"Dense timber is being prepared for the usage in the structural reinforcement." Okay, I got this one too, they have some kind of evaluation, filtering off the 'rotten timber', unfit people, old, sick or too wounded, experimenting on regulars, all that. And those 'dense' ones may be the candidates for training and converting them into guards. Nothing about separating them into two categories so far though. Hmmm... And that line. "73 regular units are fit for seeding, referring to C-03." Mad shit. As if the experiments on pregnant women weren't enough, they forcibly inseminate those who match their criteria. What a hellhole.
Those were pieces of messages marked 'safe', safe for common messaging channels and possible interceptions I presume, since their internal text exchanges are a little more colourful. "Solution T-24-22, 100%: 5s, 80%: 26s, 60%: 171s... 5 samples average, 3.1% increase...". That was about the hall of Thargoid goop vats apparently, they pumped people with some kind of 'solution' and measured how long it would take them to die in a godsdamned glass barrel. Then, more funny stuff. Organ regrowth rate, they removed organs from living people and fed them some chemical shit mixed with progenitor cells, expecting those to regenerate in a few days or even hours, without any medical equipment overtaking the lost bodily functions. They replaced human blood with Thargoid-hybrid fluids of various sorts in various proportions and I don't know which subjects were more lucky, those who burned from the inside in seconds or those who lasted for a week. At least replacing the bones with Guardian-made metals had proven useless with subjects dying almost immediately. But that didn't stop them from trying to find a new way to connect human brain or body with something of the old Guardian tech. Or Thargoid. They took the most hungry, emaciated captives, and gave them free access to the food that had Thargoid caustic stuff added into it, in various proportions. Viruses, bacteria, parasites, they infected the subjects with all kinds of shit and then measured the decline in resistances. Indigenous grass infection was on the list too, subjects were receiving the vaccine, but not every one of them. A part of those injectors contained saline, so the recipients didn't even realise they weren't immune. Then, transmission experiments on the infected, obviously. In all imaginable ways, from exhaling air in each other's faces to forced copulations and organ transplantation surgeries.
Children weren't safe here as well, from babies and toddlers to teenagers, captured along with their parents or already born within the confines of the complex, they mostly carried a burden of growth, regrowth and regeneration experiments. Hoping that their atrocious methods would help to find a way to 'improve' humans, Azimuth freak-scientists obsessively tried to make those kids grow faster or become stronger, or reach puberty earlier. Or have another, absolutely necessary by their opinion, features, like backup organs which they tried to grow in those kids using surgeries and progenitor cell injections combined. A group of victims of a more successful project, kept in a higher-level facility, was literally turned into a kidney and liver factory, even Buckley himself had his old stuff replaced with those. Once in a month or two, he ran a group of children through some of the more common experiments to compare the results with adult subjects: expectedly, kids were more resistant to slow processes but they died faster during procedures of larger scale. Some local scientists sincerely believed that a connection, of any kind, with the Thargoids, be it a listening or communication of sorts, up to far-fetched plans of controlling them, couldn't be established by an adult human, and that one has to grow up with it. Implanting, brain surgeries, exposure to chemical and biological agents, experiments with Guardian-tech energy devices, Thargoid pulse wave imitations, nothing worked reliably so far but they didn't want to stop. Some nutjobs thought that we, humans, should have a hive mind of our own, or at least share the brainpower in such a less conventional way, and they implanted a group of kids, eight to twelve years, with neural connection devices so that they could think on something together. And, Azimuth being Azimuth, they put them playing military strategy games, assuming that a bunch of kids with electronic gimmicks shoved into their brains could replace fleet commanders one day and win the war. Especially if you don't tell them it's not a game anymore.
Several experiments were grouped together into more complex programmes. Like this one, Project Retaliator, 'war effort, neural connection between humans and Guardian-technology weapons', everything from simple refurbishing a cybernetic prosthesis, making it trigger the attached weapon, up to replacing organs and muscles. Project Esther, 'post-invasion recovery, research of shortened pregnancy periods, forced development, implantation of multiple uteruses', with a wickedly-comical comment in a vintage poster style, "Quintuplets in every family, every year!". Filthy dickheads. Project Seer, developing an ability to sense Thargoid emissions biologically, their presence and communications, maybe it has something to do with those antenna-people. Project Martyr, creating remotely-controlled slaves full of alien shit and explosives that could possibly travel into the Thargoid territories safely and suicide-bomb them, without any suspicion both from the Thargoids and other people. And this one, golden timeless classic, Project Jameson. Fucking Jameson. 'Development of a biochemical weapon that could be integrated into the human body and released upon abduction inside a Titan'. Self-explanatory.
Some of the poor souls were murdered for the damn sake of entertainment, I can't find any other reason. Those scumbags called it a 'professional curiosity'. No need to let the timber rot in the storage in times when there's so much of it and so many secondary experiments we could also undertake blah blah blah. What could happen if we do this or that, or what kind of a correlation between something and how loud they scream and how fast they die. Torturing without any clarified purpose, or plain mass-murdering those unfit or simply delivered over the requested quantity. Totally a medieval inquisition kind of stuff. Strapping them to the beds and placing a Thargoid goop container, leaking slow drops, above, watching how the acid burns them through. Exploding those containers with people standing around them blindfolded. Stretching people on godsdamned quartering racks and shooting streams of ooze at their strained limbs. Forcing prisoners to drink that caustic shit, with camera probes driven inside their stomachs from the opposite side. Giving a small group quality meals to eat but with one of the plates covered in green goop and they have to choose the victim by themselves. Or outrightly starving people to cannibalism. Cramming subjects into a small container tilted to the side with the goop slowly accumulating in the lowest point, and they have to sacrifice one to get out. Offering them a chance to finally take a shower and then suddenly adding diluted ooze into the water. Cutting their skulls open and dropping a little bit of it on the exposed brain. Venting contaminated air, with fumes concealed by a mixture of smell-suppressing agents, into their cells. And a dozen of other cruelties, less creative but none less murderous.
Also, that oddball RRDG genome thing, they weren't authorised to fiddle with it but that Buckley absolutely wanted to try out, sending requests once in a couple of months. For several years. No idea what it is, but seemingly it has something to do with growth, regeneration, all that.
Weeks, months, years... I don't know how long this facility has been running, but the first messages on these datapads are going back to 3305. And all that time they were... Somewhat close to Azimuth. Sponsored by anonymous accounts but never by the Azimuth itself directly. Sending reports to Azimuth but never taking orders. Sometimes even having disagreements, none of which saw any escalation. Those scientific memoires and messages didn't contain much about politics and finances, yet now I'm even less convinced that it's a separate faction. It might be, de jure, though the connection to Azimuth and Azimuth only is crystal clear to me.
Ah, anyway... T + 52h 24min. I guess I have enough fine story reading for tonight, copied the archives to my personal datapad to dive in later. Next stop... Those runaways. Maybe they've left a trail of sorts. And even if not, we have Foster and his see-everything magic gadgets.
But, not going anywhere when it's so dark.
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Next part: #12: The Lost Ones
Next part: #12: The Lost Ones