Purgatory, 20: The Human Side
05 Feb 2024Meowers
Warning: violence, cruelty, graphic descriptions.
"There's a line, deep in the human mind. A threshold. A breaking point. After passing which, you could observe unimaginable atrocities remaining calm and focused. You may not even notice this coming. Yet, there's no way back from now on."
T + 111h 52min. Yeah, this is it. I ran through the files we've found. That new map has four C-level facilities, apparently, all four of them they have, and the roads connecting the facilities together, a half-circle, about two kilometres in radius. So the main one should be in the centre of this formation, or maybe close to it, no doubt. Yeah, they were kind of ingenious in placing their compounds in a weird messy way, yet those deeper ones... They weren't meant to be reached, I suppose, the defences here are more than enough to deal with a small threat, one that can't force them to evacuate.
And all their fucking dirty secrets are here.
More experiments. Still ugly and atrocious as heinous heck. Those forced impregnations with several artificial or transplanted uteruses placed in one person, they even tried to make men give birth. Along with filling the subjects with all kinds of wild chemistry in an attempt to get those fetuses grow faster and form in larger numbers. Reached two to three months... Holy craps, how's that even possible? At such a growth rate, they literally tore those women apart from the inside, straining and ripping the tissues, and bloody freaks didn't even try to grow them in vats, like, everything should be fucking 'natural', to pump hordes of those babies out right after retaking the colonies back from the bugs. They injected solutions based on Thargoid acid into human livers, kidneys, thyroids, even hearts, diluted enough not to cause instant death but excruciatingly painful and affecting the entire body, one of the poor bastards had to be attached to the force-feeding device since he couldn't keep the food inside him and couldn't digest it properly, everything was just going through his body for several weeks until he died of sepsis, in agonising pain. They kept another one alive for two months on a specific medication that allowed predicting Thargoid pulse discharges, contracting the muscles according to the energy buildup in the environment. In exchange for having pus pockets and cysts forming literally inside the skull which they had to cut open and replace the top part with an artificial cover to have an access inside, to remove that goop out of the brain kettle. Ended up with the brain rotting from the inside, technically the person was dead, unviable, with heart stopped and brain slowly decomposing, for five days already, and only their machinery kept the neural chains functional at the bare necessary minimum. Other experiments I mentioned before, like that children-powered organ factory, or the hive mind school. Making humans somehow compatible with the Thargoid ships was too simple for some of them, they wanted people to mutate, to become a new Thargoid variant, at least to look like one, with miniaturised FSDs and other space travel equipment connected via neural interfaces to mutilated bodies, in order to infiltrate and destroy Thargoid groups, or to lead them into black holes. And they needed more kids for that, because adults weren't showing any promising results, having their bodies already fully formed. Damn that... Thing. It looked awful. Even on the videos. Greenish, crooked, jagged, dried limbs glowing in the dark distantly resembled those of a human, looking like they were in the middle of a horrific transformation. Frontal half of the child body, bloated, energy circuits glowing blue from the inside, in their technical, orderly pattern, a striking contrast to the biological nature of the parts infused with Thargoid technology. Pulsating, weeping liquids through the cuts and seams, the body had its back part opened with the rest of the machinery forming a three metres long metal block, with miniature thruster nozzles and radiator panels. And a face, a face of a ten or eleven years old boy with a grimace of resentment and anger imprinted, frozen solid on it, anger of a child who's been punished for something he cannot understand.
Preparing, converting prisoners into guards looked like a child's play compared to everything else. Conducting the check-ups, they selected those most susceptible to the will-suppressing substances which they used during the conversion period, amplifying the brainwashing, and that's how the elite squads were trained. Lectures about self-sacrificing, neglecting your own needs and wishes, fighting until the last dying breath, mastering your own pain.
"Pain is a tool, a tool that you may expect to be used against you. Turning it in your favour will make you unbeatable. Thargoids will attack and torture you. Traitors will attack and torture you. Knowing that every second spent in pain, fulfilling your duty and destiny, bringing humanity closer to victory, will make them powerless against you. You may die, but thousands and thousands will replace you."
All that kind of stuff. Pages of it. Some places were repeated in specific orders to match the human attention nuances, strengthening the effect. The same will-suppressing chemicals were vented into the air during the sessions, which were meant to start with a slow, smooth tone, and end with loud, sharp, deafening shouts, rhymed, combined to resonate and hit hard, almost tantric, hypnotising. There were video recordings of their... Lectures, which looked like occult rituals, with selected victims being sacrificed, as an example. They smiled, they smiled and laughed until the last seconds of their lives, and everyone else had to punch or leave a small knife cut, and they did that willingly. And the victims, they received that willingly. There was one woman, in her 40s maybe, she couldn't take it anymore, she begged them to stop. Enraged, upset and disappointed, the crowd grabbed her limbs and pulled, breaking her joints, and stopped only once they tore her arms off completely, leaving scraps of tissues hanging loosely. Losing blood and screaming, she was still alive until they had beaten her to death on the floor. Next victim, a young man, impressed by that outburst of uncontrolled violence, volunteered to receive the same treatment. He smiled.
There were also files about the ancient ship, containing the main moments of the story around it. Christened 'Natalia', an old name meaning 'birth', the ship was built in 2168, an early, very early design, one of the first FTL-capable colony ships, from the age when their maximum interstellar travel speeds rarely exceeded a hundred c's, without the in-system FTL capability. Yet, at that moment, this was state-of-the-art, cutting edge technology. Natalia began the first, and the last, long trip in 2169, with exactly the purpose that I'd presumed, establishing a colony, by landing on a planet and dismantling the ship, using it further as the first building, power plant, medical and research station and so on. However, primitive and unstable, Natalia's hyperdrive started failing in 2173 and the crew had lost the track of their jumping trajectory, and that had made calculating the current position impossible. They tried, they tried for several months, stopping and making pictures of the starscape around them, once in a week, comparing them, trying to find familiar constellations and triangulate, utilising the ancient spacefaring and even sailing navigation techniques. But the drive kept succumbing to malfunctions, it failed to lock on to stars and maintain a proper acceleration, dropping them into the interstellar void from time to time or swirling Natalia into unpredictable, curved jump trajectories. Eventually, running low on supplies and spare parts, they discovered this planet and decided to land, right into the jungle, thinking that the crippled hyperdrive couldn't take more of restart procedures, and it's about to fail completely, leaving them stranded in the void. So, the planet was a welcome surprise indeed, maybe even a unique gift, once in a lifetime: an accidental discovery of a world that could, presumably, support human life.
And next goes the story about the RRDG thing. Rapid Reproduction and Development Genome. An obscure, barely ethically-acceptable experiment, an offshoot of one of the popular cloning technologies of those years, it had been conducted around the early to mid 22nd century and allowed to grow adult quasi-humans rapidly in specialised vats using genetic presets. A year, a year and a half, to reach an equivalent of eighteen normal years and leave the vat fully formed; and with minds of those people being empty slates, they were capable of completing the elementary school curriculum in a couple of months of intensive education, then going further and acquiring one of the specialised skills such as construction, basic mechanics and electronics, fundamental biology and medicine, in a year or two. Without having a childhood experience of playing and having free time, without any emotional attachments and even the ability to express their feelings fully, the clones were immensely productive. The average lifespan of newly made humans rarely reached fifteen years since leaving the vat, ten to twelve in average, they couldn't reproduce on their own, were prone to cancer, early heart strokes, rapid-onset dementia and had a few more health flaws, but that was more than enough. This technology was supposed to help with establishing colonies on the far reaches, recently charted systems, placing the burden of pioneering onto the shoulders of waves upon waves of artificially-grown expendable clones, paving the way for naturally born people, and Natalia was the first ship equipped with everything necessary for that unusual task. Ironically, what was meant to bring life, condemned the crew of Natalia to death. In order to preserve food and other supplies for a long exploration trip, and to leave more space for the clone-growing provisions, the ship had minimal crew, every member of which had also been, just in case, sterilised, to prevent specific unwanted accidents involving clones or gradual genetic pool degradation.
With that said, back to the demise of Natalia. Making a successful yet quite a tree-crushing landing, the crew realised that, on top of the absence of any navigation which made sending emergency signals via none less primitive FTL-comm devices impossible, their malfunctioning hyperdrive couldn't properly work as a power plant too, shutting down after few minutes of usage, limiting them to the auxiliary, dirty and low-output radioisotope generator. So, they couldn't power up their fancy pseudo-human factory. Such a combination of circumstances had made them stranded, in conditions that weren't much better than aimless and hopeless floating in space, being left under the same eternal rain and impenetrably dense clouds. They spent several months in fruitless attempts to stabilise the power output and construct an array of batteries to cover the downtimes, and then several more months to convert the power-producing equipment of the hyperdrive into a primitive fuel-burner only to figure out that its increased consumption doesn't give them a chance to complete one full clone production circle and now they don't have necessary parts to put everything back together. A dead end. At least, finding out that the indigenous grass carries an infection the human body doesn't have any natural resistance to, they created the vaccine and documented their research, and it was the very first version of the vaccine used by Azimuth nowadays. Although, having no way to replenish their numbers and no means to contact the rest of humankind, they were bound to extinction.
Even with the minimal crew, they didn't have enough food and necessities to cover the average human lifespan, and they lacked our modern basic exobiology knowledge to safely figure out which local plants and small animals are edible.
Surprisingly, the lizard-dogs we encountered earlier were documented too, and they were much smaller in size those years, with their existence in the local food chain being described as bleak at best, though natural foolhardiness and curiosity had eventually led a few packs into the corridors of the ship, where they, searching for anything edible, stumbled upon boxes of energy-rich provisions made for sustaining the accelerated growth rate of the clones. Natalia's crew couldn't see any short-term effects, but... Yeah. We are here to witness the long-term ones.
Honestly, I've been a little carried away going through their biology research. It's fascinating to see how similar, yet different, the local wildlife had been eleven centuries ago, when Natalia landed somewhere nearby, within the same biome. A few species went extinct, yet a few new ones took their place, others had transformed, evolved over time, slightly, sometimes almost unnoticeably, and that's from my perspective. And I'm not a biologist, I can't see something they do.
With their supplies depleted and hopes lost, the last three crew members of Natalia, starved to bones, weak and frail, committed suicide by injecting lethal doses of self-made cyanide-based toxin, simultaneously in 2185, after twelve years spent on this planet.
Almost no documents from that era survived through more than a millenia. Whilst Generation Ships had become somewhat like flying museums, overtaken by the first FTL-capable vessels, some of them even intercepted in order to take the descendants of original crews onboard and let them end their journey sooner, the first FTL ships themselves didn't share the same fame, almost vanishing from the widely known history, dismantled upon arrival, seemed utilitarian and, simply speaking, less romantic. On top of that, Natalia and the RRDG experiment were stigmatised, seen as a shameful, disgraceful failure, mentions of them were meticulously wiped out and the genetic experiment abruptly cancelled.
So, then the friggin Azimuth Bio-bloody-tech happened. Any documents even distantly related to Natalia were a rare relic, though, Azimuth being Azimuth, somehow they managed to get their claws on a clue which led them to discovering the final resting place of the vessel. Whilst having the hyperdrive shattered by the series of malfunctions and later rigging attempts, the ship itself was built extremely sturdily, as the rest of the first colony ships, and remained in good shape even after twelve centuries, its radioisotope generator even still producing enough energy to power up the essential electronics without hacking into ancient circuits.
Having a thorough, detailed documentation on the RRDG, examples of essential supplies and, more important, the vats, derelict yet preserved enough to combine several of them into one functioning, Azimuth continued the long-forgotten experiment, keeping everything in secret. They reverse-engineered the vats and started a production line for their improved models, put modern genetics science to use and extended the DNA preset library, adding random variables to bring more diversity, making clones less clones, and, moreover, evolved the technology, cutting the growth periods almost three times. Having almost an endless pool of empty-minded, uneducated subjects with only basic emotional capabilities, Azimuth scientists decided that yes, this is it, a perfect chance to start a large-scale human experimentation facility. And we all know the methods Azimuth operates with. Although, eventually, they faced a difficulty: due to the differences between naturally-born humans and rapidly-grown clones, some experiments had proven to be ineffective. And, well, it was the beginning of the humble and totally ethical and lawful woodworking company.
I couldn't find any further details in the datapads we've found, yet, at that point, something had happened between the local scientists and the mainstream Azimuth, and our folks even had to go rogue for a few months. However, their research was deemed worthy by the Azimuth top management and the disagreements were settled, leaving the local branch tightly connected to Azimuth de facto, but a different organisation legally. And, yeah, over time, with their hands untied by that agreement, they improved their already interesting research methods into what we have now.
And now I understand why those villages exist. Those are rapid-grown, quasi-humans, and I was right. Azimuth vaguely monitors the populations and just drops fresh ones into the villages since they have effectively an endless source of them, and those tribals can't reproduce on their own. A primitive set of knowledge might've been put into their heads by the scientists before releasing, and their conditioning, from a wish to be on the receiving end of punishment to a vicious, militant, cruel society, fits into that scheme perfectly. Azimuth needs them. Several types of them. They group them and contain them in those villages, no matter if they were built for them from scratch, purposefully, or the clones did that by themselves. And also Azimuth needs naturally-born people for the things where clones are useless.
So, still some blank spaces in that otherwise bloody mess but I guess we're about to get to know the rest in the central. And, yeah. Whoever is responsible... That person is going to die. No other options.
And, owww, ow wow wow... Looks like I'm a good storyteller, you know. At least not a shitty one. As I sat on a fallen tree retelling and recording all my findings since, uh, I've been asked to do so... The soldiers gathered around me, listening.
Dammit, Romano, stop giggling, I've been told to record what I see and now I see you being an idiot, phah
Alright... T + 111h 51min. We'll advance a few more steps towards where I think the central is and then make a camp of sorts, to have a nap before the attack in the morning. And I think it would be better to get rid of that angry tribe camouflage...
Ah, holy craps, this is it...
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Next part: #21: Heart of the Blight
Next part: #21: Heart of the Blight