Intergalactic Summit

Still think you ought to try Sojurn: Sani Sabik with the CTCS or something before making a final decision.

Would it be appropriate given the circumstances to wish you a happy birthday?

Being part of something, even totality - especially totality - means to belong somewhere. We just need to find out, where that somewhere is.

A happy birthday and all that is good and beautiful in the year of your life that just started, Cpt. Jenneth!

I'll weigh in as well! Happy Birthday Peregrinans.

Happy birthday, Vesper. You have not done too terribly in your first year.

Entry Thirty-four: Scar Tissue

(Names changed to protect the innocent)

It's hard to know how to write about something like this. As per Directrix Aspenstar's sleep-deprived remark, this is probably as close to a "Sojourn: Sani Sabik" as I'm ever going to do.

So, a while back, as I mentioned, SFRIM took in some of the survivors from one of Nauplius's towers. They've all moved on, now, but while they were here I was given the duty of working with some of the injured, in body or spirit. Talking with them. Helping them.

Nauplius seems to aim to bring his vision of "hell" into this world. He wants people to suffer before they die, and tries to scar even the survivors past recovery.

Vitoc's a cruel drug, though I guess the lack of temptation could be considered a saving grace. It creates dependency without benefit, need without desire. It's basically a chemical shackle. All of Nauplius's victims are, in his words, "stuffed full of Vitoc." I don't think he really understands what the stuff really is very well, or how it works, but the people he has working for him seem to have interpreted this directive by addicting each captive to between four and ten (!) different strains. It's not a cost-effective technique, but then, "The Butcher" isn't in this for profit.

Fortunately, it's not workable to customize the mixture to each individual subject among tens of thousands, so there are patterns-- batches, so to speak-- of victims, allowing Nauplius's staff to dose thousands of subjects at a time without having to keep close track of individual cases.

I first meet the girl I'll call Miri in moderate to high-severity Vitoc withdrawal, part of what we're calling Group 4, which received seven different strains. The doctors have identified five of the seven, and one of the remaining two seems to be similar enough to one of the five we've found that there's some alleviation of withdrawal symptoms, even from an incomplete "dosage key." The seventh, though, is some kind of exotic strain; none of the other types is anything like it, and the withdrawal is hitting her hard. She's shaking, clammy, bedridden.

Miri's a teenager, on the younger side. She asks me if she's going to die. I tell her the doctors are working on it; that the key is out there and they'll find it.

We don't talk for very long. I sit by her bed and hold her hand. There's really no one else to do this. Her mother's dead, murdered before Miri's eyes as an offering to Nauplius's "Red God."

Day two is much the same. She's weaker, though. She asks me if I believe in hell.

I don't.

She doesn't, either. She says any other world has to be better than this. Even the Abyss would be better, she says.

Day three, I find her sitting on the side of her bed, toes dangling. She smiles at me. They've found component seven.

(The component was unique, as it turns out, and common to more than half the groups. It wasn't available on the open market at all; we had to compound our own. One of Nauplius's people is an overachieving little ****, whom I am going to skin if I ever find him.)

She's still a little wobbly (recovery time aside, we still don't have component six, and the imperfect match with component two is leading to a slow buildup of withdrawal symptoms), but she's on her feet, sort of. She's taller than I am. I ask her about where she's from.

She tells me about a planetary plantation in Kor-Azor territory. Fruit trees, wheat fields, people she cared about, even the hoary, arthritic Holdress, whom she doesn't seem to bear much ill will. (Also a perimeter patrolled by slaver hounds. I don't mention that I own one.) She was raised a devout Amarrian, of course. She calls Nauplius's people "evil men." She says that they tried to convince her that there was a hell, and she was going to it, but she insists she wasn't fooled. There's only one God, she says, and He's not red, and there's no hell, only Paradise, or the Abyss.

She says this with the conviction of someone who's been saying it to herself a lot. Like it's the band that's holding her together.

We talk more, in succeeding days. (They finally work out what component six is. It's a discontinued subtype of 2, cancelled because it caused long-term ulceration of the ovaries; Nauplius's people must have been compounding their own.) Miri ended up in Nauplius's tower through a twist of fate: the old Holdress passed away without direct issue, and her heirs weren't interested in keeping up the plantation. The property-- all the property-- was sold on the open market.

She admits, after the first week, that she thought I was a sefrim at first. I must look puzzled, because she explains that she thought she was dying (technically, she was, just quite a ways off from being dead), and she'd never seen anyone like me before. She'd been feverish, seeing things, she says. She thought I was Death.

But I'm little, I say.

"Sure. Death should look small, if you keep God's ways," she says.

One neat twist in all of this is that the whole experience has introduced Miri to the wider possibilities of the world. She never really saw much reason for studying mathematics, before; it didn't seem important when she was picking fruit or planting crops-- just an eccentricity of the old Holdress, teaching the children among her slaves more than they would ever need to know. Now, she sees the possibilities-- what can be done with math. She wants to learn. (I hope she gets to.)

For what? I ask. What would you do with it? She's been thinking about that a lot, as it turns out. There are all sorts of engineering that glorify God, but....

"I want to design lasers," she says. Her eyes are green, and hungry. "There's no hell," she says, "but there are evil people. We should show them God's light. They should burn."

And with all the pretense on display throughout New Eden of seeking to aid such people, I still have Insorum Components sitting untouched for want of someone with the scientific capability and assets needed to do the research necessary for widespread production. Every time I've sought such people, the only ones showing interest were slavers themselves, who are obviously not getting their hands on them.

I guess there is simply less profit in finding a way to end Vitoxin dependence on a large scale than in... say pillaging Drifters for technology or researching better warships and weapons.

When I obtained these Insorum Components, I can't say I thought they'd be gathering dust for years on end. Says things about New Eden and its inhabitants that aren't particularly... pleasant.

I'd say it'd be erring on the side of reasonable caution not to hand over something this rare to those perpetuating slavery in New Eden, Jenneth. The staggering risk compared to the rather insignificant chance it'd have a good outcome is pretty much beyond even the most insane gambler.

Well ... it's not like the Amarrian faith doesn't account for people like Nauplius, though I think it plays out differently for different people, Ms. Vess. I also met people Nauplius had clearly gotten to, who were raving in terror as their symptoms worsened, convinced that only something utterly malevolent awaited them if they died.

Results seem to vary, on all sides. For many, the very fact of their rescue seemed to suggest that the universe doesn't completely hate them. For others, it seemed like false hope.

... At least at first. A fair few of those ... didn't make it. For those who did, well, the fact that they're not being slowly tortured to death is kind of hard to ignore after a bit.

Ya, I highly doubt every single one took it with the amount of strength that girl you talked to did. The ones who didn't are the ones who I really feel for. I don't even want to try and imagine them honestly. That's just too horrific...