Authors: Tony Gonzales
All it needed was the memories of a real person to give it life.
* * *
I STRUGGLED TO UNDERSTAND
why the Sleepers did this to themselves.
The savagery of their attack haunted me, yet in hindsight, I could almost sense they were fighting for their lives—just doing what living things do when cornered.
It was possible they were just automated husks, no different from the sentinel drones that attacked our ships.
Examining their remains yielded no clues on how long they had been awake for.
But hundreds of dormant specimens were still there, perhaps awaiting the transfer of a consciousness more than twelve thousand years old.
Or maybe there was a consciousness already embedded within them.
My devotion to the mission forced me to suppress that possibility.
But the idea persisted.
The will to live is so powerful in nature; life
always
tries to find a way.
Empress Jamyl decreed that Amarr must have the technology to produce an immortal army, and I was charged with delivering it.
She wanted an unstoppable crusade to spread our faith and end the war.
This was necessary, so her thinking went, for the greater good of humanity.
And, as with many other dark secrets buried within her, she knew exactly where to find the technology to make this crusade possible.
* * *
AFTER ENOUGH SPECIMENS
had been harvested and analyzed, a clone design for the first immortal soldiers using original Sleeper technology finally emerged.
Slaves and war prisoners of all races—except True Amarr, of course—were brought here as test subjects, each with freshly installed neuro-interface sockets to facilitate the extraction of their consciousness for installation into these new clones.
Early test subjects died in writhing agony, caused by everything from incorrectly mapped neural pathways to runaway autoimmune responses.
Some held on to consciousness just long enough to beg for death and then slipped away.
Others awoke the equivalent of cripples or lunatics or just empty husks with no memory or cognitive capacity at all.
The lucky ones never opened their eyes at all.
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, science prevailed.
The first poor soul to survive the refined process was a Caldari criminal, wanted by the Lai Dai mega-corporation for a crime undeserving of this punishment.
The transfer of his essence into the new clone design was seamless; he was now a soldier with no equal.
He had become immortal, and like the Sleeper origins of his new brain, only barely qualified as human.
To keep the research secret, the remaining original test subjects, though perfectly healthy, were liquefied, sorted, and added to my growing collection of biomass, a soupy sludge of amino acids, stem cells, proteins, and organic molecules destined to be recycled into another potential crusader.
With the transfer process now “perfected,” a very impatient Empress Jamyl sent twelve of her most devoted Paladins to undergo the transformation to immortal holy warriors—volunteers, this time.
I could only imagine the sales pitch.
Any other man might feel proud of this accomplishment.
Were I not trapped here, I might celebrate this great leap for Amarr by flying the
Significance
into the nearest star.
>>END RECORDING
13
GENESIS REGION—EVE CONSTELLATION
THE NEW EDEN SYSTEM
>>
SIGNIFICANCE
MISSION LOG ENTRY
>>BEGIN RECORDING
Even with the benefit of hindsight, there is little I could have changed.
Lord Falek Grange was the master architect of my shameful life, and he did his ruthless work with Empress Jamyl by his side.
Combined, they became the object of my devotion in the most extreme sense; I was absolute and unconditional in my conviction to them.
As far as influences go, my parents did little to prepare me for the cruelty of the universe.
The gift of my natural intellect was amusing to them, at best a topic of idle chatter among their aristocratic peers.
As the only son of wealthy Holders, I was entitled to the same lavish lifestyle that was the birthright of generations before me.
When I was eight years of age, I realized that I was born into an elite, homogenous theocratic caste, with no means of exceeding its boundaries.
Even if I was born a complete imbecile, I would still be entitled to this opulent, mundane lifestyle.
This terrified me, and I became determined to prove that intelligence still served some functional purpose in the world.
My insatiable appetite for knowledge only intensified as I absorbed volumes of information from virtual academic constructs.
Yet my parents failed to grasp that I sought a
context,
any context, for an application of my skills.
I desperately needed a chance to assemble everything I learned into a masterpiece worthy of genuine praise rather than subtle patronization.
At the core, I was just a child who wanted to please his parents.
My frustration was not unnoticed.
As with any Holder residence, our estate was tended by slaves, and many were devout caretakers with whom I spent more time than with my mother or father.
They were an attentive audience that made my naïve and admittedly egotistical self feel appreciated.
I was convinced they were genuinely impressed with my advancement and natural gift.
I began to confide in them, sharing in the few childhood delights that an underprivileged child might consider normal: rolling in the grass with pet slavers, playing hide-and-seek across the manicured grounds of our home, running with reckless abandon through local fairs while under the watchful eye of Paladins.
They provided comfort when I admitted to feeling unloved by my parents, holding me tight as I cried, promising not to tell anyone of my tears.
With this newfound intimacy came innocent trust, and they began asking questions that I was more than happy to answer.
I saw no harm in explaining how biometric security systems could be bypassed or how the glaive collars around their necks could be disabled or how to hack the estate’s datacore or how to fabricate a decryption key that would grant access to restricted areas of the grounds.
I relished the sensation of triumph with every conquered challenge, basking in the adulation that my companions returned, eager to prove to them again and again how much potential I had for scientific greatness.
They were my only friends.
I loved them all.
And I knew they loved me as well.
One night, I was escorted to my quarters for bed.
I remembered hearing that it would be overcast and triple new moons; the sky would be black as satin, a good night to hide under the covers in fear of imaginary monsters lurking outside.
My parents made their customary visit, gave the obligatory kiss on my cheek, and said something disingenuous.
As they left, the slaves followed.
The last one out—her name was Sasha—paused and looked my way.
I thought her eyes were glistening; there was a sadness about her.
Just as I thought to ask her what was wrong, she left, gently closing the door.
I fell asleep wondering if I had done something to disappoint her.
After a fitful sleep, the sound of my mother gasping in shock shook me out of bed.
My father, his voice cracking and desperate, was upset as well, pleading in earnest with angry men.
Throwing open the door, I emerged from my room and saw a transformed world before me: A dozen armed Paladins were inside the foyer; my slave companions were being led through the front entrance, their hands cuffed behind their backs.
I ran after them, ignoring the warnings of strangers, dashed through the front entrance, and froze.
Sasha’s corpse was splayed across the steps, her crimson blood contrasting brightly with the marble upon which she fell.
Her hand—the same soft, reassuring flesh that had touched my heart—was gripped around the stock of a rifle.
Two more companions were nearby, facedown and contorted in gruesome ways; several dead slavers—I recognized the protective animals by their pet names—lay riddled with blast marks.
Later I would learn that Holders in the estate bordering ours, some ten kilometers away, had been murdered by slaves who had somehow broken free of their glaive collars.
The running gun battle that ensued resulted in multiple fatalities, as the rogue slaves possessed intimate knowledge of Paladin response tactics and terrain.
It was a suicide mission, the investigators explained.
There was no way for the slaves to escape the district, let alone the planet.
Their goal was just to spill as much Amarr blood as possible before their own inevitable demise.
Investigators further concluded that Sasha died protecting my estate, turning on the slaves who wanted to kill my parents during the rampage, and likely myself as well.
The pursuing Paladins, unable or uninterested in determining her motives, shot her to death anyway, ending the night of terror.
A crude but effective decryption device made of salvaged household electronics was found among the deceased slaves.
It didn’t take the most sophisticated detective work to determine its origins.
I was made to sit with Paladins, high priests, and detectives alongside my parents in a theocratic court to explain my actions.
I told them that it just never occurred to me that the information I divulged could be used to do harm.
That was the honest truth, if not a pathetic one.
I thought “slaves” were perfectly content with their role in society.
I believed them to be utterly incapable of hurting anyone.
Through tears that flowed more for confusion than despair, I declared that it just seemed illogical that knowledge or science could be used to commit acts of evil.
Nor, I added, was this lesson apparent in what little of the faith I had been exposed to.
I regretted admitting this immediately; the judges and priests shook their heads, their faces impassive, not at all empathizing with my plea.
I could sense the deepest shame welling up in my parents at my ignorance.
When asked about my relationship with Sasha, I answered that she was more caring toward me than my own mother was, which earned me a vicious slap from my father.
The Paladins reacted forcefully, instructing him not to do that again.
But the pain spreading across my jaw triggered a realization, something that ripped apart the veil of my innocence.
In that moment, two burning hatreds were born: One was for my parents, whose unforgivable detachment I blamed for this tragedy.
The other was for slaves themselves.
I would eventually harness this emotion into a zero-tolerance policy for even the mildest of indiscretions and hold them accountable to the most extreme interpretation of our faith.
Administering punishment was therefore a convenient alignment of inner rage with the religious justification to become a sadist.
That I didn’t really believe in God at all was irrelevant, provided no one else knew.
And so at last, here was my masterpiece.
I had finally achieved the recognition I sought, though I had not a single friend in all the world to share it with.
The magistrates and priests recessed briefly to discuss my fate.
I was left to sit with my parents.
“How could you do this?”
my father demanded.
My mother said nothing, her face puffy and red from grief—not for the trauma I was enduring, I was convinced, but for the embarrassment I had wrought on the family name.
“Because I didn’t know any better,” I admitted.
“That’s unacceptable!”
he bellowed, grabbing my arm.
“I
raised
you to know better!”
The same Paladins who earlier warned him not to get physical stepped forward.
I gave my father the coldest stare I could.
“I was raised by slaves.
Not by you.”
They were the last words I ever spoke to him.
As the magistrates returned to take their seats, I felt as though I were in free fall, at the total and complete mercy of immutable laws of physics, and that I would be banished to the cellar of some reliquary and forced to memorize every word of the Scriptures until a bishop declared my soul purged of sin.
But instead, a miracle of sorts happened.
They declared that I was innocent of conspiracy, concurring that I had been the victim of a cunning plot of sabotage.
I was, after all, only a child, and thus emotionally unprepared to see through such an elaborate and deceitful scheme.
However, I was found guilty of the juvenile misdemeanor charge of negligence, of which the sentencing guidelines were entirely contextual and discretionary.
It wasn’t uncommon for a slave child or even a non-Holder Amarrian to be given a flesh-ripping shocklash or two, depending on the infraction.
My punishment was to take an aptitude test on the spot, with no preparation.
While the courtroom watched, mathematical challenges and scientific queries materialized in the space before me, and immediately my mind shut everything else out.
I was in my element now, completely at peace and oblivious to my surroundings.
I quickly and flawlessly worked through one problem after the next.
I finally had a chance to show the world what I was capable of.
I don’t know how long I was standing there.
But the sound of the chief magistrate declaring “Enough!”
snapped me back to reality.
The results showed what I knew all along—that I was different—and that, in the magistrate’s view, I wasn’t realizing my full potential while under the misguidance of my parents.
I was to be sent to Amarr’s elite institution for applied sciences, the Royal Amarr Institute, and given advanced placement in a special program for the development of intellectually gifted children.
We would each be assigned a personal mentor—each a former graduate of the program itself and very much accomplished in a specialized scientific field.
The magistrate further explained that the mentor assigned to me was a prominent scientist poised to earn a seat on one of the most powerful institutions of the Empire—the Theology Council, the Empire’s highest court.
They said that he was revered with the utmost respect by both academia and the church alike—an extremely rare combination in modern times—and that I should consider myself blessed to be under his tutelage.
But my parents gasped as though I’d been sentenced to death.
Despite my misgivings toward them, I was frightened by the passion of their response.
My father protested furiously and my mother begged for mercy.
I remember them being restrained by guards as the magistrate ordered them to be silent.
He then stamped the verdict, sealing my fate.
Court was adjourned, and the Paladins informed us that a courier would visit our estate to take me to the Emrayur system within thirty-six hours.
It wasn’t until I was aboard the dropship lifting upward from my homeworld that I learned that the name of my mentor was Lord Falek Grange.
At just eight years of age, that meant nothing to me, except that the name of the Holders who were murdered because of my ignorance was Lord Talhur Grange, his wife Miko, and one of their sons, Hathim.
My greatest influence was about to become a man who lost his entire family as a direct consequence of my personal ambition.
>>END RECORDING