Tenuria
17-02-2007, 04:40
Technically, Raj Danilov wasn't even PEST. What he actually was remained a matter of great speculation. No-one even knew why he'd been posted here, how long he'd stayed, or when he'd leave. Although Danilov wouldn't have been particularly surprised to find out most of them hoped the answer to the last question would be "soon".
There was nothing very mysterious about Danilov, on the surface. He was a tall iron-haired man with lean opaque eyes and a face of angles and ridges, the eyes almost sunken. It was far from a standard Damalg'iru face, of course, but then most of these were 2nd-gens and even the odd 1st-gen, kept in close suspicion of course by the 2nds as well as Danilov and the guards themselves.
The odder matter about Danilov concerned his rarity of speaking. Namely, except to give orders (and he was indisputably one to give orders), he almost never spoke, not even to the other personnel. They had observed that even the highest-ranked officers on the complex deferred to him, on the rare instances when he chose to concern himself in matters.
Even the prisoners were not entirely oblivious to this. Yag'Haroth was, necessarily, a prison as well as a fortress. The prisoners were used sometimes as an impromptu logistics crew, setting up all the dangerous weaponry (and being exposed to the doses of radiation the personnel themselves tried to avoid); sometimes they served as food when rations got low, or served to satisfy the certain sexual needs of their captors. Nonetheless, there was still an intimate grapevine connecting the lowest-ranking personnel to the prisoners, these being mainly 1st and 2nd gens.
Some said Raj Danilov was a Sol-Marius, the dread special forces of the si-Thaluo. Some claimed he was a henchman of the Inquisition. A few even held that he was a Moderator of the Yag'Haroth Oversector, or even a Moderator of the HICOM. Danilov had been confronted once with this last, by a curious officer; he had merely laughed and warned, playfully, the officer not to get mixed in over his head.
The prisoners especially held a peculiar reverence for Danilov, the kind of reverence men have for powerful adversaries or opposing tyrants. Thus, when they decided to break out, they carefully considered his feelings into the matter, and planned their strategy carefully. The prison cells were deep underground, and prisoners were not normally allowed to speak to each other, kept in solitary confinement except for the daily exercise sessions; that started to be when messages were passed along, in a code agreed upon at some unknown point in the past.
They were a mixed bag: intellectuals and political dissidents thrown in alongside petty thieves and criminals, evidently deemed not dangerous enough to be executed. This policy was of course changed after the Yag'Haroth breakout; no longer were the Fortress Islands used as prisons, all prisoners simply redirected to the forced-labour camps in the North, and computer users summarily executed.
But I appear to be getting ahead of myself. The ringleader of our prisoners now was one Amon Hakku, a young man full of brilliance and fiery optimism; he'd been convicted of espionage and treason in the second degree, the usual designations for someone who accessed the Internet from Damalg'iru territory. Since espionage and second degree treason were not considered major crimes at the time, he had been simply imprisoned with a cellmate named Loki Marsden, convicted of the same crime. 'Convicted' wasn't accurate; more 'seized by the Sol-Marii at night, taken to the OVSCOM, informed of one's crime, and doled out an appropriate punishment by an Oversector Sub-Moderator'.
Hakku had planned out the escape in detail. It was not, of course, one that could be easily accomplished elsewhere, and relied largely on the structural details of the building, its age, and running like hell. Hakku had served on other Fortress Islands before his conviction; he knew that all of them contained computers of some variety, usually in private offices. That was all he would need.
Raj Danilov, of course, could well be the fly in Hakku's ointment. Hakku knew this; higher-ranking officials meant more likelihood of capture, more security. But Hakku couldn't well delay much longer. The die, as someone or other once said, is cast. He'd have to make his move soon, or risk losing it all anyway.
* * *
The artificial 'morning' of Day 271, Year 29 failed to dawn. It appeared the night light-sequence had never turned off, even though it was well past Hour 7 now. That was not the only strange thing one might observe upon closer examination of Yag'Haroth Fortress Island. One could see that the prison cells were invariably locked shut, secure, but no-one was within.
The cafeteria and gymnasium were also on this level, far below ground and sea level. Both massive rooms were strewn with blood and bodies. Yag'Haroth had held up to eight hundred prisoners, and most of them lay dead here, 7.8mm caseless and 5.56mm rounds littering the floor and pockmarking the walls. The dead bodies of personnel lay here too, some killed in more gruesome ways; eyes are gouged or scratched out, arms dangling uselessly, bones fractured by heavy wooden or metal implements (the kind one might pick up in a cafeteria or gymnasium), necks broken. A few had been shot, apparently with handguns.
Upstairs the chaos grew deeper. Troops ran to and fro in fists of two and three; armed men massed in corners, bloody dead bodies lying everywhere. Raj Danilov appeared to be sitting in his office, watching the events playing out on several TV screens; he was enjoying himself immensely. Of course, it wasn't his facility to manage, so he hadn't bothered to report any of the phenomena; these were Damalg'iru soldiers, they could figure it out on their own.
Finally, on the third floor, we find the reason for this outcry. A heavily blockaded blast door was ringed by soldiers, shouting and firing upon it with their weapons, holding it until the Sol-Marii could arrive with the heavy weapons from below; around the blast door was a small perimeter of armed prisoners, a number dwindling every moment as more 5.56mm rounds took them down, forming a wall of dead bodies (behind from which the survivors continued to fire indiscriminately upon their attackers, with wild horror).
Behind the blast doors virtually everything had been overturned and pushed against the door except for the computer table and the instrument sitting upon it. Typing furiously at the console was Amon Hakku himself, bleeding from three wounds, bruised and disheveled. A quartet of other prisoners, some armed and some not, guarded him as he typed.
The message was short, and posted as a blog entry.
Help us. You have to help us.
We're from the si-Thaluo Damalg'iru. You haven't heard of it. Far north, probably as close to the North Pole as it's possible to get. Ridiculously massive island of which we occupy only a small southern fraction. That's beside the point, anyway.
The si-Thaluo's been carrying on a quiet program of extermination for the past thirty years, give or take. Extermination of what, you ask? Extermination of everything that makes us human. Individual, free expression is outlawed. Emotions are outlawed. Art, literature, music, media are all outlawed. Non-oral communication is outlawed. Families are outlawed. Sex is outlawed. The punishment? Death, preceded by tortures that would make the Spanish Inquisition cry.
We want sanity back, and there aren't many of us... within ten years the Moderators' breeding program will be complete and us first-generation people will become obsolete. Future generations will have no memory of any of the things that make us human, no humanity at all, just empty shells filled with the hateful propaganda of the HICOM.
I ask the world's citizens to notify your governments. Those of you who can still vote for them, urge them to do something about these monsters. Even waging war against them would be better than watching us suffer in silence.
I'm going to die in a few minutes, probably in a particularly nasty way, so this blog entry won't be updated. At least not by me. Perhaps those few uncaptured Internet users in the si-Thaluo will take heart and continue to update and reinforce this with their own comments and entries.
Thanl;p'
This is all the world outside of the si-Thaluo would ever know on the subject. In his room Danilov watched the ATGM blow in the door, and the extremely brief gun battle before the usefulness of the Sol-Marii's penetration rounds became evident, as the tungsten core penetrated the body and then released its unpleasant combination of ball bearings and anti-coagulants into the wound. He rolled back the camera film and watched the computer screen. It had worked. But that was no obstacle to Danilov's ultimate plans.
Danilov was watching for a specific reason. He was the one who'd "inadvertently" ordered the creation of a chink in the security net. He'd been watching the escape the whole time, without lifting a finger to stop it. Why? Because he knew their plans. He knew they weren't simply running away, seeking their own freedom; no, they were "martyrs", seeking the freedom of all Damalg'iru. And thus, more of an asset than a threat to Danilov himself.
Hakku's head ended up landing on the "return" key, and moments before the Sol-Marii put five 7.8mm rounds through the computer monitor, tower, and modem, tenurianrevolution.blogspot.com/ had been posted. There in cyberspace, converted into an endless string of zeroes and ones, it waited. Waited for someone to download it onto another hard drive, where its numerals could be turned to letters, each letter conveying a stark truth, or a stark falsehood, or perhaps both; for are they really so different in a world where reality is what you make of it?
There was nothing very mysterious about Danilov, on the surface. He was a tall iron-haired man with lean opaque eyes and a face of angles and ridges, the eyes almost sunken. It was far from a standard Damalg'iru face, of course, but then most of these were 2nd-gens and even the odd 1st-gen, kept in close suspicion of course by the 2nds as well as Danilov and the guards themselves.
The odder matter about Danilov concerned his rarity of speaking. Namely, except to give orders (and he was indisputably one to give orders), he almost never spoke, not even to the other personnel. They had observed that even the highest-ranked officers on the complex deferred to him, on the rare instances when he chose to concern himself in matters.
Even the prisoners were not entirely oblivious to this. Yag'Haroth was, necessarily, a prison as well as a fortress. The prisoners were used sometimes as an impromptu logistics crew, setting up all the dangerous weaponry (and being exposed to the doses of radiation the personnel themselves tried to avoid); sometimes they served as food when rations got low, or served to satisfy the certain sexual needs of their captors. Nonetheless, there was still an intimate grapevine connecting the lowest-ranking personnel to the prisoners, these being mainly 1st and 2nd gens.
Some said Raj Danilov was a Sol-Marius, the dread special forces of the si-Thaluo. Some claimed he was a henchman of the Inquisition. A few even held that he was a Moderator of the Yag'Haroth Oversector, or even a Moderator of the HICOM. Danilov had been confronted once with this last, by a curious officer; he had merely laughed and warned, playfully, the officer not to get mixed in over his head.
The prisoners especially held a peculiar reverence for Danilov, the kind of reverence men have for powerful adversaries or opposing tyrants. Thus, when they decided to break out, they carefully considered his feelings into the matter, and planned their strategy carefully. The prison cells were deep underground, and prisoners were not normally allowed to speak to each other, kept in solitary confinement except for the daily exercise sessions; that started to be when messages were passed along, in a code agreed upon at some unknown point in the past.
They were a mixed bag: intellectuals and political dissidents thrown in alongside petty thieves and criminals, evidently deemed not dangerous enough to be executed. This policy was of course changed after the Yag'Haroth breakout; no longer were the Fortress Islands used as prisons, all prisoners simply redirected to the forced-labour camps in the North, and computer users summarily executed.
But I appear to be getting ahead of myself. The ringleader of our prisoners now was one Amon Hakku, a young man full of brilliance and fiery optimism; he'd been convicted of espionage and treason in the second degree, the usual designations for someone who accessed the Internet from Damalg'iru territory. Since espionage and second degree treason were not considered major crimes at the time, he had been simply imprisoned with a cellmate named Loki Marsden, convicted of the same crime. 'Convicted' wasn't accurate; more 'seized by the Sol-Marii at night, taken to the OVSCOM, informed of one's crime, and doled out an appropriate punishment by an Oversector Sub-Moderator'.
Hakku had planned out the escape in detail. It was not, of course, one that could be easily accomplished elsewhere, and relied largely on the structural details of the building, its age, and running like hell. Hakku had served on other Fortress Islands before his conviction; he knew that all of them contained computers of some variety, usually in private offices. That was all he would need.
Raj Danilov, of course, could well be the fly in Hakku's ointment. Hakku knew this; higher-ranking officials meant more likelihood of capture, more security. But Hakku couldn't well delay much longer. The die, as someone or other once said, is cast. He'd have to make his move soon, or risk losing it all anyway.
* * *
The artificial 'morning' of Day 271, Year 29 failed to dawn. It appeared the night light-sequence had never turned off, even though it was well past Hour 7 now. That was not the only strange thing one might observe upon closer examination of Yag'Haroth Fortress Island. One could see that the prison cells were invariably locked shut, secure, but no-one was within.
The cafeteria and gymnasium were also on this level, far below ground and sea level. Both massive rooms were strewn with blood and bodies. Yag'Haroth had held up to eight hundred prisoners, and most of them lay dead here, 7.8mm caseless and 5.56mm rounds littering the floor and pockmarking the walls. The dead bodies of personnel lay here too, some killed in more gruesome ways; eyes are gouged or scratched out, arms dangling uselessly, bones fractured by heavy wooden or metal implements (the kind one might pick up in a cafeteria or gymnasium), necks broken. A few had been shot, apparently with handguns.
Upstairs the chaos grew deeper. Troops ran to and fro in fists of two and three; armed men massed in corners, bloody dead bodies lying everywhere. Raj Danilov appeared to be sitting in his office, watching the events playing out on several TV screens; he was enjoying himself immensely. Of course, it wasn't his facility to manage, so he hadn't bothered to report any of the phenomena; these were Damalg'iru soldiers, they could figure it out on their own.
Finally, on the third floor, we find the reason for this outcry. A heavily blockaded blast door was ringed by soldiers, shouting and firing upon it with their weapons, holding it until the Sol-Marii could arrive with the heavy weapons from below; around the blast door was a small perimeter of armed prisoners, a number dwindling every moment as more 5.56mm rounds took them down, forming a wall of dead bodies (behind from which the survivors continued to fire indiscriminately upon their attackers, with wild horror).
Behind the blast doors virtually everything had been overturned and pushed against the door except for the computer table and the instrument sitting upon it. Typing furiously at the console was Amon Hakku himself, bleeding from three wounds, bruised and disheveled. A quartet of other prisoners, some armed and some not, guarded him as he typed.
The message was short, and posted as a blog entry.
Help us. You have to help us.
We're from the si-Thaluo Damalg'iru. You haven't heard of it. Far north, probably as close to the North Pole as it's possible to get. Ridiculously massive island of which we occupy only a small southern fraction. That's beside the point, anyway.
The si-Thaluo's been carrying on a quiet program of extermination for the past thirty years, give or take. Extermination of what, you ask? Extermination of everything that makes us human. Individual, free expression is outlawed. Emotions are outlawed. Art, literature, music, media are all outlawed. Non-oral communication is outlawed. Families are outlawed. Sex is outlawed. The punishment? Death, preceded by tortures that would make the Spanish Inquisition cry.
We want sanity back, and there aren't many of us... within ten years the Moderators' breeding program will be complete and us first-generation people will become obsolete. Future generations will have no memory of any of the things that make us human, no humanity at all, just empty shells filled with the hateful propaganda of the HICOM.
I ask the world's citizens to notify your governments. Those of you who can still vote for them, urge them to do something about these monsters. Even waging war against them would be better than watching us suffer in silence.
I'm going to die in a few minutes, probably in a particularly nasty way, so this blog entry won't be updated. At least not by me. Perhaps those few uncaptured Internet users in the si-Thaluo will take heart and continue to update and reinforce this with their own comments and entries.
Thanl;p'
This is all the world outside of the si-Thaluo would ever know on the subject. In his room Danilov watched the ATGM blow in the door, and the extremely brief gun battle before the usefulness of the Sol-Marii's penetration rounds became evident, as the tungsten core penetrated the body and then released its unpleasant combination of ball bearings and anti-coagulants into the wound. He rolled back the camera film and watched the computer screen. It had worked. But that was no obstacle to Danilov's ultimate plans.
Danilov was watching for a specific reason. He was the one who'd "inadvertently" ordered the creation of a chink in the security net. He'd been watching the escape the whole time, without lifting a finger to stop it. Why? Because he knew their plans. He knew they weren't simply running away, seeking their own freedom; no, they were "martyrs", seeking the freedom of all Damalg'iru. And thus, more of an asset than a threat to Danilov himself.
Hakku's head ended up landing on the "return" key, and moments before the Sol-Marii put five 7.8mm rounds through the computer monitor, tower, and modem, tenurianrevolution.blogspot.com/ had been posted. There in cyberspace, converted into an endless string of zeroes and ones, it waited. Waited for someone to download it onto another hard drive, where its numerals could be turned to letters, each letter conveying a stark truth, or a stark falsehood, or perhaps both; for are they really so different in a world where reality is what you make of it?