Work Text:
[CLICK]
[GRIAN]
Statement of Doc M., regarding some mysterious blueprints. Original statement given April 22nd, 2022. Audio recording by Grian Dreamslayer, Head Archivist of the V.O.I.D Institute, London.
Statement begins.
[STATEMENT]
My whole life I was fascinated by machinery.
People had always called me a smart kid and my parents were enthusiastic about my interest in science, so in my early years I was able to freely explore my gift. Unattended classrooms quickly became my playing field, my skills giving me easy access to all the things I needed to create and destroy worlds at my will, little robots and tiny explosions, just controlled enough that I could hide the evidence afterward. It seemed like I could transform the entire universe under my hands. It was amazing.
Despite my slightly strange hobbies, I wasn’t unpopular at school; I was good at sports and me and my best friend Ren were active in multiple clubs. But as my experiments went on, I felt the respect of my other students slowly dissolve into something…different. One of the councilors called it fear once. It never bothered me.
After all, fear was the right reaction to greatness.
What bothered me was the way they started to attempt restricting my access to materials. It never stopped me, of course, but there were some…accidents, involving the particularly noisy teachers, even if they could never prove anything. I must confess, I played with the thought of just blowing it all up sometimes. It would have been so easy, decimating it all to dust, and it would have looked glorious. But I knew there was a time and a place for big explosions and this wasn’t it.
After graduating from school, Ren and I formed a little start-up called The Octagon. He was always the more business savvy of the two of us, seeing the big profit potential in everything I’ve built, and being able to call it a business expense had given me access to technology I could previously only dream of. It was pretty successful for the first few years, nothing special but enough to get by comfortably.
That’s when the blueprints started to appear.
I noticed them immediately when I went into the workshop one morning, almost like they had a magnetic pull. Just lying on the table as if they were supposed to be there, with no sign of who left them. And they were beautiful. I had never seen machinery like that before. And the things it promised sounded completely insane! But I knew I could make it work. I could make it better.
For the next few weeks, every single one of my thoughts was fixed on building this thing. The plans were only signed as “The Hivemind” and I wasn’t able to find any kind of patent on it, so I figured it was for me to build it. After all, why else would they leave it in here? Actually crafting it was magical, putting my mind in a state of pure ecstasy almost like a drug, and every piece of metal put in place intoxicated me further. There is something about inventing, about creating something truly new, that made you feel true power. It made you feel like a God.
What kind of machine was it? Industry secret. I don’t want any government snooping around in my workshop, no matter how much your institute pretends it’s keeping its records private. I did some research into you guys before and I know how many of those statements end up at the police. If you would even believe me.
Ren was the only person checking me regularly, bringing food and telling me about our recent sales, but apart from a few jokes about me not coming home he never tried to stop me. I don’t think he ever really understood what I was doing, but something about him felt like he knew the maddening urge I felt.
Maybe that’s why I wanted to keep him by my side when all of the other stuff started happening.
Even so, his voice faded more into the background with every day that passed, his visits becoming distractions, then interruptions. I don’t remember if I touched the food. I don’t even remember if I slept. I must have, right? After all, the human body is weak and frail. Open for improvement.
And then the feeling when it was finally complete! It was beautiful, it was glorious, it was perfect, it was…finished. Suddenly I could really feel my body again, in all of its inferior structure, utterly powerless compared to the beast I created. And strangely enough, after all the excitement I felt while building it, I suddenly became bored with my creation. The original prints had some issues, nothing that could escape a skilled eye like mine, and now it was running flawlessly, smooth and perfect. And for some reason, I found myself wishing something would go wrong. Sometimes I thought about what would happen if it did, the destruction it could cause in a matter of seconds. About how many people it would rip apart and burn and dissolve into atoms before I would be able to put a stop to it. For a second I even thought maybe the flaws had been in there for a reason. And maybe I shouldn’t have tried to fix them.
It almost drove me insane over the next weeks. I had to experience this feeling again, had to get my hands on another blueprint, but there was no way for me to contact this mysterious person who left them for me, no matter how many hours I searched every corner of the internet. I don’t remember if I had the idea myself or if something I saw during my research tipped me off, but I had to do something to win their favor back.
Now, you may have already noticed a few… alterations I made since the first time I got in contact with their technology. The eye was an honest accident that happened later, but the arm… Now, that was a challenge. It didn’t even hurt. You would think when you put a saw up to your shoulder, you would maybe hesitate, some sort of survival instinct holding you back from doing what’s necessary. All I felt was excitement. Out with the old, in with the new.
I didn’t tell Ren about my plans, so I have no idea why he decided to show up in the workshop at just the right moment, but he always had this uncanny ability to smell where blood was spilled. And ever since he took that trip that left him with stitches around his neck and a glimmer of red in his eyes, he also seemed to know his was around lost limbs.
After that, it didn’t took long for the next blueprint to arrive.
I had learned from my previous mistakes and rented out a small cabin outside of the city, just far enough that if something went wrong it wouldn’t immediately be on the news. You would think that in our advanced society, people would put more trust into science, but sadly most humans are the same, crying over morals and ethics and safety code violations. Like that ever got us anywhere.
Surprisingly, there wasn’t a single accident the whole time. Every new machine I put together was running perfectly, even if I knew it shouldn’t be possible with what the blueprints said. It almost felt like they were waiting for something. And I was preparing for their arrival.
And there was something else. I started having dreams, first only vague and occasionally, later they happened every night. Dreams of cities burning and land being torn apart, destruction brought by the machines I was making to lay the foundation for a glorious rebuilding, the true future of humanity. They even started slipping into my waking hours. I’m no longer sure if they were my own thoughts. But I didn’t disagree with them.
And then there was Ren. Kind, helpful Ren, who was probably running at least 3 illegal black market schemes to get me the materials I needed. I had to share it with him, didn’t I? My vision for a glorious future. I wanted him to experience it for himself, to feel how much better I could make the world. He didn’t even struggle when I knocked him out, almost like he saw it coming. I kinda hope he did. He knew better than to run away. And he’s much happier in his new body anyways.
Now that he can also hear the Hive.
A few days ago I got another blueprint. “The World Eater”. It’s our biggest project yet, the last preparation for our beautiful future to come. I’m not sure if I could stop it again after it’s turned on. I don’t think I would try.
Statement ends.
[GRIAN]
Well, that was a foreboding one. Even if he didn’t leave his full name, it was luckily not that hard to find out who left us this statement. After all, it’s hard to forget an explosion that blows up an entire street and kills over 100 people. I sent Scar to research some more of the finer details, but everything seems to check out. Doc did in fact run The Octagon with his partner and we were also able to locate the cabin he spoke about, even if the building has long been searched and demolished by the police. Both Doc M. and his Partner Ren D. Dog were declared dead in the explosion, but they were never able to identify their bodies.
Some parts of his statement remind me of The Desolation and it shares some similarities with Zedaphs lab we encountered before, but there is also all this talk about the future and human advancements… It’s just weird; I can’t sort it in at all. This Ren person seems like a whole other story in itself, I wonder if there might be more to uncover as I sort my way through the archives, even if I haven’t been able to find any details during our research so far.
What really bothers me about this though, why did the former head archivist not go to the police with this? Even if it feels unprofessional to admit, Doc wasn’t wrong when he accused us of handing concerning statements over to law enforcements. And knowing this earlier could have definitely prevented a huge tragedy. Was the previous archivist threatened? Or was there something else preventing them from intervening?
End Recording.
[CLICK]