video ; backdated to the 26th (before the scouts' departure)

[khajidont]

[Last time Jaime posted as Blue Beetle, he kept to text. This time, he thinks that people might need a face - masked as it may be - to match to the words. His voice is put through a technological filter, just distorted enough for him to keep from being recognized. He's in the VR room in the most professional looking room he could think of, which is essentially a large table with wall-to-wall windows behind him looking out onto San Francisco - potentially recognizable to some canonmates as a loose copy of the Titans Tower meeting room, which is fairly generic anyway.]

So... hi. I'm Blue Beetle. A bunch of you already know that I've been trying to dig up as much info on the Chimera Project as I can - those are the cloned children, for you new guys - and I think I've got enough information to get going. Thanks to everyone who helped me out with this, by the way - you know who you are. I know everyone must be really tired of hearing people give long speeches by now, so I'll try to keep it short. [He smiles at the camera for an instant, a flash of white, human teeth behind the armour]

[He's making an effort to sound professional, but he's not used to public speaking. Sometimes, he looks down at his lap instead of the camera (consulting his notes as if he's giving a speech for class if he's honest about it) and he's stiff, uncomfortable, but his voice is even and steady. Small victories, and victories born of actually rehearsing.

Are you ready for a fun history lesson, Transports? Because you're sure as hell going to get one.]

If we're going around in time, then that's the way we've gotta look at this: as a timeline, not just something that popped up right before the nuke did. Most of you will have already seen the guys people call the Masked around here. They're clones too. Not clones of us like the new ones are, but they're proof that the UE had the tech for them long before they had our genes, like dozens of years ago. This round of testing is what they call the Chimera Project. According to the data we've got, most of the UE's funding went into messing with genes of people who were born normally and clones so they could adapt to different environments for colonization and for soldiers. They wanted to use people from different worlds first, but they couldn't work it out like the Initiative could. Everyone they brought from our worlds died. Before you ask, we don't know which worlds, or even how many people. I know you want to know. I do too.

[He is silent for a moment, letting that sink in.]

This project started after one of us got kidnapped, way back before Elmer's world was destroyed. He had powers, and the UE - well, the UE has eyes. They started getting ideas. It seems like they started getting obsessed with creating, like... the perfect human being. That's why, when they introduced the supervirus back in June, they went ahead to target the children directly in the hospital.

Once they knew one of us had powers, they wanted more. Most of you will remember when the UE kidnapped a whole bunch of us, right before we came up here? After that, they did a bunch of tests on them, and they made clones of them. Of us. They worked, but not that well; they've got a whole morgue of the ones that didn't make it. When the rest of us went to go rescue the guys who got captured, the clones broke out of their tanks and fought us. They couldn't have been more than nineteen days old, but they still looked around eight or nine, something like that. It's only after we fought back against the UE - and their new clones - that they decided to nuke Exsilium.

I know some of you are gonna suggest just wiping out cloning period, but before you do, you need to understand that there are a couple problems with that. One is that they've been using cloning for a long time for food and for organs, before the UE even came into power. We get rid of that, who knows how many people will die? The second is that the clones are people too. Children. They were attacking us, but not because they wanted to. Inside - [and here, the professional veneer wanes a little, but he covers it up by glancing back down at his lap, as if consulting his notes, before looking back up at the screen] - inside, they were begging for help, for us to get away from them. I know just by going back in time, we're erasing people, but this would be actively doing it. And if they do end up getting erased... they deserve to be remembered as more than what we saw. They do.

So that's what I've got. If you want the more detailed lists of powers and all that, let me know and I'll send you my notes. If you've got more info but want to share it in person or whatever, or want to meet with a bunch of other people to talk this out, I'll be in the VR room.

[If you had previously ICly requested to receive a copy of the notes before now and haven't gotten a note from me in your inbox by now, let me know as Jaime ICly sent them out prior to making this post! Please feel free to respond via action or network - and if there's enough interest in sort of a mingle group log, I will toss one up!]

Comments

audio;

[khajidont]

[Aw noooo, exactly the type of person he didn't want to deal with...!]

No.

audio;

[biwinning]

[sorry m8]

Because forcing them to cope with never having a mind of their own, and the fact they potentially slaughtered hundreds of people for the sake of keeping your own personal moral code is definitely the right thing to do instead.

audio;

[khajidont]

Oh, so you'd rather just kill them. Yeah. That sounds a lot better.

audio;

[biwinning]

Weigh your reasons for wanting them alive. Ith it because it makes you too uncomfortable to kill them, or is it because you really think that they have a chance of recovering being hatched brainwashed and suffering from mutations?

audio;

[khajidont]

They don't deserve to die just because we've decided that they don't have a chance.

And yeah, if we can save them? Then they do have that chance.

audio;

[biwinning]

And if we can't?

audio;

[khajidont]

[He's silent for a moment. Not because he hasn't considered it - he's been through too many of these missions to think the way he did before - but because it's an unpleasant thought.]

We can't just give up.

And even then, if our only option here is changing the timeline of the cloning projects, then we don't sit back and call it a mercy killing.

audio;

[biwinning]

Tho your morals let you eliminate them from existence entirely by taking out their timeline, but don't allow them an honorable death, ith that it?

audio;

[khajidont]

My morals say we help them. Erasing them from the timeline is just as bad as killing them.

audio;

[biwinning]

Your reasoning ith selfish and unrealistic.

HELLO AGAIN PESSIMISTIC TROLL CHILD

[highhealplz]

How is it less selfish to decide for them that death is a better solution?

how did you know his secret nickname

[biwinning]

Becauthe they were clearly athking for death already, and ignoring that because poor blue wiggler baby doesn't want his morals dented ith selfish in itself.

[highhealplz]

Were you the psychic on the field who heard them?

[biwinning]

... No. But.

That'th what I'd be asking for if I were in their situation.

[highhealplz]

But you aren't, and even if you were, you couldn't speak for all of them. That's the kind of choice that no one should make for anyone else.

[biwinning]

Ith everyone here really that stupid? Do you all really think thith could possibly end up like some fucking fantasy-genre fluff-laden bullshit?

Say we do somehow do what BB says he wants. Aka, "rescue" all those clones. Since apparently now, just undoing the timeline in which they exist isn't an option to him.

So now we have a bunch of mentally-conditioned superpowered humans just sitting in Initiative lockdown. ASSUMING they don't blow shit up and leave like Adam did, ASSUMING they all just sit their asses down and stay there, what's the next step? Undo the brainwashing they were hatched with? To how many of them? Oh right, a metric fuckton of them. So, once again, ASSUMING that someone figures out how to undo that, which is about a .0002% chance of likely to happen, we've now put another huge drain on Initiative resources. Resources that can barely handle how many of US there are, let another a bunch of immigrants from UE. Oh, and we have to also simultaneously do this while somehow ensuring that the UE never just REPEATS the process.

If I wanted to hear about unreasonable super fun times and cotton candy, I'd watch a shitty romcom.

[highhealplz]

I'm not going to pretend that any of this would be easy, but I won't admit that because it's difficult it shouldn't be attempted. That's cowardly.

All of your points but the last can be covered with the answer of patience and careful handling, with some inventing thinking. And there's a simple route to the solution of your last point. [ His lips press together. ] We destroy the UE.

[biwinning]

Oh, of course! Well shit, why didn't I think of that! Destroying the UE, wow, such innovation! So cool.

You goddamn idiot. Mental conditioning isn't a thing you can just patience your way through. It's literally a part of how their brain works, after a certain point. Have you ever dealt with someone who's had that happen to them before? Where they don't even know what's wrong with them, because they've been broken like that as far back as they can remember?

Saying that you shouldn't try stupid stuff because it's a waste of resources and time isn't cowardly, it's efficient. It's realistic. We're at war. Horrorterrors forgive me if I don't go out thaving every fucking human baby I come across. You save the ones you can, and you honor the ones you can't. That'th just how it goesth.

JUST COMIN RIGHT ON IN HERE

[fintastic]

Because it might be better to painlessly not exist, rather than what they might go through if they live... for however long they live.

[highhealplz]

Maybe. But I'll ask the same question of you that I asked of Sollux: who are you to decide it for them?

[fintastic]

Someone who has seen what happens when they cannot control their powers and die horrible, painful, frightening deaths.

[highhealplz]

I'm sorry you had to see that, and I'm sorry to whoever it happened to. But you can't assume it in every situation.

[fintastic]

Even if it doesn't, what kind of life is knowing that you exist because of someone's suffering? Knowing that, and having to fight for the very people who did it to you? If we bring them all back, what kind of life would they have?

If there was any possible way I thought their existence could be a happy one, I would say so! [ Because, really, she is the last person to be suggesting culling them, even if it's by way of erasing their existence. ] But I don't see how it could be. Can you imagine existing like that?

[highhealplz]

No, I can't imagine existing like that. And it's for exactly that reason that I could never condone writing them out of existence. Unless we stood in their shoes, we could never truly say what was best for them.

[ kiiiind of a lesson he's still working on himself, but by god he can still lecture it ]

[fintastic]

Maybe you cannot imagine it, but I can, and either way you are still deciding what's best for them. There's no way around that at this point. Whether they live and suffer, or simply fail to exist, it is still a choice.