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

[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!]

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Ah, it's good that you made this public. Thank you.

I'll take a copy of any information you have

[Yes. Give a mutineer ring leader all your hard data.]

[He's just going to pretend he didn't hear the bit about being called 'Blue Beetle' and continue on.]

No one's mentioned clones to me before. Huh.

Yeah, of course. That was always the end goal here, I just wanted to get a sort of bigger picture look at it first.

And vice versa?

[...not a fan of the mutiny, but not something he actually has a problem with! What good decisions to be made here!]

Everyone's had a lot on their minds. [Or else they'd all still be talking about it, surely...?]

Does this fill you in all right, or d'you have any more questions about it?

It's a lot to process, but I think I've caught the gist of it. How long have you been on this case?

Uh - [there's a moment of true thought there; time is a hard thing to keep track of on the moon] - it'd be around a month and a half now.

This is quite comprehensive. Thank you.
Science this sophisticated is definitely not a recent development. It is an echo of technological strides taken in my own world, though bent very sharply toward military functions.

Killing them would be doing them a favor.

[oh trolls.]

You can thank the UE for that one. But I think we do need to learn more about the nuts and bolts about their tech. Any information from your world you can bring over for that would be useful.

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

No.

[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.

My knowledge of the technical aspects of this kind of breeding and conditioning is very limited. I can only speak to how it can impact society, how it's impacted myself.
There are ways to manipulate the brain, for example, to inject false or foreign memories, to erase or alter natural ones. It is a traumatic experience, particularly where one's perception of identity is involved.
Those children were under heavy mental strain, not unlike the sort of procedures I know of. But without one present, I cannot divine which aspects of that conditioning are from solely external stimuli or the alteration of their original states of mind.
Should there be a means of returning Earthside, capturing one of these people alive to examine would be a very broad step forward.

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

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?

I was wondering about the false memory thing, but they were way too aware for that. It could be important later on though. If the numbers I've got are right then they should at least be physically thirteen or older by now. Maybe we can even talk to one.

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.

[Normally, long speeches tend to lose Katniss within a matter of seconds. But this time, she's hanging on every word; she has no choice when each word horrifies her to her core more than the previous. Even if she can't pretend to understand everything, but she's got enough of a gist to paint a mental picture. And that picture is one that makes the Capitol, with its muttations and complete disregard for people's (children's) lives, look almost tame. One that closes her throat, makes her stomach twist into a knot.

Everyone they brought from our worlds died.

... Children. They were attacking us, but not because they wanted to.

Katniss, when you're in the arena.... You just remember who the real enemy is.

When she finds her voice, it's even. Not harsh, but resolute, uncompromising.]

But we have to do something. [Not talk about it. Do it.]

And if we can't?

Yeah. We do. [Of course they do. There's a reason he's bringing this to everyone's attention.] You got any suggestions?

[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.

[Being one of the people kidnapped and experimented on by the UE, Johnny feels particularly invested in this. Hearing all this news is difficult, but it's right that everyone's aware of it.]

That's... a lot of info. Thanks, man,

I been sayin' that we need to figure out where the right place in time to hit 'em, but I have no clue how we even start that. One wrong move and we could maker eveythin' even worse.

Edited 2013-11-28 04:20 (UTC)

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?

I doubt I've anything that would interest you

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