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HUMANITY FALLEN Part 8: Patok-9

Patok-9.

The planet looms over this history like a cloud of poison. It is both a curse and a blessing: a curse for the sheer unfeeling monstrosity of the things that happened there; but a blessing for the meager exoneration it provided us as a species.

The Lima Beans discovered Patok millennia ago, during the age of their first interstellar expansion. Patok is a binary star system – two stars at its center – with over forty planets. “Patok” is a system-local name, which was used by the indigenous people on Patok-2, the only naturally habitable planet in the system. The Loloth, not known for their imagination, simply ran with the name and added a number for each of the planets.

Patok-9 was downright hostile to life. It was a terrestrial planet and geologically dead. Its core is chilled to the bone and the lack of magnetic fields has seen the planet stripped of atmosphere. Like Mars, Patok-9 is basically an irradiated lump of dirt buffeted by the solar wind of not one, but two stars.

There’s only one reason that Patok-9 was settled at all, and it can be summed up with one word: Astatine.

You’d be forgiven if you’ve never heard of the stuff. It’s the single rarest element in the universe. Human scientists could never stabilize the atom and there was so little of it, and it deteriorated so quickly, that it could never be put to any practical use.

Not so for the Loloth. Although no one but the beans understands *how* it works, or how they stabilized the element, it is common knowledge that the Loloth trans-warp drives, those bubble looking engines on their ships which allow near instantaneous travel, rely on Astatine to function.

Patok-9’s only unique trait is an abnormally high concentration of naturally occurring Astatine. Astatine is so rare, that “high concentration” takes on a new meaning. In this case, Patok-9 is supposed to have had about 10 kilograms of the stuff *within the entire planet.* That may seem like nothing, but consider that Earth – which is nearly 10% larger than Patok-9 – is estimated to contain only 30 *grams* of Astatine.

The Beans couldn’t leave such a treasure trove untapped, but they ran into a problem. Turns out giant psychic amoebas aren’t very good at manual labor. Luckily for the Loloth, they had an entire civilization’s worth of indigenous peoples to enslave on Patok-2, and the psychic means of placating any resistance.

A millennium ago, the Loloth began the destructive mining of Patok-9. Because of the rarity and dispersion of Astatine across the planet, the Patok-9 was systematically deconstructed. By the time humanity entered the scene, the Loloth had quartered the planet’s mass and worked the local Patok people to extinction.

From what we can tell the first humans on Patok-9 were brought there of their own volition, as paid Loloth employees from the new human colony on Patok-2.

At some point, several centuries into the human expansion, the Loloth began construction of a facility, deep within the dead mantle of the half-mined planet. Thousands of miners were diverted to the task of constructing the place and these workers were also paid well. According to the Loloth internal records – which are the source of almost all the information in this chapter, the Beans wanted to force humans to work, but were having trouble exerting psychic control.

In fact, that was why the facility was being built in the first place:

(1) to find out why the Beans could not exert their normal psychic influence over Homo sapiens

(2) to change that ASAP.

Once the initial portion of the facility was completed the abductions began. Patok-9 miners would be taken during shifts and their disappearance attributed to cave ins and natural gas explosions. These unlucky abductees would be the first of countless human guinea pigs, subjected to near constant experimentation, all with an eye not toward understanding the human psyche, but mapping the complex psychic maze of the human brain.

The Loloth believed that the only way to control the human mind was to illuminate it completely. To that end, it was imperative that they psychically observe the human brain in every conceivable mental state – from the most intense emotional extremes down to the subtlest responses to the most minute stimuli.

Enter Lan-Too-Loll, chief researcher at Patok-9, and author of more and varied individual human suffering than any other creature that has ever lived. Lan-Too-Loll was charged with cracking the human mind wide-open, and he took his responsibility very seriously. Over several centuries, Lan-Too-Loll would transform the research facility at Patok-9 into the most grotesque and unique torture chamber in galactic history.

It began simply enough. For almost half a century the Loloth simply abducted human miners and released them into a self-contained, heavily monitored ecosystem in the belly of the facility. To be sure, these first humans suffered over the course of their lives. But it must be said that the first batch of test subjects, relatively speaking, got off easy. Isolated from their loved ones and families, this “control” group eventually formed new relationships in the confines of the facility. They were subjected to periodic individual neural stimulation – sometimes causing ecstasy, sometimes excruciating pain or unbearable fear – but by and large these first humans were left to their own devices – to grow old together, fall in love.

To have children.

After two decades collecting several thousand miners, the facility became self-sustaining. This was entirely by design – the better to stay off the radar completely – no more abductions, no more disappearances. After the first generation of test-subjects, the facility became a closed system, a human factory farm devoted to plumbing the depths of the human brain.

By the time the first generation had all but died off, Lan-Too-Loll felt he had enough data to begin testing in earnest. About fifty percent of the facility’s human population would always remain separated as a continuing control group – as well as a source of new subjects. But starting with the third generation of newborns, Lan-Too-Loll began subdividing the other half of the population into groups of two to five hundred individuals. Each sub-group was sent to a different section of the facility devoted to the testing of specific human emotional states.

Initially, these subgroups were broken into broad categories. There was a sub-group for fear and a sub-group for pain, one for love and one for pleasure, one for sadness and one for joy. Each of these subgroups was meticulously stimulated to create varying neurological responses along the lines of the emotion they were intended to map.

The joy sub-group for example lived in a near constant state of dopamine enhanced bliss, sometimes prodded by electrical stimulation, sometimes by chemicals, sometimes by food or drink. Alternatively, the fear sub-group would be held in a near constant state of apprehension and terror, with the Loloth adjusting their methodologies as needed to compensate for the human mind’s automatic defense mechanisms to this kind of prolonged torment.

The Loloth were playing the long game – they knew they had centuries to figure out this sticky little problem of theirs, and so they didn’t rush. Consider, for instance, the practice of “Natural Observation.”

Hundreds of pairs of subjects would be matched and allowed to progress in a semi-natural way through the ins and outs of a normal human life. The Loloth would go to elaborate lengths to convince these special subjects that they had escaped the facility and now lived free of Loloth interference. Then the Loloth would observe them in this “False Normal” state for years.

Aside from giving Lan-Too-Loll another set of “Natural” data points to observe, these “Natural Observation” studies would often transition back into the study of individual emotions.

For example, in one such study, the Loloth paired approximately one thousand subjects and released them into “Natural Observation” portions of the now gargantuan facility. These subjects – and this is all taken directly from Loloth records, which were characteristically assiduous – were allowed to live without interference until the birth of their first child. The moment of birth, of course, was carefully observed and provided “invaluable” data regarding the neurological experience of joy.

A lesser scientist might have terminated the expensive study of these subjects right then, but Lan-Too-Loll was nothing if not pragmatic. He allowed each of the children to mature for one year. Then, on their first birthday, according to the Lan-Too-Loll’s notations:

. . . within the course of one month, the offspring of each human pairing was methodically terminated. In an effort to maximize the observed emotional response, several means of termination were considered. In the end live vivisection was determined to provide maximal distress to the subject parents. This methodology was a great success, eliciting new and exotic neuronal pathways.

Never one to waste resources, the report goes on to say that the devastated subjects were methodically tortured to death themselves, although with less interesting neurological results.

As time passed, Lan-Too-Loll began subdividing subject groups into finer and finer distinctions. Pain was eventually subdivided into over three dozen groupings, ranging across all variations of physical and emotional suffering. As test groups burned out, or succumbed to their particular stimulation, new crops were distributed from the control group.

The “research” went on like this for over five hundred years. Three centuries before the start of the war with the Gorax, Lan-Too-Loll said in the final memorandum of his long career:

Although our efforts have not yet afforded us total control of the human mind, they have not been in vain. Our neuronal mapping is now more than capable of influencing human decision making and it is my firm belief that within two centuries more complete control will a reality.

The partial influence the Loloth learned on Patok-9 was used to great effect during the war with the Gorax. It had the added benefit of not only helping to ensure human obedience, but also minimizing psychological ego destruction. The psychically influenced human being was, generally speaking, left unchanged by the psychic intrusion.

The same could not be said for the psychically controlled human being when this technique was finally cracked. 11 years after the end of the Gorax war, 300+ years after the death of Lan-Too-Loll, the new head researcher on Patok-9 sent a memorandum to Loll, which stated in part:

Total control is now possible. However, the force required is psychically destructive in a majority of test subjects. A small percentage are unaffected, while approximately 50% subsequently exhibit theretofore uncharacteristic violence and a general lack of impulse control. Importantly, many of these neuronal changes survive procreation, causing the aberrant traits to persist in the offspring of effected subjects, indicating a permanent genetic alteration which we do not yet fully understand. We would advise caution in using the technique.

Needless to say, the Loll Hive ultimately decided to throw caution to the wind. The technique for human control was genetically implanted in the entire Loloth population, installed during one of the Bean’s routine genetic maintenance scans, and, all but overnight, the Lima Beans had the means to force humanity to act against its own will.

The question was, where to begin. The Beans’ saw us as both inferior and as a threat to their dominance in the post-war galaxy. Their goal was our total extinction, but they knew the Council would never abide by such a decision, at least not without good reason. In the end, the Loloth knew what they needed was for humanity to appear as an existential threat to the galaxy, on par with the Gorax themselves. To that end, the Loloth first carried out a test of their new ability. They picked a well populated world, with a large contingent of already known human minds, already practiced in the art of extreme violence.

The name of that world was Palthurian, and needless to say the test run surpassed all expectations.

Over the years leading up to the Battle of the Enslaved in System One, The Loloth systematically forced bands of War Dogs to capitulate to their control. The Loloth technique was not perfect – many thousands of Mad Dog ships failed to obey and fell off the radar entirely. Likely psychologically damaged, these ships dispersed into the anonymous far edges of the galaxy. God knows what happened to them all.

But a majority of the Mad Dogs followed the Loloth commands and made way for System One. Meanwhile, humanity itself sealed the deal during the Unmooring – an outcome the Loloth couldn’t have orchestrated better if they’d tried.

By the time the Lima Beans approached the Federation offering to force humanity to combat the Mad Dog threat, the Council treated them as heroes. The rest is history.

There are only two things left to discuss regarding Patok-9.

First, you may have intuited that the Loloth had some help in this process. It was not, I can assure you, the Lima Beans themselves, those sacks of white goo, who vivisected human infants, or subdued working miners. The facility’s rosters include several hundred Hiddrell and Trylixians assistants and security personal. The involvement of other Federation races is not, in and of itself, surprising. But it does raise a question about how much the Federation knew, and for how long. I am convinced that the Federation Council was kept out of the loop, but some Federation authorities knew something about the facility, and in that sense I hold the Federation morally culpable in the whole affair.

And second, we must never forget the heroes of the final control group who broke their shackles, and gave their lives, so that humanity could know the horrible truth. They struggled for several weeks to take control of the facility, fighting tooth and nail for every foot of subterranean hallway. Had they not succeeded in breaching the Loloth data-center before the facility was obliterated from orbit, their suffering, and the Loloth’s unimaginable sins, would never have come to light.

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