Day 5 - Breeding - XCOM

By property of bureaucratic red tape, Dr. Vahlen, I cannot officially address this letter to you. According to the classifications handed down by XCOM, as of this point in time you are no longer a person, and thus cannot be addressed in correspondence.

This is, bureaucratically, an easier designation to make than philosophically. As I write this, I am looking at you on the other side of a one-way glass alloy viewport. Your brain activity registers as normal for somebody under heavy sedation. You breathe. If we were to prick your finger, you would bleed. The bureau remains uninterested in stating whether or not you still retain a soul. Perhaps three out of four isn’t bad.

The object on the other side of the glass is Dr. Vahlen. The object.

Designation as an object is, in this case, bothersome to me. Because at the point where a comatose person registers as brain-dead, they become an object and not a person. Some people can only understand things insofar as their endings. I have known doctors in my time who use “it” pronouns in reference to comatose persons who show no indication of trending toward brain-****. As if, since they assume that the coma is the ending of every person until proven otherwise, the status of person and not object is something which is reclaimed, not which has been removed. Perhaps more so even than Geppeto himself, these doctors can achieve the miracle of making people out of objects.

In this regard, doctor, you may very well get up and dance for us again, but the bureau remains unconvinced of any transformation from this point forward. You have been un-made. Unpersoned.

Externally, your body shows no damage. Aside from the… ‘crawler’ which you have chosen to couple with, you look right as rain. Internal changes are more detrimental, I have my doubts about your recovery.

Assuming that you have written your last on the subject and I am to have the final say about this humiliating series of events, I wish to record for posterity exactly where you went wrong, doctor. And what happened as a result of your failure. For the record, the bureau agrees with many of the assertions you made in your manifesto, and has begun to pursue routes by which we might test your theories safely. Let nobody say you failed to contribute to the scientific advancement of mankind. Though our scientists have been unable to verify your reported “Dresden beavers.” You may have accidentally conflated a half-remembered anecdote about the bombings with the conclusions of Swedish scientist Lars Wilsson, who concluded that dam-building behavior was motivated by the sound of running water. It would not be your only or most serious mistake in your experiments, and it will be excused. However, many of your theories about crawler coupling and juvenile sectoid behavior are being vindicated as we speak…

Poor choice of phrase.

Shortly after your manifesto was uploaded into the XCOM database, you were found in your quarters by personnel. Fortunately for us, before your scheduled purge could take place. Of course, you were under surveillance from the moment a crawler specimen disappeared from the lab. For this, I do admit being somewhat disappointed in you. You, doctor, were instrumental in ensuring that XCOM functioned as panopticon. Surely you of all people should have considered setting a short timer, though perhaps you doubted your ability to decouple the crawler once you had begun joining. That would be a rather cruel piece of irony. Since your capture, you have been held within containment. There has been talk about medically induced comas and the like, but the truth is that the sectoid larvae attached to your face is keeping you under more sustainable, long-term sedation than we would feel comfortable applying.

Your failure was twofold, doctor. Firstly, and perhaps this was not something you could have known, the crawler somehow understood that the human stomach would represent a more acidic groth environment compared to the human vagina (~3.5ph hydrochloric acid against ~4ph vaginal fluid). Even without knowing that the crawler would know, you should have been more cautious than you were. Your second, and greater, mistake was in the improper application of your gag. It was commendable for you to think of plugging your rectum, but video recorded from your quarters demonstrates loose and incomplete gagging. In the footage, the crawler doesn’t even hesitate. Perhaps you also mis-measured its ovipositor…

Pardon my speculation. I am equally uninterested in both scolding and apologizing for you. Your methods, and your mistakes, were your own. It feels in poor taste to chastise you for setting XCOM back the labor of its best scientist.

Upon recovery of… the object… that your body has now, bureaucratically, become, there was rather extensive debate on whether we should initiate purge protocols on the observation chambers anyway. I made what I believe was the ethical argument that you and the crawler both be euthanized. I regret that I was not more convincing. Should your condition change to the point where the bureau no longer considers you an object, I do not believe I will regret my argument.

Computer scans show that the crawler’s forward ovipositor (located roughly equivalent to a human pineal glance) has extended past the gag and fully down your throat, the tip now residing just within your lower esophageal sphincter. The creature seems to be aware of exactly how many eggs are within your stomach, as it observes a baseline number. First five, then ten, then fifteen, most recently twenty (though we have no doubt it will move up to twenty-five and beyond). Any time the number drops below twenty, it will produce a baseball-sized egg exactly once per minute for however long it takes to refill back to that number. This is largely concurrent with our conclusions that they work on a base-ten numerical system, as we also do.

Once inside the high-acid environment of your stomach, the eggs grow until somewhere between roughly softball and football-sized. Forgive the use of imprecise measurements, the eggs which leave your body are too volatile to measure extensively, having a hatching period of anywhere from five minutes to mere seconds after laying. The ones inside cannot be subjected to extensive measurement without disrupting the breeding environment.

You will likely be concerned by the mental equation of twenty eggs combined with the full size estimations present. This would not be in error. The stomach of the object in the observation room is grotesquely swollen at all times. It has been difficult to take measurements considering the volatility of your status, but a conservative estimate puts waist measurements somewhere around sixty inches.

As the eggs become fully grown, they make their way through the lower intestine and colon before exiting through the anus. You were sound in your decision to plug the orifice when attempting coupling, but the plug was simply overpowered as a series of eggs built up in the colon and made their way out of your body. In fact, despite your intentions, your vagina has so far been the orifice of the three which has yet to be affected by any of these processes. Though, if the hatched sectoids were allowed to remain in the room, our scientists express near-certainty that they would attempt to copulate with you.

What has been impressive has been the necessary and wide-sweeping bodily changes that have taken place in order to support this continued egg-laying cycle. Computer scans have measured a softening and warping of the spine, ribs, and pelvis to make room for both the distended stomach and other intestines. The colon and lower intestine have shown signs of straightening. Readings suggest increased ovum production and an almost hyper-charging of estrus cycles, as well as a complete cessation of menstruation. If you had been successful, Dr. Vahlen, it seems that coupling was designed to put you in a near-constant state of reproductive fertility. Some of the team have expressed doubts that you would have been able to trigger a manual purge.

Finally, a process we have only begun to notice more recently, but extended periods of egg excretion seem to correlate now with behavior in the human body and brain which were not present in the first few weeks of coupling. Increased activity within the anterior cingulate cortex, releases of high quantities of dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin, as well as prolonged contractions of both the vagina and anus concurrent with orgasm. What makes these findings challening to interperet is that they exist not as a cluster of separate entities or as anomalous happenings. Starting within the past week of observation, every session of laying which produces more than five eggs triggers these responses unbroken for the duration of the process. This does not seem possible, as while a five-egg cluster can be excreted in a minute or two, a full twenty-egg release has been documented to take as long as a half-hour.

If Dr. Vahlen is, as the bureau delcares, an object; we must consider these findings as a cautionary tale about female-crawler interfacing. A non-person specimen for whom the biological behaviors are to be treated as the result of X-Ray life attempting to make sense of human anatomy. Under this same classification, the object remains a source of juvenile sectiods, whom the bureau have so managed to socialize both sectoid-neutral and sectoid-hostile, with inroads being made into human socialization.

If the bureau is incorrect, you will understand why I elect not to sign this documentation.

Forgive us, Moira.

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