The tales of Kassala

The pleasant temperature inside the underground facilities of the North Dome often causes Dr. Suzana to lose all sense of space and time. Kilometers above the laboratory lies the vast, deceptively calm and deadly desert; the Dome, half-camouflaged by the ruins of an ancient indigenous temple, is almost indistinguishable from the dunes. To any unlikely visitor, in these inhospitable lands harsh enough to repel tourist convoys yet exotic enough to attract the occasional adventurer, the North Dome gives the impression of being some forgotten planetarium or an archaeological excavation site.

With no access to natural light, Dr. Suzana remains oblivious to the folds of time: under the low, white laboratory lighting, it is always either noon or midnight. Time frozen in awe. It had taken nearly four years of tests and experiments to reach a satisfactory and minimally safe version of prototype B-612. Until then, the test subjects — first recruited from the cells of political prisoners and later from the Kassala Concentration Camps — died after seconds, minutes, or, at best, a few hours of exposure to the ionically altered Thermidorian amniotic fluid (TAF). Before entering the tank, each subject was forced to undergo jets of sterilizing liquid and surrender their uniforms. As a precaution, only completely naked individuals could dive into the rectangular hydrostatic compression vessel.

Ideally, the integrity of the research depended on the integrity of the human material. Due to the tortures inflicted on the condemned and the increasingly frequent cases of self-mutilation by the prisoners themselves, the relaxation of safety standards became the solution to continue the tests. Initially reluctant, Dr. Suzana soon had to yield to pressure from her peers and superiors: she signed the directive authorizing the use of test subjects with open wounds, poorly healed cuts, chronic non-contagious skin lesions, and pregnant women under 22 weeks.

Head of the State’s neurotechnology research unit, Dr. Suzana had been personally invited by the eccentric Dr. Ross, creator of the TRANSCEND Project, to lead the team of scientists gathered from various parts of the country. In her thirty years of service to Kassala, she had endured and reported many bizarre and abject situations, but nothing compared to the horrors witnessed in the depths of the North Dome. Of the hundreds of experiments conducted, only a handful had a “gentle” outcome — a word used as a euphemism for more or less tolerable distortions with lethality rates demonstrably below the historical average.

Dr. Suzana is now organizing the reports she received from her subordinates over the last three years. It is time to prepare a compilation of the most significant cases, highlighting the successes and advances of the research throughout this dark period of border tensions and internal power struggles. She knows that, to maintain the substantial funding during this time of crisis, she must demonstrate how the discoveries of the TRANSCEND Project serve various sectors of the State, with implications for public security, therapeutic rehabilitation programs, personal data extraction, prison management, control of immigrant flows, and military defense and espionage matters. Among the many files stored in the North Dome’s central computer, Dr. Suzana decides to open the report on