#76062 Report.23
Time: 3.48am
Location: Undisclosed
Class: Top Secret
Source: Y.L.W [No photo attached]
Did you ever wonder why a war was fought with so few men? Did you ever stop to think why they don't die? Sure they respawn, but where did that technology come from? Did the heavens just open one day and decide it was time for life to have a reset button? Of course not. That would have been far too easy.
It should have been a war of hundreds of thousands of men from all over the globe, from combat to logistics, intelligence to medical. I remember them, bright young faces all ready for the biggest payload they'd ever receive. They were all so confident, so ready, all because the word had spread of that little device.
The Respawn. Within moments of hitting zero brain activity, in kicks the physics that jumpstarts reality. Well, not reality, but the space around the reality. It morphs it, reverses the time frame back to a predetermined point before the death and resets. Its like a computer, restarting the hardware doesn't affect the software, it's backed up and re-accessed. Over and over again.
You couldn't begin to imagine to excitement this caused. Every branch of the military wanted it, needed it. But it was only issued to Mann Co. personnel, they invented it first and the linguistically complex legalise that the lawyers used stated, 'Finders keepers losers weepers'. The influx of men we got was chaos, in the first week we had a hundred thousand applications to process, after the first month there was over a million. Mann Co. had the capacity to build the world's largest army in less than six months.
The world was their oyster; unfortunately it was a catastrophe masquerading as a damn oyster.
The initial device testing was cleared with the best of each league, covert affairs sent forward their spies, medical sent their doctors, engineers sent the specialists, and so it followed with two by two onto the ark so to speak.
Their devices were fitted. They were killed. They respawned.
It was a success.
We got the go ahead to fit a million more.
They spawned. Their bodies spawned. Only their bodies. Only the hardware.
Somehow, in the midst of all our calculations we didn't take mental capacity into account. The form was shifted through the quantum barrier, but the mind was left behind.
A million soldiers just stood there, glassy eyed and hardly breathing. They didn't move, didn't talk or walk, didn't even blink. We yelled at them, screamed at them, pushed them, punched them, threw them, burned them, shocked them, anything we could think of to try and snap them out of it.
That's the problem with software, it corrupts.
We had a million shells of men. A million living bodies missing a million living minds.
I remember their faces, commanders, officers, technicians, gunners, drivers, even well drillers and bricklayers. We killed them. All of them.
Except for the five. The pilot test successors.
We studied them, examined them, tortured them. We wanted answers; we didn't care how we got them.
We blamed them. Why had they survived and the millions others hadn't? We pinned the whole failure on the false results they gave us, and somehow managed to shift the blame of the murder of a million soldiers onto their shoulders. I wasn't quite sure which act was more cruel.
And when we couldn't do any more to them, then what? On their own they couldn't be trusted, they were fixated on the device as much as any other man... but somehow they made it work. They put it into some poor bastards who didn't even see it coming, I remember reading there was a kid from Brooklyn and an ex-Russian mob gun. They were making their own army with technology and knowledge we couldn't access, they wouldn't have given us the secret if we'd begged. You'd have had more luck getting blood from a stone. But we couldn't kill them, they were immortal! And it was all thanks to us.
There was only one solution.
Mann Co. employed them. Employed them to kill each other. Over and over and over again until... well there is no until... we made sure of that..."