The 47th Tribe

About one in every one-hundred men who served Caesar actually understood what he was trying to do. They saw past the pageantry and publicity and outright lies to the philosophy behind the movement, behind the man. Some knew what autocracy was, some didn't have the words for it, but of that select group of men who fundamentally understood Caesar's ultimate goal (not necessarily of a nation but rather of a vast machine that used human lives as its components with Caesar at the controls, a machine made to make itself indefinitely, for the supposed benefit of its parts) few disapproved. Some only went along to get along, lacking any better options, and a select few even attempted to subvert Caesar's authority, but they were a minority among a minority, and most legionaries who actually understood what they were serving for actually believed in the dream. With clear minds and open hearts they truly, honestly believed that what they were doing was for the best. Some were Centurions, some were Decani. Seneca Superstes was only a Legionary, albeit a veteran Legionary. He'd even served at the Battle of Hoover Dam. In the back. His centuria was supposed to occupy the Dam as the army pressed westward, but they were still nearly a mile away before the invasion was repelled. They did provide cover to retreating Legionaries, and Seneca's Decanus was killed by an NCR sniper, but that was the most action they saw. Seneca never saw the enemy and he never saw the Dam.

Still, like many of the other men who survived the Battle of Hoover Dam he was given the surname Superstes, survivor. As far as any man in the Legion was concerned everyone who served at the Dam had defied death, regardless of their actual role in the battle. For a short time after Joshua Graham was punished, no-one knew whether or not if, in a fit of pique, Caesar would condemn the Legate's army to the same fate. For two days, regardless of whether they'd stood on the west bank or the east bank of the Colorado, every one of those men faced death. Any man with the name Superstes was given respect.

Naturally, Caesar wasn't going to follow up his Legion's first real defeat by destroying even more of his army. Hoover Dam was a devastating blow, and not that Caesar would ever admit it to anyone but his control over the wasteland was quite tenuous. His command was absolute, and his soldiers loyal and numerous, but they were still stretched thin. That was the problem Caesar grappled with daily, the more power he had the more difficult it was to keep it, and more disastrous to lose it. Even Kingman, when he crucified only a quarter cohort and sacrificed the other quarter in battle was at the time a big gamble, early in his career as a living god as it was. He knew he had to do it, to make sure Legionaries then and for decades to come would know the cost of disobedience, but conquering the world- conquering human nature- meant taking risks. But no, he wasn't about to throw a dozen cohorts into Wi kaŹ¼i la out of anger and embarrassment.

Seneca Superstes knew that and he wasn't afraid. He had known fear, once. True fear, fear in its platonic ideal. A long, dread terror that creeps its long tendrils into the marrow of your bones. Seneca slept with it each night and it greeted him each morning. The fear was constant, baked into his body, his essence, so strong it felt like pain. In even his earliest memories it was there, a physical thing lurking in the periphery of his vision. He called it the black fog. Caesar saved him from it.

The 47th tribe of Caesar's Legion was known only as the 47th tribe because every man in the Legion knew its name, but none ever spoke it. Everyone in the southwest wasteland knew the 47th tribe. Everyone in the southwest wasteland was afraid of the 47th tribe.

To many they were a myth. A bedtime boogeyman story to tell disobedient children. Tales of men and women with eyeless faces or faceless eyes, shiny black oily skin, fingers that ended in long, wicked claws, who hissed and clicked like hideous bugs. They appeared and disappeared at will, sometimes dragging people off with them. No one knew where they lived, and no one who they took ever came back. There were rumors that they practiced human sacrifice, that they cut out hearts and brains and ate them for power, or used them in perverse arcane rituals. They were ghouls, they were ghosts, they were some as-yet-unnamed form of mutation, something sinister and no longer human. The 47th tribe haunted the wasteland.

But to Seneca they were not a myth. The 47th tribe was his tribe. Once, a long time ago, the tribe started in the Wattz Innovation Lab with physicists. Brilliant minds who contributed to some of the 21st Century's greatest advances. They revolutionized transportation, power, warfare, and robotics with their discoveries. They developed the propulsion system for the Mr. Handy line of robots. The shielded laboratory that became their post-war home was where the first fission battery was built. The progenitors of Seneca's tribe built it.

The darkness must have always been there, Seneca knew. Even when the men had doctorate degrees. The patrimonial confidence that they had the tools and the know-how to fix humanity, in spite of a complete lack of any applicable knowledge, was something deep inside, a rot that started at the root of the 47th tribe. Seneca didn't know when the surgeries started, or the games, or when they first started using electrodes, but it couldn't have been too far removed from the day the bombs fell. When it was just the physicists and the support staff of the WIL huddling underground in the labs. The amateur surgery must have been particularly awful back then. It was practically butchery in Seneca's time, and that was after a century of experimentation, of trying to find which parts to cut and which parts to staple to make people "perfect".

During his time with the 47th tribe Seneca had things done to him, but it was when he did things to others that he truly hated his tribesfolk. Dosing kidnapped tribal after kidnapped tribal with radiation over and over again, even though he did it so much he knew what was going to happen and it was done so much the other "technicians" knew what was going to happen and the last generation of "technicians" knew what would happen. Either the victim would die immediately of radiation, or the victim would die slowly and painfully of the tumors that developed (and just before they succumbed to their tumors Seneca would be required to surgically remove some of their growths to implant into other victims who would then be killed by the tumors [and sometimes the surgery]). Injecting the same chemicals into different parts of victims bodies over and over again, dosing them with MDMA or heroin or mercury or the blood of other victims who had somehow survived even worse torture, not to see what would happen but to see if something different happened, this time. The "experiments" that the 47th tribe practiced became so abstract and rote that they had transformed from scientific inquiry to dark occult ritual.

There were pieces of Seneca missing. That was sacred to the 47th tribe. How much they could take away from a person and that person could still live. On his left hand Seneca's ring and little finger were removed at the knuckle. One of his kidneys and half of his liver were gone. His liver had been cooked, and he'd been forced to eat a small piece of it, but his kidney was stored in a jar of formaldehyde. The 47th tribe had an entire room dedicated to organs they'd removed, shelves and shelves of them. Some labeled, most not. There were all kinds in that room. Brains, kidneys, lungs, appendixes, pancreas, esophagus, stomach, intestines all suspended in sickly green fluid that glowed faintly in the dark. There were jars with plenty of sex organs, as well. Occasionally tribals from neighboring tribes would disappear for weeks at a time then suddenly return lobotomized, or unsure of where they'd been and missing parts of their bodies. Although these disappearances were never directly tied to the 47th tribe, during the early years of the Legion it was part of their mission to exterminate the most mutilated and insensate victims of these experiments, those that had been kept alive by loved ones no matter how gone they were. This cleansing was considered a kindness. One of Seneca's first responsibilities, while still a child himself, was to castrate young boys the tribe had snatched. His father taught him how to do it, with the implicit understanding that if he didn't then it'd be done to him.

It wasn't just surgery, though. There was also the conditioning, the electroshock, the mind games, and the drugging. Seneca still, years afterwards, would sometimes fly into an uncontrollable rage, like he was possessed, because of misfires in his brain. Programming from the 47th tribe that would still sometimes go off, no matter how he tried to escape it. His brothers-in-arms were trained to help him during his fits.

When he was a teenager, Seneca heard about Caesar's Legion. The Legion posed a threat to the 47th tribe not just physically but philosophically. For decades they had the only true vision for humanity and the future in the wasteland, and that left their ideas unchallenged. Now here was Caesar, with a competing view on how to fix humanity, plus the manpower and equipment to enforce it. Through torture and conditioning and rape the 47th tribe had managed to keep their population stable, but they'd never grown, and the pre-war tech they had maintained for so long was threadbare. Much of the sublevels of the Wattz Innovation Lab that had survived the bombing were in disrepair, many didn't even have lights. They still had a good supply of stealthboys and laserguns, but other than that the only edge they had on Caesar was their fanatical devotion to their monstrous philosophy.

It was the shallowness of that doctrine that did them in. From the moment Seneca realized the leaders of his tribe were scared of Caesar's Legion Seneca was the Legion's man. He couldn't tell whether he'd internalized his tribe's ideology or whether he'd simply seen from them the worst, most unrestrained impulses of humanity, but he believed in Caesar's doctrine of discipline and authority. In the west Caesar's Legion was considered savage and cruel but in the lands Caesar conquered the Legion was civilization, was civil. Compared to the 47th tribe, Caesar's Legion was enlightenment.

So as soon as he possibly could Seneca left Wattz Innovation Lab (or The Will, as it was known) and sought out Caesar's Legion. He sold out his tribe, utterly and entirely, their methods, their routes, The Will and how to access it, everything. He gave Caesar the names of each and every member, occasionally editorializing what he'd like done to them. His betrayal was a windfall for the Legion. Not only did he serve one of their most dangerous enemies to them on a silver platter, the elimination (or even better, integration) of wasteland boogeymen by Caesar was a marvelous public relations boon that guaranteed that at least a half-dozen tribes would unite under Caesar's banner without hesitation. And Seneca's intelligence made it so easy to conquer the 47th tribe that Caesar was able to integrate some of them into the Legion. There were a few who Seneca knew would be happy to renounce the tribe, but he was honestly surprised at just how many of his people were eager to escape. There were some who, though technically able to function as human beings, were so mentally destroyed by the horrors visited upon them that they were kept as slaves, and the rest were slaughtered, publicly, except the few psychopaths who still tried to fight back despite being completely outmaneuvered, either out of sheer fanaticism or simply because what had been done to them gave them no other option. When the Legion raided The Will it was a house of horrors, and opening any door held the chance of provoking attack by a maniac whose hands were surgically replaced with knives. After the Legion cleaned out The Will, they flooded it and sealed off all entrances with stone and mortar. Some said they sealed something inside, something sinister and incomprehensible that the 47th tribe had built, or perhaps tapped into, but that was only a rumor.

Although essential to the conquest of the 47th tribe, Seneca was only a teenager and was thus admitted to the Legion as a recruit. He didn't care. He was happy with his new name and his new title. Besides, after seeing the way power and authority corrupted the people in his old tribe he was wary of being in charge. As far as he could tell, power meant doing incomprehensibly horrible things, and now that he was free of his old tribe, he was done with incomprehensible horrors, although comprehensible horrors he was willing to accept as the cost of progress. He served as a simple Legionary for a decade and change, never seeking promotion and never receiving it. Even without a title he was given respect, though, even by Legionaries who didn't understand the tribal affiliation the black electrical tape wrapped around his forearms signified. He was a veteran, a man of honor, and regardless of his rank he deserved deference.

The Cohort Seneca served in was divided by Caesar, with two thirds sent to amass on the eastern Colorado and Seneca's third stationed on the edge of Caesar's New Mexico holdings, in a town called Yap. Seneca's Centuriae was the most experienced and respected of his cohort, while the other Centuriae stationed with them was the least. His Centurion, Otho, and most of Otho's men had served for almost twenty years. In Yap Otho was de-facto in charge, despite technically being co-commander with Centurion Lathos, who had only been a Centurion for three years. The idea was that even though Yap only had one-third of a Cohort Otho and his men, backed up by a recruit Centuriae, were skilled enough to maintain order and control. Most importantly, Otho was considered to be loyal and intelligent enough to be left to his own command, without much input from Caesar or his new Legate.

Surprisingly, though, after six months of silence in Yap reinforcements arrived. With no warning nearly an entire Centuriae emerged out of the wasteland, claiming they'd been sent by Caesar to serve Otho and Lathos. More surprisingly was the company they brought with them.

In Seneca's tribe, the 47th tribe, the notion of family was considered outdated. A relic of a worse time, one more thing that the brilliant minds of The Will had to cleanse from humanity in their effort to improve it. He knew who his father was, or at least a man who said he was Seneca's father, but that man had been killed by the Legion for his dark magics. Seneca knew that he had a mother, obviously, but he never met the woman and by the time he betrayed his tribe she was long dead. He might have had siblings, dozens of siblings for all he knew, but he wasn't raised alongside them. When he betrayed his tribe and saw his father shot, Seneca- save for some small tokens to remind him of the horrors- abandoned his past and his people, and he was happy to do it. Until they arrived in Yap, Seneca had honestly never considered how many of his peers had families they still cared a great deal for.

Rounding out the reinforcements' Centuriae were women, nearly two dozen of them. Some had already peeled off before the reinforcements arrived in Yap, to join their families in the Contubernias providing point, but all of them were in some way related to nearly every Legion officer in town. For Lathos it was his mother, a long-necked woman with a beehive hairdo. For Othos, it was his daughters, three young women who had been babies when Othos' tribe was conquered and they disappeared with their mother. Seneca's own Decanus, Laughing Wind, was reunited with his younger sister. Seneca watched in awe as these men were reduced to tears, embracing family they hadn't seen in decades. The night their families returned, the men of Seneca's Cohort even threw a party.

Seneca didn't participate. He volunteered, along with the reinforcements, to guard the periphery. He wanted the opportunity to get a better read on these reinforcements, these Legionaries he'd never seen before. There was something off about them, something he couldn't put his finger on. Physically they were all excellent specimens, broad shouldered and rippling with muscle, plus some of the tallest men he'd ever seen. They were all young, though, the oldest perhaps twenty and the youngest didn't look a day over fourteen. Each and every one of them lacked discipline, at least the discipline befitting a Legionary. They lounged on duty, slouched even, and they talked and laughed amongst themselves. When they noticed him staring they returned to attention, but otherwise mostly slacked off. Most egregiously, when Seneca tried to get one of the reinforcements to scout a suspicious noise, the young man actually scoffed, although he quickly regained his composure and did indeed scout the sound. He never apologized to Seneca, though.

Upon his return to Yap the next morning, Seneca had a lot to say about these reinforcements and their quality, but in Yap things had changed. The women that had arrived with the new Legionaries claimed that they, too, had been sent by Caesar. They'd come with a message, they said. Caesar's time is coming. Ave Caesar. Gloria Romae. Omnes Ave novi Imperii. Mars venit. Apollo venturus est.