=Brak Kodel= 
**To:** Sergei
**From:** Callistrio
Okay, we applied that decryption key your woman got us out of [[Mars]], and it worked fine. Good stuff—especially as it got us the attached. Interesting reading. Looks like [[Pathﬁnder]] has found themselves just as bad a can of worms at the Brak Kodel setting as we thought. It’s no question why they’re keeping this so quiet—the situation raises a host of disquieting ethical concerns. It remains to be seen how they’ll play it, but we need to deﬁne our own policy on this issue sooner rather than later. This isn’t just a humanitarian concern, after all, there’s a serious x-risk factor. Fortunately, it looks like there might soon be ways that we can get a few sentinels in on the ground here to assess the situation and stay primed to act.
||>   ||= **Brak Kodel** ||
||> **Type** ||= Terrestrial (Mercurial) ||
||> **Primary Star/Satelite of** ||= K9V (Orange Dwarf) ||
||> **Gravity** ||= 0.77g ||
||> **Diameter** ||= 9,200 km ||
||> **Atmospheric Pressure** ||= 0.04 atm ||
||> **Atmospheric Composition** ||= Carbon Dioxide (92 %), Nitrogen (4%) ||
||> **Surface Temperature (Min/Mean/Max)** ||= -220 C/30 C/330 C (25 C in valleys_ ||
||> **Day Length** ||= 17 hours ||
||> **Orbital Period** ||= 89 Days ||
||> **Satellites** ||= None ||
||> **Gate Access** ||= [[Martian Gate]] ||
==Conference Transcript== 
**Meeting Code KU-19TT-Delta**
**Company Security Level 1**
**Security Class KARNAK-B3**
**Transcription by Secured System SCARLET THETA RADIUS.**
**Present:**
***** Helen Rasmussen //(Board Representative)//
> Karol Karlinsky //(Security Contracts Division)//
> Qin Shu Feng //(Scientiﬁc Assessments Coordinator)//
> Sandrine Lapousse //(External Interactions Supervision)//
**Lapousse:** Thank you for your attention at this meeting, everybody; I thought that it was time to decide what to do next about this Brak Kodel business …
**Karlinsky:** You know what I think already. Close down the base, pull everyone back, and push a nuke through the gate with a 30 second countdown. Forget we ever found it for a decade and then come back once the glowing has died down a bit.
**Feng:** Yes if I recall you pushed for that stratagem before and we’re still dealing with, ahem, fallout from the information gap created by our hasty action.
**Karlinsky:** Why you little … You’d be fucking dead or worse if I hadn’t acted with clarity and purpose. And Brak Kodel is shaping up into a similar situation. The sooner we nip it in the bud the better.
**Lapousse:** Yes, we are aware of your position, thank you Karol. However, there are additional considerations.
**Karlinsky:** Do I really have to remind you that we are dealing with a probable TITAN operation? One showing all the regard for transhumanity that we’d expect? A damned lab experiment, and one that doesn’t appear to have been closed out completely yet? Every time we transfer an ounce of matter through that setting, we are increasing the risk that we’ll attract attention. Or worse, that we’re already doing exactly what they want, what they’ve been planning.
**Feng:** But if the TITANs come back to any of the gates, anywhere, we’ll have that problem. The agreed countermeasures are in place against that eventuality. I don’t see that the supposed increased risk in this case is signiﬁcant. The Brak Kodel situation also offers returns to match—more than match. It’s a transhuman-habitable settlement. There is new technology here—potentially dangerous, yes, but nonetheless valuable. And there is value in getting a chance to study the TITANs’ work, to see how they design and think.
**Karlinsky:** Brak Kodel is not a transhuman-habitable world. [invokes an entoptic display, with Brak Kodel and its star depicted; full information attached] It is a rock ball with only trace atmosphere in close orbit around a star that’s barely out of the red dwarf category. There are a handful of valleys that were roofed over by the previous owner [invokes a new entoptic display, apparently showing an enclosed valley on an airless world with semi-chaotic terrain; image attached], sealed up, and pumped full of air—
**Feng:** And with a complete, stable mini-ecosystem installed, may I remind you? That’s a scientiﬁc gold mine on its own.
**Karlinsky:** Most of that ecosystem’s biochemistry is also more or less toxic to terrestrial life—so much for “habitable.” According to the reports I’ve just seen from your own people, it doesn’t even use terrestrial-analogue DNA. What the fuck are we dealing with there, Feng? Answer me that! Your people can’t even tell me if we’re opening up ourselves to long-term health risks just being around these, these things. The biomorphs that the TITAN left there all have radically modiﬁed digestive and immune systems, just to allow them to eat the food and avoid a mess of allergies. The place is no more valuable as living space than any station we could build ourselves. Less. And more dangerous. And it’s already occupied.
**Rasmussen:** Yes, and that’s another factor. There is a humanitarian consideration in the case. These people that we found here, these survivors, have all been victims of of some ghastly experiment. All other concerns aside, if it ever gets out that we’d left them to rot, or simply killed them, we’d be made to look like monsters.
**Lapousse:** Absolutely.
**Karlinsky:** As opposed to importing monsters to the solar system. Monsters created by a TITAN for Mars knows what purpose. I know your bleeding heart aches for the poor abused natives, Rasmussen, but I think you’ve got the wrong referent here. These aren’t people. They’re abominations. They’re experiments gone wrong at best, as Feng would like to believe, or weapons pointed at our heads at worst. I’d be remiss in my duties if I didn’t point that out to you.
**Feng:** I disagree with that description. Those are, so far as we can tell, all human minds, whatever the oddities of the bodies they’ve been given.
**Karlinsky:** They were human beings, back when the TITANs harvested their heads on Earth. Even your own team admits that some of those morphs look like … botch jobs. Weird, and frankly sloppy. They have an insane array of genetic problems, which is why half of them have cancerous or pre-cancerous—
**Feng:** Not half, no, barely a quarter. Again, the biomorphs themselves are an item of scientiﬁc interest. As far as we can tell, these were not cloned from human stock, and their genetics are an approximation of human genetic code. It’s as if their makers created them from scratch, using a recipe in a cookbook. It’s a fascinating lesson in neogenetics.
**Karlinsky:** Whatever. This //[invokes a new entoptic image, a composite of human-looking biomorphs; image __attached__]// is not a transhuman in any sense we recognize it. You’ve all seen a lot more pictures than this; you know how inhuman some of them look, even if they’re nominally “healthy.” But that’s not the point. The point is that their brains are much less human. Those egos have been through Mars knows what, installed in facsimiles of human bodies where they don’t ﬁt, and toyed with by some machine monster. And they’ve adapted. They have become monsters.
**Rasmussen:** Well, that’s one of the issues still under evaluation, yes? Can we extract these egos and repair them? Restore them to transhuman brain structures, provide them with therapy?
**Karlinsky:** Fucking hell, Rasmussen, do you even read the reports on Brak Kodel or are you too busy swapping beads for whufﬁe and dancing around a drum circle with the economically challenged primitives of the outer system to keep up?
**Lapousse:** Karol. Please.
**Feng:** Unfortunately, that would be, well, rather a large project. We know that their brain structure is indeed different. We’re fairly conﬁdent we could map it and upload them, and we’re looking into it, but …
**Karlinsky:** But there are some serious security concerns regarding infection, of course, so it’s a slow process to make sure nothing goes wrong. Let’s just admit it, shall we? We’re trailing along behind demons, trying to work out how they do that thing with the pitchforks and the ﬁre. And you want to douse us in gasoline and jump in to see how hot the ﬂames are.
**Lapousse:** Well, then. If we’re not going to shut the place down, and we can’t easily evacuate the, ah, displaced persons—or we don’t want to, thank you, Karol—can we work with them? Establish some kind of stable order there while we set up an installation? I understand that there’s the beginnings of a government in place over there.
**Karlinsky:** Calling it a government is being too goddamned generous.
**Lapousse:** Then what is it? Please enlighten us.
**Rasmussen:** The, ah, the faction who call themselves the Servants in Truth like to claim a certain amount of authority—and they can back that up, because they have control over some remnant technology. But it’s really more of a tribal society like existed in certain parts of the sub-Saharan regions of the African—
**Lapousse:** What do you mean when you say “remnant?”
**Feng:** Left over by the … by whoever or whatever created the Brak Kodel enclosed environment.
**Karlinsky:** The TITANs. You can say it. Of course those gibbering idiots, they don’t understand it—nobody human could—but they have some idea how to work the controls. They’ve got machines that can synthesize not just the sort of items we could get out of a cornucopia machine—clothes, simple tools, temporary building materials—but also a few complex items we’ve not seen before, the stuff that has had Feng’s people so excited. And they can control the opacity of parts of the roof material, which gives them a degree of control over the microclimate in places. We also think that they’ve got remote surveillance capability.
**Lapousse:** I sense a “but” coming here.
**Karlinsky:** They aren’t rational. I think that they think they’re servants of the gods. Any conversation comes back to how they’re superior to you, and you shouldn’t forget it. There’s some left-over Earth religion mixed up in their jargon, and they love talking about “the Godhead” and “Perpetual States of Grace.” They have this disgusting statue that they worship at the lakeside of the main valley, a pile of junk and rotting matter. They all get out and bow down before it and howl and prance about like fucking animals.
**Feng:** I’m afraid that Karol is right. They aren’t a government, just a self-appointed priesthood. It’s impossible to get much in the way of useful sense out of them.
**Lapousse:** I understood that one of them was proving quite helpful. Umm, “Kyle McMillan,” wasn’t it?
**Karlinsky:** Huh. Turned out that he wanted us as allies against a couple of other sub-factions. And by the way, the enemy groups were also both being led by Kyle McMillan.
**Rasmussen:** Pardon?
**Karlinsky:** Took us a while to work this out—the subject seems to be a bit taboo—but the TITAN had a twisted sense of humor with its experiments. It created forks of quite a few of its captives; sometimes it ran them in a lot of very different morphs, sometimes it created a bunch of identical minds in identical bodies. Some forks form tight little cliques, others are in denial—like I said, taboo—and some of them want to gut each other. Usually literally.
**Lapousse:** What about the other factions?
**Feng:** Not a chance. We can talk to the Ungifted—that’s what the Servants call them, and I’m afraid we’ve picked up the habit—but it’s hardly worth the effort. They’re generally apathetic at best, and … well, we think that many of them are borderline schizophrenic. I’m afraid that things were very unpleasant there for the ﬁrst couple of years after the population was resleeved, and a lot of those people couldn’t handle it. The hormones in those bodies don’t help; some of them are prone to extreme mood swings. We can tell them what to do, and so can the Servants, and they’ll often do it—but they really need therapy.
**Rasmussen:** You could always talk to the Feral. I have reason to believe—
**Karlinsky:** Ha!I could also go talk to one of the killsats around Earth and ask if I can just take a quick trip down.
**Rasmussen:** Pardon?
**Feng:** I’m afraid that Karol is joking and Helen is being perhaps overly optimistic. There is a third category of, ah, “native” on that world. As I said, things were very unpleasant there for a few years …
**Karlinsky:** “Unpleasant.” What a useful word.
**Feng:** As I was saying, things took a while to settle down even as much as they had by the time we arrived. And the—yes, okay, let’s assume it was a TITAN—it evidently didn’t even try to control or assist all of the groups, it left one as a sort of control group. Some of them presumably decided to survive by any means necessary, and some of them had been given morphs that were well suited to this attitude. In other words, perfectly adapted to living in the sort of tropical jungle analogues that exist in the valleys.
**Karlinsky:** In other words, they voluntarily gave up on humanity and decided it was kill or be killed.
**Rasmussen:** Sounds like you’d get along swimmingly.
**Feng:** Ahem. Really, we don’t know what happened. There’s a whole set of taboos attached to discussion of the topic of the Feral among the other two groups.
**Rasmussen:** And some very interesting folklore and a rather evolved oral storytelling tradition.
**Karlinsky:** Which should tell you plenty in itself. People snatched up from their homes, murdered, then brought back to life in insane conditions. Feng, it was your people who found the remains, who scanned the graves and the ashes of the cooking ﬁres.
**Feng:** Thank you, yes. The Feral are a small group, I’m glad to say, but they do retain some dangerous habits of mind and their dietary choices are often, well, taboo I think covers it. I think that one way we could get the Servants in Truth on our side would be to offer them some security equipment and assistance, actually.
**Karlinsky:** They’d just use stuff like that to keep the Ungifted in line and to settle their own quarrels. My security consultants have already been twitchy, ever since the incident where two of them were killed. We’re still not completely sure it was the Ferals that did them in, I still think the Servants may be playing us all. Giving them weapons would be the last thing to do in that case.
**Feng:** We could provide self-managing systems, with built-in constraints.
**Rasmussen:** Yes, indeed we could. And that, I think, is where we should start. We’ll recruit a specialist social structures unit—Sandrine, that’s your area—and give them as much security assistance as necessary; Karol, we’ll sort you out an additional budget for protection of those units.
**Karlinsky:** This is under—
**Rasmussen:** Your protest is noted, Karol. However, as of now, we’re going to see what we can make of Brak Kodel, and what we can get out of it. I need to report to the board on all of the projects and their concern is the bottom line and patentable innovations. There’s no sign of ongoing TITAN activity here, just some traumatized survivors, and there may very well be some exploitable technologies here. It’s worth investigating further. But, Sandrine—
**Lapousse:** Thank you … Uh, yes?
**Rasmussen:** I don’t want you to think you have free rein. If Karol thinks that the risks here are too high … well, we employ Karol for her proven judgment. She is completely right that in any other situation where TITAN inﬂuence was detected, we would cauterize and never look back. The only thing Brak Kodel has going for it is that the TITANs seem to have moved on, and nothing they’ve left behind so far seems to be infected. We cannot ignore the possibility that this is a trap, however, or that the TITANs meant for us to ﬁnd this little colony of theirs. You and Feng are to extract as much valuable information from this setting as you can as quickly and efﬁciently as possible. If we change our minds and pull out in a hurry, I still want you to have something to justify the effort. Do you understand me?
**Feng:** I understand.
**Lapousse:** Yes.
**Rasmussen:** Secondary to ﬁnding something we can capitalize on, I want a complete census of these survivors. If there’s anyone interesting in there that we thought was lost during the Fall, I want to know ASAP. Any heads of state, corporate execs, leading scientists, anyone with a name that matters, bring them to my attention. If it turns out that we have some Nobel laureate or the grand-daughter of some hyperelite dynasty sitting around in the muck worshiping their machine god, we may have to put a different spin on things. In general, we need to identify who these people were and where they came from, and maybe that will help us determine what the TITANs were doing with them.
**Feng:** Well, as noted in my reports, the Servants we’ve talked to so far all seemed to have been, um, harvested by the TITANs from the same three cities on Earth: Kiev, Mexico City, and Osaka. It’s worth highlighting that they all speak English on Brak Kodel, even those that had no proﬁciency for the language when the TITANs took them.
**Rasmussen:** Okay, that’s another question for which we need to ﬁnd an answer. Like I said, the board wants results but they also put me in charge of recruitment as well as image management here. If and when word about this exoplanet leaks out, I want us to be seen doing whatever we can to help those people. So we’ll go multidisciplinary on this and look for all the answers we can. Find out about these freakish morphs, ﬁnd out how to cure their cancers, and ﬁnd out if there are going to be any issues with resleeving them. Play nice, get some cooperation from anyone there who isn’t trying to kill you. If we end up having to bug out and sterilize the place, I want us to have solid grounds for doing so—a looming threat. Whatever; you know your businesses. I want preliminary plans and budget requests in my inbox within ﬁfteen hours. So move.