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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/BainWrites on 2025-12-17 18:13:07+00:00.
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Warning: This chapter involves gore, and some serious dysmorphia stuff.
Date: 2424 AD
It ended with a whimper, not a bang.
It took two months since Patient Zero had been officially diagnosed on the surface of Vereka, it took two months for the God Plague to finish its course through the human population. Like every other planet it had touched, it rampaged through land, air and water: infecting every breath, every bite of food eaten, every thirst quenching drink.
It would take several years for the full casualty list to be compiled. The AI and uplifts that were left behind would have more pressing issues to contend with first: rebuilding that which had been destroyed, and patching relationships broken by the desperation to save those they loved. It would take years before any serious attempts to create a unified front against the God Plague would start. Years before AI and uplifts that had lost their friends and family forgave those who hadn’t.
But once communication between systems had been reestablished and the infrastructure rebuilt, a final picture could be painted, to show what had been lost. Once the bodies had been metaphorically piled high and counted, 49.7% of humanity was dead. That wasn’t the full story, however. The inner systems, those last to be infected, had had enough time to prepare, while those caught sooner within the pandemic devastating path had been left scrambling to defeat a foe that couldn’t be faced.
Vereka would eventually have a final casualty rate of 77.5%, or just over three billion souls. Even that number was a miracle, the end result of every Terran working towards a singular goal of making as many stasis chambers as possible while time ran out.
But those statistics would be collated later. For now, Dr. Johnathan Fletcher was lying against a wall, waiting to become another datapoint in this terrible event. He was fully in the grasp of the God Plague, death filling his blood as he lay there barely conscious, mind going over the events of the last two chaotic months. There had been two more attempts to assault the facility, two more waves of attackers held back by his own unholy chemical creations. Now, there was only the silence of the dead, each body left where they’d fallen outside the facility.
The number of uninfected humans on the planet was now a grand total of zero, with the vast majority of those still alive deep within the throes of the illness. Johnathan had maybe a day left if he was lucky, every breath and step taken in agony.
Even through the cocktail of painkillers he’d been given by the unfortunate uplift in charge of the end of life care, Dr Fletcher could barely do more than just sit in the dimly lit room, next to the now silent fabricators. They’d been turned off for several days now, the people with the knowledge to keep them running no longer in the physical state to do so, the sparse few uplifts within the facility focusing on keeping the power to the facility maintained and running, to keep those who already had chambers safe until a longer term solution could be found.
Johnathan had known from the start of his deal with this place that this was how it would end: People who helped were given one of the scarce spaces within the stasis chambers, and he’d willingly given that to his wife. Still, there was a niggling little thought in the back of his head as he sat there slumped against the wall, that it would be all too easy to… take a spot: It wasn’t like there were many people still alive in the facility to stop him doing so, and replacing someone already sleeping would be a simple job.
Maybe if it was his wife that needed the spot, Dr Fletcher would be willing to do such a thing, but for only himself… there were some lines he wouldn’t cross.
The room was silent, anyone still outside a chamber had found their own spots to crawl too, to die in whatever peace they could find. He stared at the machines that surrounded him, how many lives had these machines saved: Hundreds? Thousands? Would anyone remember what he’d done here, the good and the bad, or would Dr Fletcher just become another death, another statistic, forgotten and discarded like the pile of half finished broken parts lying in the corner of the room.
Half finished parts.
A thought, pushing through the foggy, drug blunted pain as Johnathan slowly stood up, pausing to cough up copious amounts of blood before stumbling over to the mountain of scrap. Each item in the pile was a failed fabrication, a mistake from the new and inconsistent technology, each piece broken and unusable for some reason. There’d been talk of someone scavenging them to create working chambers, but nobody had found the time or even had the expertise to do so while so much other work was going on.
To most people, it was a worthless pile of scrap, but Dr Johnathan Fletcher wasn’t most people. With pained movements he started to pick through the scraps of metal, each moment of exertion an orchestra of agony, wrenching out parts of the tangle of discarded items, taking a second to look over each.
Panels with defects, electrical boards missing components, items twisted out of normal alignment. It wouldn’t be the item collection any reasonable engineer would choose, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Painfully and slowly he started to get to work in the dim lights of the room, his every sound echoing through the now empty space as he took the tools into his hands.
Jonathan couldn’t help but feel aggrieved by the lack of time he’d been given to do this task; just how many additional lives could have been saved by the people here at the facility if they hadn’t been forced to spend so much time defending against others wanting to take what they had? If they hadn’t forced him to do terrible things.
None of that mattered, what had happened could not be changed, all Dr Fletcher could do was work through the problem at hand, scavenging pieces and patching together broken parts with his painfully slow movements. An uplift or two that had been wandering the facility joined in on his spontaneous engineering project as he continued working, Jonathan glad for the uninfected bodies helping him where his was starting to fail, even if none of the uplifts at the facility had much in terms of engineering experience.
As each minute and hour passed by, as the God Plague continued to ravage his body, his mangle of items turned into… something. Something that kinda looked like a stasis chamber, if you squinted real hard. Sloppy welds and wiring that looked like it would spontaneously burst into flames at the slightest inclination of power. Still, theoretically it would be enough, for a little bit, at least enough time for someone else to create a longer term solution, when the non-human Terrans left behind could pick up the pieces.
Johnathan doubled over once again as he coughed up more torrents of blood, swaying as he stood and looked at the probable coffin he’d constructed. Still, as the tumors along his body continued to gradually grow, Dr Fletcher didn’t really have much to lose: Either the device he’d cobbled together would kill him, or the God Plague would in a few hours.
He turned his ‘stasis chamber’ on with an alarming hum, the power vibrating through the various cobbled pieces, a disconcerting noise bouncing off the walls as he crawled inside the device. He spent moments manually sliding the panels shut into an airtight seal, giving grunts of desperate exertion as his makeshift invention finally clicked shut.
Jonathan lay there in a cramped twisted position, feeling the cold gas of the stasis process start to enter his tumour filled lungs. As consciousness left him, unknowing if he’d awaken once more, he couldn’t help but let the memories of the last chaotic month spin through his mind.
What he’d done to make sure his wife survived, the choices he’d made and the lives he’d taken.
He hoped he’d made the right decisions.
—----------------------------
Date: 77 PST (Post Stasis Time)
Johnathan moved with a measure of righteous indignation, his legs carrying him with a fury only found in those who knew everything was wrong, but had very little control over the matter. The meeting with Susan had been… had been… in retrospect it was exactly as he’d expect the government to work on such things. During all of his current investigations into Xavius, it never crossed Dr. Fletcher’s mind exactly what he was going to do if his fears became reality, but now he’d hit that crossroad he felt powerless.
The houses of different architectural designs lined up besides Johnathan as he continued to angrily march down the pavement, grumbling and fuming to himself. Of course his external communications had been cut off as soon as he’d been delivered back to his quarters, and even if they hadn’t… who would believe him? Who would even care?
Xavius had been the one to cure the God Plague, she was the closest thing to a living disciple to be worshiped amongst the Terran population. Who would believe that the saviour of humanity was now creating weapons beyond morality itself? For that matter, who would really care? The Hagorthians were a cannibalistic species that routinely hunted sapient prey for the thrill, who would really care that someone as revered as Xavius was working on something that only hurt the monsters ...
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