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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Ralts_Bloodthorne on 2026-04-18 02:39:22+00:00.

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There are rules, dawg, and if you want to live to run these streets, you don't break them, you feel me?- Anonymous Terran, Age of Paranoia

I wouldn't do that if I were you - Most ignored piece of advice, inner voice, in the universe

Thou hast fornicated about and now thou ist about to discover most intently. - Unknown, Unknown Era, Terra

There was no hint of what was going to happen.

The three moons still pulled the planet in multiple directions at once, dragging at the planet's core, slowing the rotation of the planet and the core both. The yellow-white sun still blazed in a hellstorm of incandescent fusion. The plants and insects, the kind of creatures that could thrive under such radioactive fury, went about their dim little lives.

The military bases, long having been relegated to a punishment detail (the local flora and fauna was poisonous of all things) to the Ornislarp who were stationed there. The sun put out enough hard radiation that they had to be covered at all times. The rain was mostly H2O, which was your standard for carbon based life, but something about the dust particle it bonded around left radioactive dust all over everything. Rations were always crap, never any live shipments, all frozen. And not even the good frozen, where you could thaw them out and use a meal-chase drone. No, the bad kind of frozen where it unthawed and it was gross and soft and wet. And the meal-chase drones were terrible. Either you used them on base tarmac or they pulled grass into their wheels and shorted out. It wasn't even fun to throw your meal out on the grass and run at it, since the majority of the time the pheromone spice was some crap that you wouldn't have eaten if you were starving in an alley.

No, the place was complete trash. Trash bases. Trash barracks. Trash food. Trash officers. Trash enlisted.

Everyone and everything but you were trash.

Unless you were honest with yourself.

Then you were trash too.

The Ornislarp marched, drove, and flew around the planet according to a schedule set by High Command and Ornislarp Military Force Training Organizational System, then modified by whoever felt like just adding a line or two or modifying existing lines.

The planetary commander and his staff had all come out second best in a power struggle. They'd tried to seize a nice piece of territory for themselves to retire to after they got done with their politically motivated stint in the military. Instead they'd found themselves unwillingly conscripted for an additional fifty years and assigned to this backwater rock full of radiation, poison bugs and plants, crappy weather, and off the main shipping lanes so everything got there late, was the wrong thing, or nothing at all.

The planetary commander was pretty sure that the shipping officers were actually selling his supplies on the black market.

But it just kept getting worse.

The continental commanders had offended someone powerful and were sent out here on a 'ten year in depth expansion mission' with one exception of a psychopath who had actually requested something like this. That weirdo acted like he had been given the best posting the Noocracy could provide.

His troops tried to murder him at least once a day.

Every time he survived, always unscathed, he told the guilty that their obvious incompetence is why the Ornislarp Military Forces considered them walking compost piles. Then had two of their legs pulled off (one of the back ones that were designed to do that, but always one of the front ones. Particularly sadistic officers would do the 'tilter special' and pop off a rear leg then rip or saw free the opposite side front leg, making it hard to stand up) and dropped them off a hundred miles away from the nearest base with a bare bone kit and told "walk it off, skinny."

Sector Commanders were incompetent, stupid, crooked, or juts plain losers. There wasn't a single interesting one. They were all alike, the same schemes, the same complaints, the same looks.

One of the base commanders had mocked the Sector Commanders by pulling off the nametags from their body drapes and laughing that they all had the exact same awards, schools, and patches and nobody could figure out whose uniform body drape was whose.

Someone shot that smartass down with a surface to air missile two months later.

The Battle Zone commanders were incompetent and stupid.

The post commanders were fat, incompetent, and stupid.

It wouldn't matter.

The bases were there for a reason.

The reason was classified Ultra-Violet with Infrared Coding.

It was so secret that it had its own starport. No ship, after all, no sense in tempting anyone to run away.

But it was super secret. So secret nobody was even sure what was happening in the massive crysteel done that was five miles side and almost a kilometer high. It even had its own weather inside.

Not that anyone outside knew.

It was so super-duper secret that no military bases or troop movements were allowed that might be able to see it over the curvature of the planet.

It was so Infini-Secret that it had its own satellites over it and the other ones weren't allowed to point lenses at it.

It was so Ultra-Max Secret that nobody knew everything about it.

There was so much security around it that there wasn't even an AI in charge of the facility.

It was so secretive that no internal surveillance was allowed. Not even the doors had sensors to open. You had to open them manually, like a peasant.

So Ultra-Dupra-Secret that no two scientists knew what the others were doing. No scientific teams knew what other teams were. Only the facility commander knew that there was an ultimate goal of the facility.

But he didn't have the clearances to know what the goal was, he only knew it existed.

Everyone received their tasks and did them, turning in their results, and never told what the goal was.

It was so super secret that the right hand didn't know that the left or its own fingers even existed.

So it didn't get shit done right.

But the Noocracy Military Forces guarded the entire planet, just like they were told.

They marched, they drove, the flew, they schemed, they plotted, the succeeded and failed.

Below them it had gone from a single tiny object to much much more deep in the bedrock.

But unknown to the Ornislarp, the timer had run down.

The facility had a breakthrough. One that made the facility's high end super computer, running on all 16 bit system architecture right down to the molecular circuitry, send a signal to a message torpedo that was orbiting the planet in stealth.

The message relay melted down, to keep anyone from finding out that it existed and had transmitted a message.

But a major breakthrough had finally happened.

[The Universe Disliked That]

But the other timer had run out.

Great metal doors were opened.

And Hell was released.

[The Universe Liked That]

It was just rolling hills. Nothing special. A particularly hardy strain of grass that spread its roots wide instead of deep and bent with the winds. Sure, lightning storms lit hundreds of miles a year on fire, but that was just the part of doing business to the plants. The bugs didn't care, some of them laid eggs that the casings had to be softened by fire. Some of the bugs were even fireproof. Most of the small mammals (too small for any self respecting Ornislarp to bother with, which means they had been tried and found to taste terrible and/or possibly be poisonous) had burrows they could from the flash fires in.

It was also night time. The darkness hiding the little rodents, who had thick fur on top and bare bellies so their body heat went down so that the fliers (that also tasted terrible and had sharp claws) couldn't see them easily.

There was a loud rippling crack, like thunder on the ground.

The shape charges went off against the heavy blast doors buried under tons of dirt and grass. The doors were flung away from inner doors, spinning rapidly like someone flipping a coin, to hit and bounce twice before coming to a rest.

The interior doors were unmarked, somehow glossy and matte black at the same time.

Panels withdrew from the inset lip of the frame and lights came on, bathing the doors in harsh white light as well as the eastern edge of the now-blasted to bedroom dirt fan, which was one of the longer edges. Each light came on with a loud "KLACK", a sound effect unnecessary for the type of light it was, but that still sounded out across the hills anyway.

For a long moment there was complete silence.

Birds began to stir. Bugs went back to buzzing. The breeze washed over the doors.

There was a loud siren. The birds gave an angry cry and went silent. The bugs went silent.

The doors gave a loud KRACK and then began to slowly separate, pulling to each side along the long axis, the edges with huge low-angled gear teeth. The doors locked back, revealing another door. This one lifted along the long axis, overlapping wedges pulling back.

This revealed another door.

This one just lowered slowly.

There was more sounds of a klaxon.

An ele...

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