In-Depth Look: Palers
BUNKER RATS
A rectangle of light marked the border between the outside and the eternal darkness on the inside. The rectangle slowly shrunk, became a slit, and a pounding noise echoed through the tunnel. Dozens of people watched the spectacle: their pupils widened as the darkness began to surround them. There was a last shimmer, like a string of pearls made of flashes from a total eclipse of the sun, and then it was done. With a loud bang, the bar closed. Engines roared and pushed invisible bolts that were big as an arm into the bulkhead. The mountain had closed behind them. Neon tubes awoke with a soft clicking noise. For a long time, their light would mean day to the group.
Many generations later, people stand before the bulkhead again. There are patches of rust on the steel, condensate has created dirty grooves in the concrete of the tunnel walls. The engines tremble and start, stuttering and roaring like old miners suffering from a lung disease. The bulkhead shudders with the beat of the pistons, rust flakes away and falls to the ground shimmering. The neon tube flickers and hums. With a crash, the gap opens a finger width. At once, two figures separate from the group and jam hydraulic claws into the gap. With a metallic groan, the tools work the bulkhead, pushing against petrified lube oil and jammed friction bearings.
Suddenly, the bulkhead opens, its halves crashing into their recesses. The hydraulic coils fall to the concrete with a thud. Dirt and roots fall from the bulkhead and dust billows through the corridor. The engines die down. The neon tube does the same. Darkness.
The people wait. They can taste the earth in the air. A breeze washes over them: the mountain exhales.
The dust settles, starlight falls into the corridor, glittering in the eyes of the people, different than those who went into the darkness long ago. Their skin is waxen and pale, their eyes unreadable black holes in the darkness.
A lot of time has passed.
But they have never forgotten their gods, have never left out even one ritual, have never become unfaithful to the fuzzy figures on the image screens and their likenesses in the sarcophagi. When they go out into the world now, raising their gleaming, pearlescent pendants high, they will be the chosen ones. Chosen to free the world and pave the way for the gods.
IN FILE
They marched. Hundreds of thousands streamed into the Recombination Group’s subterranean facilities all over the world under cover of night. They gazed straight ahead, there was no doubt in their eyes. They were beautiful people: strong and powerfully built, their skin without blemish. Everyone knew them as the “Guardians”. With long strides, they went down into the mountain, through whitewashed, brightly lit corridors. They followed the signs, endless colorful lines. They went past operation theaters and ignored the generator rooms, the provisionary systems, and a forest of Freon tanks.
They marched on.
A hall opened up before them: thousands of tubes, all larger than a man, some standing, others lying on the floor or piled upon each other. Red and green lights flickered in turn, cables and hoses from the cylinders disappearing into the ceiling.
The Guardians spread out and attacked the cylinders. They touched control panels, removed digital barriers. Inside, something hissed, and then the tops opened. Icecold mist from the inside drifted across the floor. Men, women, and children lay silently in the cylinders. They slept. Hoarfrost glittered on their skin. The lids were tight over the frozen eyes, and their cheeks sunken in. They were all ill, most of them frozen in the throes of death, awaiting a treatment that never came.
The Guardians could have woken them. But what should they have answered to the questions and the screaming, the nervous “Am I healed?” or “What are you doing to me?” It would have added unacceptability to unpostponability.
Instead, the Guardians put on gloves and took the bodies from the chambers. Bones and flesh cracked like ice. With scrapers, they removed the remainders, cleaning the cold chambers. They threw complete bodies as well as single arms and legs into carts, piling them up in a wild mix of limbs. Electro cars came, and cart after cart was hooked to them until they finally started moving with a hum.
They drove to the storage halls. Endless halls with pillars, empty, the end barely visible to the naked eye. The electro cars unhinged the carts and returned. They carried everything here that the sleeping chambers had to offer.
The work was done. One Guardian stood at the entrance and let his gaze drift across the army of carts. There had to be more than a hundred, all filled with what looked like a butcher’s leftovers. He switched off the light, closed the doors, locked and sealed the halls for eternity. No one noticed that some of those trapped inside awoke – this transgression remained unpunished.
SEALED
The Guardians formed an honor guard when their wards arrived in armored cars and climbed down into the Dispensers. All traces of the last purge had been cleaned away, the corridors shone in the brightest white, bright like the smiles of the Guardians.
The newcomers were all marked. They had numbers on their wrists, all multiples of 100: there were 100s and 200s and 300s – up to the 900s. People in white coats were already waiting at the glass cylinders and hailed the newcomers. With a machine the size of their hand they scanned the tattoos, nodding. Everyone was tense, that feeling of being part of something big was ubiquitous. They were in a festive mood, like at one of Getrell’s announcements. But today, the gift was not self-awareness but survival.
Ten days later, the newcomers had become Sleepers. Locked in the chambers, their eyes gazed out of crystalline nanite meshes. Shining green displays confirmed the cryostasis. Then the lights went out, the doors closed. Heavy steel bulkheads snapped into their bracings. The countdown had begun. 100 years until the first ejection.
The Guardians lived on the outer ring. They maintained the backup systems and bioreactors, watched the data stream from the facility’s core: the Sleeper Chambers. This data stream really was something. Those who tried to find a pattern in the flood of gene and human parameters soon were successful. Too soon, some of the Guardians thought, but their warnings remained unheard. All the Sleepers carried within them a special combination of genes that made them… divine? According to data, there was no other possible conclusion.
It was all a façade. With every generation of Guardians, the information backed up in the Dispenser software’s code was presented simpler than before. It planted the seed for a religion. Pure, infectious memetics.
BLACKOUTS
The Eshaton came and went. The annual clock within the Dispensers kept ticking.
But even before they could announce the first scheduled opening, some bunker teams had already given up and blown open the portals. Outside in the wasteland, they started a new life, rid themselves of the brainwashing and became part of the surviving population.
Most waited, though. Year after year, they forced down the slimy liquid from the algae tanks, drank water that had passed through thousands of bodies. When the daylight lamps, the xenon tubes, and the light bulbs finally expired, eternal dusk surrounded them. Recollections of the last days of light, of emerging helplessness but also grim determination were passed on through the generations. After centuries, day X had become a mystical moment: it was not the Guardians who chose the darkness, but the darkness that chose the Guardians.
Life in the darkness of the tunnel systems, interrupted only by a few islands of light – pale LCD gauges at bunker generators – took its toll: the Guardians suffered from signs of deficiency, became paler with every generation and lost their hair in handfuls. Seeing became less important, other senses like hearing and touch took over leadership from the eyes. When the darkness threatened to swallow them completely, the Guardians scratched their collective knowledge into the walls. With fingers caressing the scratches, one could experience the last days of light, learn about the Sleepers’ powers, or listen to problems and fears of Guardians who had lived many years ago. A history in stone. Next, the intercoms died. The Guardians replaced them with a tube system that wound through the bunker in endless curves. First they banged simple rhythms, and later more complex patterns emerged. They were able to transmit entire news stories that way.
The crying of children echoing through the darkness was liberating and provided a dimension to the nothing that the people could cling to. The Guardians sang songs of old to keep the darkness away from their hearts.
FAITH
The faith in the Sleepers as divine creatures grew. The use and maintenance of the facility were coded in rituals, the religion served as a transmitter for practical knowledge. The memetic modifications within the Dispenser code finally unraveled completely: picture walls that had been dead for eons woke up, displayed some shining creatures for a few seconds, and then died down again. Artifacts recovered from caches made bulkheads open or activated speakers from which smooth sounds came. Sung melodies or simple gutteral noises could open doors that had been sealed for centuries. Every bunker was a paradise only waiting to be explored for those who believed.
Some crews took centuries to solve the biggest mystery available to them. Only through the right combination of artifacts and the right words at the right time could they break past a series of barriers and finally stand in the room with the domed ceiling.
In this vault, there were strange echoes – it seemed as if the speaker always stood behind the listener. The dome’s true power, though, only revealed itself to those who were blessed with pendants and an impressive voice: stars were projected on the walls, accompanied by a supernatural murmuring. Perfect sound synthesis. Even those who doubted the Sleepers’ divinity saw their faith restored under the dome.
FROM THE DARK
The generators slowly died down. They were replaced from the supply caches as long as the Guardians could do so, but they eventually ran out of replacements. Then the ventilation’s propeller shafts started screeching, before they finally stopped with a discharge flash. More spare parts. The water preparation became more and more undependable: the drinking water stank; the toilets clogged. Mold spread in the corridors and made entire sectors uninhabitable. The bioreactors leaked and spilled organic matter throughout the corridors, cable insulations became brittle and cracked, displays flashed for one last time and then blacked out. The technology in the bunker facilities was slowly wearing itself down, and there was nothing that the Guardians could do about it. The controls for the entrance seals did not react to their keystrokes anymore, the readout screens on the panels simply staying black. The Dispensers had become the Guardians’ prison – or their deathtrap.
Some few Guardians dedicated their lives to the language of the Bygones. They rummaged around in databases, where they found instruction manuals, documentations, and emergency plans. They had to recover what the centuries had forgotten, and all too often their insights were lost again when they died. Others eventually performed the miracle: they reactivated the bolting mechanisms and the opening mechanisms, destroyed the seal with tools.
For the first time in their lives, they saw the sun and realized the limitlessness of the sky. And they were afraid.
AWAKENING
The world was very different from what they had imagined. The world’s rulers did not bow to them of their own accord. The Balkhani only laughed about the pale creatures and their stories of sleeping gods and bludgeoned the Guardians back into their holes.
For so long, they had called themselves ‘Guardians‘, but now they received the title that would spread on the surface: Palers, a war name to hide their true nature. They felt hatred rise within themselves.
Back in the safe body of the Dispensers, the survivors of the first expeditions discussed what they should do. Their aim was clear: they had to pave the way for the divine ones, build palaces out of limestone and the bones of the surface dwellers for them - not all of them could agree on how the gods liked to reside. But the Palers were only few, scattered to their many bunkers across the world, and a direct confrontation with the abovegrounders was out of the question. So they remembered their strongest ally: the night. Under cover of the darkness they returned to the location of the defeat, strangled their enemies while they slept, and stole their belongings. The re-conquering had begun.
DEMAGOGUES
Getrell’s memetics induced territoriality and dominance coupled with submissiveness towards the ruling class. Highly infectious ideas disguised as an elitist ideology – a difficult construct that was modified and statistically backed a million times in the Stream before it was installed in the Dispensers. Yet it was successful. Without outside influences, the memes developed exactly as planned. They created a form of solidarity for which love or devotion are only insufficient descriptions, as well as a special talent: the ability to lead and to instruct by voice, facial expressions, and gestures.
Language and sounds have always held immense meaning in Paler society. A Paler with a deep, resonant voice is more influential than one who speaks in a falsetto. Children with a strong vocal power were made to train their pronunciation. The elders took care of them and taught them the art of storytelling in the hopes of raising one of their best: a Demagogue.
Within him, memetics and talent have become one. One word from him, correctly intoned and spoken with the right attitude, provokes emotions like fear or desire: concentrated to a series of memetically active phonemes it can influence the mind.
The Demagogue judges, leads councils, and gives solace. His memetics develop along with his nature: Rato, a Demagogue of fear, controls his subordinates through terror and punishes deviance with panic, the words of Chire, a Demagogue of violence, hurt like whip lashes, and Jiklas’ people indulge in the intoxication of song to forget the terrors of the outside world.
Within the Cult, these influences work very well as they were created specifically as tools to control the Cult. But the abovegrounders also feel the fire in the vocal power of the Demagogues. It doesn’t burn their very soul like it does to the Palers, but it bends and twists something deep inside them: implanting fear even if the voice itself sounds very soft and sweet, luring them into a trap, hurting like hell, making gums bleed.
AWAKENED
There had to be others like them out there, that threw themselves against the portals with broken hydraulic coils. There were brothers and sisters to save.
Soon, the first Revivers left the bunkers. The sun burned through their skin into the flesh, it made them look for shelter by day and travel on in the night. They were adorned with Sun Discs that bore the Dispenser command codes and other artifacts, signs of awe and proof of their origin. For orientation, they used old Recombination Group maps, followed signs into a world they did not understand.
Every Dispenser they found made their hearts swell. They were not alone.
Where they found others like themselves, the implanted memetic mechanisms took over at once: the Revivers were received like old friends. With their pendants, they opened portals the skeleton crews had despaired on and loaded additional codes into their Sun Discs from the picture walls. They were on a holy quest and felt that they were getting closer to their goal with each and every Dispenser. Eventually, they had checked all of the Dispenser locations on the maps. The search was over. All Palers were free. Still, they felt incomplete. They had to have overlooked something.
The Revivers settled down, grew old, and died in bitterness. In the Dispensers they were considered heroes, their names were honored and meritorious Palers carried their names as honorary titles, but no one wanted to follow in their footsteps. Several years ago, a drawing surfaced. It showed a type of Dispenser that no Paler had ever seen. ‘Gusev’, number 12 of 44. According to the Chroniclers, the coordinates pointed to a location in Noret, right in the middle of the Machine Mens’ territory. But who trusts a Chronicler? At least in this case, the Palers did. Since then, the Revivers have been on the road again. They look for old records, dig into Recombination Group facilities, and exchange burnt-out artifacts for information. Sometimes they even talk to abovegrounders. Then, they hold back, ask instead of order. It doesn’t always work, but without help, they will not find the 44 bunkers. Maybe that’s the divines’ last test. Yes, the liberation must be truly at hand!
SLEEPER
The ancestors of the Palers belonged to the best that the Recombination Group had to offer. All of them were loyal and thoroughly infected with Getrell’s memetics: they looked up to the leaders of the Recombination Group gleaming eyes. That was not enough for Getrell. Deep down in the abysses of the sealed catacombs, those he had chosen himself waited for their awakening. Are they scientists, the board, soldiers? The Dispenser data systems bore witness and could tell – thousands of glass eyes watched the long march into the depths. But their life elixir ran out centuries ago. Without electricity, they have fallen silent. Posterity only has the words of Jaquar, an alleged Sleeper. In the ruins of Laibach, he was found by Hellvetics and told a story about betrayal, immortality, and madness: “Do you see this 100 here? Goes all the way down to the bone. Even right into the damn soul. Don’t touch it! I am, no, I was a Sociocybernetic. Others built roads, but I programmed groups of people. Advanced memetics. What year is this? No. That can’t be. That can’t be! Only weeks ago… I met a 300. That shouldn’t have happened.”
He spoke about Exalt: all the blood and gore, the endless labyrinths and the Grindworks. He said the city was their temple, prepared for a coming that would test and take in the best of us and to turn down the worst.
But why? He told of the Free Spirit equipment. “Free Spirit – is that a rank or a subgroup? Why don’t we know it? Why do we know so little? There must be Dispensers, that have to still be in working order. The plan can still work…” It was to be his legacy.
Shortly afterward, Jaquar died under mysterious circumstances in a locked chamber in the Alpine Fortress. When the Hellvetics prepared the body for the last journey, they saw the countless pinpricks for the first time – as if something had milked him for his blood.
TRADE
The implanted memes strengthen the community, but they also erect a barrier against everything from the outside. Indifference is the best thing that abovegrounders can expect from Palers.
Traders try anyway. They transport food to the bunker portals and engage in the dance of arrogance. Palers demand instead of asking and take instead of buying. For the trader, everything’s on the line, but if he is successful, he can make enormous profits. The alleged scrap that the Palers pay the traders with can be resold for a lot of money to the Chroniclers.
Who’s laughing now?
HUNTERS IN THE NIGHT
Food is getting scarce, and what little remains in the algae tanks tastes awful or is simply poisonous. The only alternative for the Palers is to go searching at the surface. They’ve never considered tilling fields or breeding animals. They only know stores from which they can take things according to a rationing schedule. They are depleted now, so they need new stores. There are many on the surface, and they are refilled regularly. There’s no rationing schedule, either.
This is why many Palers have moved from the darkness of the underground to the blackness of the night and started robbing villages. Especially the regions in the northern Balkhan where there are lots of Dispensers suffer from the Paler plague. Villages are bled dry, vanish, and all too often drag the parasitic Paler society along to its doom: others resist or turn to the Voivodes for help.
The large bunkers Thalus and Fermat have existed for centuries in spite of the raids. They developed a rota system, which gives looted villages the chance to recover. The Palers loot the land continuously, but they do not completely bleed it dry.
THE DAY AFTER
The Sleepers will awaken. Their eyes are like gold and fire and their skin is like pristine plastic: even and without blemish. They come armed with the weapons of Armageddon, mighty artifacts from the depths of the Dispensers. They will turn the heat of the sun against their enemies, burn them to ashes or turn them into pillars of salt. On columns of fire, they rise above the mortals and judge them cruelly.
Then they will take the Palers by the hand and lead them into the light, after centuries of humility. Together they will build a realm of abundance on the bones of the abovegrounders: the few survivors will become slaves serving the sublime. The Palers will become a caste of priests. It is their calling. Even if the world resists them in the beginning, it will be grateful to them in the end. And worship them. Until eternity.
Amen.
SECRET LANGUAGE
In the presence of strangers, the Palers use a system of clicking and clunking noises that imitates their tube tapping in the bunkers. Crimes against the above grounders can be more easily coordinated when the victims cannot understand the Palers’ discussions. It’s a war language that differs very much from bunker to bunker.
SLEEPER PROPHETS
When the hundred-year-olds rose from the darkness in 2173, the third generation of Guardians followed them into the untamed land of the Balkhan. The memetics had already begun their work, but old knowledge was still stuck within the Palers’ skulls like tar. They still clung to old values: a little off the rails, but still autonomous. The second wave of Sleepers already gazed into the awe-filled eyes of worshippers who offered them dried lizards and submachine guns while intoning a polyphonic mantra that made the dust dance. Today, Sleeper Prophets roam Europe.
They are known as Daimondal, Trice, Helios, Uriz, and Enceph, and they conjure fire, heal deadly fever with divine stones, and talk in thundering voices that can be heard even over the noise of the wind and the cries of thousands of followers. In the eyes of the superstitious people, they are gods. However, they see themselves only as harbingers of a far greater power.
Many Palers leave the Dispensers to serve these Prophets, becoming Halos – thus abandoning their holy task to guard their own bunker with its sleeping gods.
THE TRISZYKLION
The disc is the size of the palm of a hand, black, smooth, and hard as glass. Into its surface, three interlocking triangles are etched to form one unbroken line. They are only visible when the disc is held into the light at a certain angle.
The Palers call it the Moon Disc, or the Triszyklion, in any case, it does not resemble any of the known Sun Discs. It is also impossible to load up codes into it at the stations, or at least it doesn’t react: no humming, no flashing, no soft pulsing. However, some Palers claim that it sticks to the hands. Not because they are greasy: the disc seems to sink into the skin, which doesn’t seem to want to let it go again. Nonsense, others say.
It is not known where the Triszyklion was found. According to legends, it was discovered in the catacombs of Exalt, alone in a room so vast the other side was out of sight. As this cannot be true, of course, there are many and more alternative stories: forged by the gods and planted into the sky as star that fell and was found by the Palers, recovered from a battlefield in the Balkhan, or discovered in a cave and torn from the mummified hands of an Anubian.
Whatever the case, the Palers worship the Triszyklion. Only the greatest Redeemers have the right to carry the disc into another bunker to be tested at the entrances. It feels like a key, so it must open something…
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