Starfleet makes a Hellish discovery (RAR!)
Posted: 2019-07-25 03:56pm
In this scenario you are a Starfleet Captain onboard a Starfleet Ship on a long range exploration voyage when you come across the remains of a long extinct species. A few dozen planets have ruins, some flora and fauna with a shared biological heritage and had suffered extinction events about a million years prior. There are several starships floating out in space, hulks that have been stripped of most of their technical systems, but enough remains of these to snoot out several things of note. First of all they had Warp Drive. Second of all they seemed to have wiped themselves out in a civil war. Thirdly all the dead corpses have neural implants installed at the back of the cerebellum. These were not like Borg implants and there is plenty of evidence of individuality, from half finished meals frozen meals floating about in messhalls to various personal artifacts. The purpose of of these implants will become evident with the revelation that there is at least one extensive relic of this civilization which exists and functions on.
What it is is basically a giant server farm the size of a city located on the nightside of an otherwise quite boring tidally locked mercury like planet. Largescale solar panels on the dayside provide it with power and it has a modest set of defense systems which includes a shield generator, a few old phaser cannons and a torpedo launcher long depleted. An IFF module you picked up on one of the wrecks allows you to bypass the remaining defenses. This has allowed an away team to examine this facility. The small army of meter long repair spiders is a bit unusual, but nothing too out of the ordinary. The real shocker happens when your engineers manage to find out how to access these machines. There is a simulated enviroment running on them as well as the mindstates of billions of individuals, which you access through your Holodeck. What you find is a nightmare.
The basic enviroment is a volcanic wasteland with rivers and lakes of lava and acid and other more organic fluids and jungles of twisted black thorned plants with a sky dimly illuminated not by sunlight, but by smoldering clouds far above. There are also fire pits, black obsidian spires. But beyond this, the true purpose of this world is made bear with it's denizens. The Holodeck Away Team soon came across a road which was lined with double barred crosses onto which people were nailed by hands and feat, writhing in pain. Along said road naked men and women trudge pulling spiked iron carts each with a reptilian figure with a spiked scaled hide, quills for hair an a horned face driving them on. Some carry ore or other raw materials, some carry dead body parts or tools and weapons. These travel between towns and cities doing a grizzly trade. Said towns are composed of buildings inhabited by the various types of these Reptrillian beings (which your away team soon comes to call Demons) which live in boxy medieval style buildings mostly made of volcanic stone with ghastly ornamentation (you know how some English pubs are named "The _'s Head", well this is less metaphorical here in this simulation) and pens of barbed iron in which ranks of people are kept when not being dragged out to toil in mines, manning furnaces, maintain roads, chop lumber from forests which can ensnare and devour woodsmen, hall the timbers, work in crude factories with grotesque machinery that makes Victorian era factory equipment look safe or other such tasks under the lash of their demonic overseers. That's not when their bled out, used as fuel in the furnaces, nailed up, tormented for sport, raped, killed, eaten or otherwise brutalized by their masters. For all that fall, a steady supply of fresh ones comes down as firey meteorites which crash into the landscape being hunted down by boisterous hunter demons who bring them to the slave pits. Some are drafted to fighting in the Legions of Hell and are given crude suits of jagged armor, swords, spears, halberds, axes, maces and muskets to march off to war under the supervision of Demonic Captains to fight other armies of the same nature. Even with the oversight of Demons, the fatigue of marching long distances barefoot eating foul tasting sludge and disease most soldiers fall on their foes with brutal abandon for those people that manage to win and slay three or more fellows get a reprieve, being reincarnated into another simulation where they get to work as bronze age slaves, peasants, artisans, scribes, warriors or even nobles (based on the number of their kills) for a spell before they eventually die and go back to the main Hell World.
Fortunately the holodeck safety protocols held up and your crew was spared the brutalization of the Demons. After a few failed attempts at tormenting them some of the Demons talk among themselves. Then one comes forth and begs the apology of the Away Team and offers to take them to see a higher authority, which involves them going to an ominous black temple and sacrificing someone from the pens to open a gateway leading to a rather monstrous but refined palace where they are met by a massive but civilized and courteous Demon Lord who explains to them the purpose of this facility. Long Story Short the Long Extinct ancient alien civilization that you'd been studying (called the Bhroshij) worked out systems which allowed them to transfer their Consciousnesses onto non-biological substrates when they died. There were several different versions of this. This included "Heaven", which was lands of pleasure and plenty combined with eternal youth and vigor. This existed alongside a Purgatory, which was basically a set of less spectacular worlds of tedious work with a bit of fun on the side for those which failed to measure up to their society's ideals and for the worst of their kind there was Hell where the guilty would face their punishment (which was as a default as Eternal as Possible, though this could be countermanded at a latter point by legally constituted authority of the Ministry of Post Mortum Affairs, which now does not exist). Lifetime after lifetime of torture and torment punctuated by periods of comparitive peace and pleasure so that the damned don't get used to their lot and can hope for such a reprieve. During the last stages of the Civil War, Rebels and Rebel Sympathizers were sent to hell unless they decided to change sides to try restore order. This did not work. There were reports of Rebels building their own Hell for Loyalist. Exactly why they were spared during the war is a point that they did not know, though the lack of strategic value of the Hell System and the strategic defenses is part of it. Currently five billion mindstates exist in this hell, all that remains of the Bhroshij species that have existed in a cycle of rebirth, torment, enslavement and violent death with occasional bouts of bronze age comparative peace.
In any case the Demon Prince has no interest in tormenting the away team or any other Starfleet Group since even though they are interlopers they have not been specifically Damned. Visits of the living to Hell did happen back in the day to scare people straight. it is willing to share information on the Bhroshij civilization. They have no intention of expanding Hell, which is a reasonable claim given that this facility has not expanded itself over the last million years. Though it will resist attempts to dismantle it. He also informs the away that the Demons (or at least the Demonic People as there are rather nasty Demonic Beasts) are Self Aware, even if they are programmed to crave to torment The Damned. Occasionally some have been known to question their role as tormentors. He is also willing to provide maps of the environments as well as more specific information about the simulation
After reading and reviewing the reports, you are left with the question of what to do about this. It would be possible to destroy the Hell Servers with a torpedo or two, though some might object about wiping out billions of beings. It might be possible to liberate Hell by reprogramming it into something less horrible if a team of engineers are deployed.
What do you do?
Zor
What it is is basically a giant server farm the size of a city located on the nightside of an otherwise quite boring tidally locked mercury like planet. Largescale solar panels on the dayside provide it with power and it has a modest set of defense systems which includes a shield generator, a few old phaser cannons and a torpedo launcher long depleted. An IFF module you picked up on one of the wrecks allows you to bypass the remaining defenses. This has allowed an away team to examine this facility. The small army of meter long repair spiders is a bit unusual, but nothing too out of the ordinary. The real shocker happens when your engineers manage to find out how to access these machines. There is a simulated enviroment running on them as well as the mindstates of billions of individuals, which you access through your Holodeck. What you find is a nightmare.
The basic enviroment is a volcanic wasteland with rivers and lakes of lava and acid and other more organic fluids and jungles of twisted black thorned plants with a sky dimly illuminated not by sunlight, but by smoldering clouds far above. There are also fire pits, black obsidian spires. But beyond this, the true purpose of this world is made bear with it's denizens. The Holodeck Away Team soon came across a road which was lined with double barred crosses onto which people were nailed by hands and feat, writhing in pain. Along said road naked men and women trudge pulling spiked iron carts each with a reptilian figure with a spiked scaled hide, quills for hair an a horned face driving them on. Some carry ore or other raw materials, some carry dead body parts or tools and weapons. These travel between towns and cities doing a grizzly trade. Said towns are composed of buildings inhabited by the various types of these Reptrillian beings (which your away team soon comes to call Demons) which live in boxy medieval style buildings mostly made of volcanic stone with ghastly ornamentation (you know how some English pubs are named "The _'s Head", well this is less metaphorical here in this simulation) and pens of barbed iron in which ranks of people are kept when not being dragged out to toil in mines, manning furnaces, maintain roads, chop lumber from forests which can ensnare and devour woodsmen, hall the timbers, work in crude factories with grotesque machinery that makes Victorian era factory equipment look safe or other such tasks under the lash of their demonic overseers. That's not when their bled out, used as fuel in the furnaces, nailed up, tormented for sport, raped, killed, eaten or otherwise brutalized by their masters. For all that fall, a steady supply of fresh ones comes down as firey meteorites which crash into the landscape being hunted down by boisterous hunter demons who bring them to the slave pits. Some are drafted to fighting in the Legions of Hell and are given crude suits of jagged armor, swords, spears, halberds, axes, maces and muskets to march off to war under the supervision of Demonic Captains to fight other armies of the same nature. Even with the oversight of Demons, the fatigue of marching long distances barefoot eating foul tasting sludge and disease most soldiers fall on their foes with brutal abandon for those people that manage to win and slay three or more fellows get a reprieve, being reincarnated into another simulation where they get to work as bronze age slaves, peasants, artisans, scribes, warriors or even nobles (based on the number of their kills) for a spell before they eventually die and go back to the main Hell World.
Fortunately the holodeck safety protocols held up and your crew was spared the brutalization of the Demons. After a few failed attempts at tormenting them some of the Demons talk among themselves. Then one comes forth and begs the apology of the Away Team and offers to take them to see a higher authority, which involves them going to an ominous black temple and sacrificing someone from the pens to open a gateway leading to a rather monstrous but refined palace where they are met by a massive but civilized and courteous Demon Lord who explains to them the purpose of this facility. Long Story Short the Long Extinct ancient alien civilization that you'd been studying (called the Bhroshij) worked out systems which allowed them to transfer their Consciousnesses onto non-biological substrates when they died. There were several different versions of this. This included "Heaven", which was lands of pleasure and plenty combined with eternal youth and vigor. This existed alongside a Purgatory, which was basically a set of less spectacular worlds of tedious work with a bit of fun on the side for those which failed to measure up to their society's ideals and for the worst of their kind there was Hell where the guilty would face their punishment (which was as a default as Eternal as Possible, though this could be countermanded at a latter point by legally constituted authority of the Ministry of Post Mortum Affairs, which now does not exist). Lifetime after lifetime of torture and torment punctuated by periods of comparitive peace and pleasure so that the damned don't get used to their lot and can hope for such a reprieve. During the last stages of the Civil War, Rebels and Rebel Sympathizers were sent to hell unless they decided to change sides to try restore order. This did not work. There were reports of Rebels building their own Hell for Loyalist. Exactly why they were spared during the war is a point that they did not know, though the lack of strategic value of the Hell System and the strategic defenses is part of it. Currently five billion mindstates exist in this hell, all that remains of the Bhroshij species that have existed in a cycle of rebirth, torment, enslavement and violent death with occasional bouts of bronze age comparative peace.
In any case the Demon Prince has no interest in tormenting the away team or any other Starfleet Group since even though they are interlopers they have not been specifically Damned. Visits of the living to Hell did happen back in the day to scare people straight. it is willing to share information on the Bhroshij civilization. They have no intention of expanding Hell, which is a reasonable claim given that this facility has not expanded itself over the last million years. Though it will resist attempts to dismantle it. He also informs the away that the Demons (or at least the Demonic People as there are rather nasty Demonic Beasts) are Self Aware, even if they are programmed to crave to torment The Damned. Occasionally some have been known to question their role as tormentors. He is also willing to provide maps of the environments as well as more specific information about the simulation
After reading and reviewing the reports, you are left with the question of what to do about this. It would be possible to destroy the Hell Servers with a torpedo or two, though some might object about wiping out billions of beings. It might be possible to liberate Hell by reprogramming it into something less horrible if a team of engineers are deployed.
What do you do?
Zor