"In war, truth is the first casualty."

Excerpt from Jarek's journal - Date Unknown

It is dark. I no longer have any idea how long I have been here. It seems like only yesterday that we were removed from the Tribunal Office to this installation. We found ourselves part of a sorry bunch of men and women, heads bowed and shuffling, led through a maze of doctors and machinery that poked and prodded us without emotion. Individually and in groups, we had wires attached to various body parts, various images were played seemingly directly into our heads and a wide array of blood and tissue samples were taken by the army of white-coated scientists that surrounded us like insects feeding upon a rotting and bloated corpse.

Separated from the rest, I was hung from a huge contraption that resembled a gyroscope I once saw on the mantle of my uncle's house. The machine rotated and span until I could no longer retain consciousness, and my mind was flooded with inescapable dreams of death and carnage. I forgot everything. The faces of my loved ones seemed to fade before the gaze of my mind's eye, and eventually I could not even have correctly named myself had my very life depended on it.

I awoke strapped to a gurney in a long, brilliantly white corridor. My head was fixed in such a way that I could only partially see my surroundings, yet I was aware that far from being alone, I was surrounded by others fastened similarly. In time, a group of doctors approached and asked me a series of questions: Who was I? Where was I from? Questions that, as they were being asked, I was supremely confident of being able to answer seemed, as I formed my lips to respond, to require a monumental mental effort, as if the part of my mind that made me who I am had been submerged beneath layers of other, new information I had never had to access before. My reflexes were tested, and then finally I was given yet another series of injections that made me sleep once more.

And so I found myself in the darkness. For a long time I allowed myself to imagine that all the life I had lived so far had been an illusion, some bizarre hallucination of an unborn foetus suspended safely inside its mother's womb. The fluid that surrounded me was tepid, yet comforting, buoying my invisible limbs and flooding my throat. As time passed I began, blindly, to explore my body, discovering a complex network of wires and tubes that seemed at once both alien and yet completely natural. I understood intrinsically that these were as important to my survival as any organic part of my wrinkled and puckered form. A hard mesh fit snugly over my scalp, its wiry ends burrowing deeply into the broken skin of my head. A flash of panic briefly struck me as I realised that I was no longer actively breathing, bringing with it all the old tales my Grandmothers had told me as a child of creatures living beyond death. Horrible, twisted creatures that rose from the earth to feed, parasitically, upon the living. Was this to be my fate?

After the longest time, I woke again in the dark. A dry dark this time, my beleaguered body rested upon a most comfortable bed. My lungs ached from the renewed exertions of pumping air into my frame, and my entire system felt as though I had been beaten, badly, yet I found relief in the open and welcoming arms of sleep. My dreams were filled with complex images, and upon waking it seems that now I have a deeper understanding of my situation than before.

Soon the others will come to release me from the darkness.

Soon, ensconced in my life-preserving pod, I shall learn to control the fantastic craft that rage against our ancient oppressors.

Soon my existence will be filled with the light of a thousand thousand suns, and I shall join my kindred in the crucible of righteous WAR.