The Allbright System - A Sci-Fi Progression LitRPG Story

VOTHEL: [Long pause.] Ask me what you want and I'll tell you what I can. Hundreds of years too early for the NDA to pass, son, but they're not gonna come stick a needle in an old man… So what do I really have to lose, eh?

KORREV: Where did the program actually start?

VOTHEL: Unofficially, about thirty years before the funding line opened, when a Captain Ilane Maro filed a Battlefield request for "any chemical, biological, electromagnetic, surgical, or otherwise plausible intervention that could allow her Marines to fight a Pyrokinetic without, simultaneously, all of them being on fire." She spent thirty years writing follow-ups. The last one was just four words. "Hurry the fuck up." By the time we got the funding, we were two generations of dead Marines behind where we should have been. She died to a Psyker before we finished—because of course she did. Never got a medal for any of it.

KORREV: When did the breakthrough come?

VOTHEL: PFC 291. We'd been working with a captured Null for about eight months.

KORREV: A captured Null? That's not in the public record.

VOTHEL: I know it's not. I'm telling you anyway. The kid was nine when they brought him in. Died at fourteen. Best care you've ever heard of. He still just died.

KORREV: How did the first field deployment go?

VOTHEL: Badly. PFC 304. Dose was wrong, we knew it was wrong, but the unit was in contact with a Telekinetic Ace. Three out of seven Marines died on the spot. The other four killed the Telekinetic and died hours later. It was logged as a massive success—because, frankly, it was. They killed a Psychic Ace, son. The math fucking worked… I was the dosing recommendation during that mission. I made the calls. Couldn't sleep for two months, then went back to work, because the alternative was Marines having nothing the next time a Telekinetic cracked open a transport.

KORREV: Doctor, the Serum is, by most reasonable measures, the most important piece of anti-Psyker work humanity has ever produced. And it came out of the UHF Defence Bioscience Division, not Terra. That's always been one of the quietly impressive things about HOLLOW.

VOTHEL: [Long silence.] ...Mmm. In a way, son, it was Terra.

KORREV: I don't follow.

VOTHEL: We did the synthesis. We did the dosing. We took the first heat when Marines started dying. But—and this is the part you won't find written down anywhere—almost every major breakthrough on HOLLOW followed about six to eighteen months after an "unexpected delivery" of foundational research materials from a source the manifests refused to name. Reagents we couldn't have synthesised ourselves. Theoretical frameworks that weren't in any UHF literature. Tissue stabilisation protocols that predated our own science by two or three decades. The project was Black-locked the entire time. Terra should not have had the faintest idea what we were doing. Every time we hit a wall, a package showed up on the loading dock with exactly what we needed.

KORREV: And you took them.

VOTHEL: What were we going to do? Refuse? Send them back? To whom? Marines were dying, son. We stopped asking questions about the loading dock somewhere around year four.

KORREV: There's been speculation that the Serum involves more than synthesised compounds. That the manufacturing chain contains material—

VOTHEL: It does, yes. The Serum contains, very literally, parts of a Null. Tissue cultures, propagated from the original samples and from every Null brought into Authority custody since. We keep them alive. We have to. The active compound doesn't synthesise from scratch—we tried.

KORREV: And the rest?

VOTHEL: [Very long pause.] What you are really asking, son, is whether the active compound contains █████-██████.

KORREV: I am.

VOTHEL: [Pause. Then a nod.] It contains █████-██████. We do not use that terminology anywhere in the official manufacturing chain. There are very specific reasons. Some legal. Some theological. Some I am not going to discuss with a military historian on tape. But yes. The reason a Null is what they are is downstream of how their ████ functions, and the Serum works by giving the recipient a temporary, very partial, very crude reflection of that same ████. You cannot get it from synthesis. You can only get it from a █████ that once was part of a Null.

KORREV: Are you telling me—

VOTHEL: Stop. Don't finish that question, son. The redactions in the published transcript will tell you exactly where the line is.

KORREV: Last question then, Doctor. Was it worth it?

VOTHEL: [Very long pause.] The Serum has saved more Marine lives than probably any other single piece of equipment in UHF history. It has also, between the field-trial casualties, the long-term effects on long-service Marines, and the rest of what we've just discussed, almost certainly cost more lives than any other single piece of equipment in UHF history. Both of those things are true. I gave up trying to weigh them against each other somewhere around PFC 340, when I realised I was just going to keep coming up with whichever answer let me sleep that particular week…

[Shortened Excerpt from “Edge of the Possible: The Twenty Programs That Made the Modern Marine, Vol. II — The Null Serum” — Senior Correspondent Marin Korrev, UHF Sundered Press, PFC 386. Original interview transcript declassified PFC 461 under the Public Knowledge Initiative of PFC 455. Several portions remain redacted under Archive Exemption 14.7.]