He awoke to a cacophony of ragged sobbing. In the air was a stench he clawed to breathe in out of instinct. It was disgusting. It was nourishing.
He was crying, and he couldn't stop.
Everything was happening everywhere at every time. It was noisy, disordered; the ringing in his ears did not relent for a moment. He didn't know how to distinguish between the bleats and screeches and the grating metal that thump-thump-THUMPED.
Every sensation was set ablaze in a grease fire. He barely registered being picked up by hands bigger than his own body.
Only then did most of the flames stayed their onslaught, and he was given a moment's respite. Soon, he performed his first action resembling any sort of lucidity since gaining consciousness. He opened his eyes.
Strange. When did the world consist entirely of bokeh? He wasn't sure if it was the tears, or his mushy mental state and... he was moving...?
Rows upon rows of moving grey dots were all he could see. And the dots wouldn't stop screaming.
Soon enough, the wind fluttered by him, losing his sense of vertigo.
The screams grew more and more distant by the second. A sounder mind could register immediately he was being plucked away somewhere else, but he did not have that luxury. The colours around him were becoming duller now – as much as black and white could, anyway – and the humidity was replaced by a cold, assured dryness. And his skin – covered in a viscous goop he did not dare ponder the origins of.
But the wind came to a screeching halt, and he was hit with a gust, and vertigo. Falling, falling.
When you were unceremoniously dropped on the ground like a ragdoll, it was no time at all.
Then he felt a pain, one so great all the air in his lungs broke out. It came from below, snaked the waist down, someways to the left. Not much, just enough, for his blind eyes to peer at a leg crunched into two.
He had screamed. He pleaded, anyone, anything, to make it stop. Through the tears he saw metal things, metal claws, and living grey things that looked about his size, looked like him, squirming about on a conveyor belt, crying and screaming and—picked up by those giant hands again – navigated below, around his legs, so tender and agonising and-
Crack.
His world exploded, and black soon enveloped reality.
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His little fingers clutched his leg. A dull throb resonated around the fracture. It was like metal mallets were constantly hitting the leg bone.
It took all his might, all his will, to keep awake. Blackness always encroached his vision, but never enough to envelop him completely. If it did, he would live with a lifelong phantom pain of a bone forever bent at an awkward angle.
No matter how many times his hands stretched out, and his little fingers wiggled about, he couldn't reach his leg.
He did not have nearly enough time to register how weird it is for his body to lose 4/5ths of his previous mass. But he knew he had to fix it; he had to.
He recoiled his hands back to his person and shrank. This was going nowhere.
His environment and the tools it provided was his only friend now. But his was flat, black, and like he was an a conveyor belt being trudged along like a hapless chick to a metal grinder. Through the tears, he couldn't make out much of anything. He threw his head on his back and forward, searching for…
That's it!
A bend around the belt. A wedge that pocked out the curve as it turned left, a manufacturing defect on the belt none had noticed yet. An opportunity to reset the bone. He didn't have the strength to do much else.
He wriggled about to get closer to it. Tiredness was his constant companion, unrelenting in vigilance.
Closer, closer… come on...
Come on...
Come on.
For once in his life, he could honestly say he did everything he could to reverse a difficult situation. But he wasn't enough. He watched with widened eyes as his body came along the turning.
He didn't know what he expected. No matter what he did, everything he did ended in failure.
His head swung back on the belt. The world turned black once more, as the black came like tides around the edges of his visions.
So… drowsy. Drowsy...
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GULP
It was common for Jiralhanae soldiers to handle the breeding operations of Covenant-produced Unggoys. Their general distaste for anything that did not possess killer beards and bodybuilder muscles was apparent in their handle of the 'livestock'.
Hence, the bum leg he will have for the rest of his life. Like objects, the guy who handled him probably couldn't care less how he was thrown away.
That was unfortunate. A bum leg was not really compatible in this military machine.
But they didn't care, as he already filled his role. He gathered not long after he awoke that he was part of the unlucky few born for the express purpose of being cannon fodder for the Covenant.
His eyes trail to his nubby hands.
Being an Unggoy did not really offer anything amazing in the medical space. He was young enough that the bone healed itself around the awkward angle he was dropped. Any bit of pressure he put in that area was met with a sharp and agonising ache.
He still couldn't believe it. An Unggoy, of all things? The species who was dealt the worst cards, existing in a world which itself was dealt the worst cards?
GULP-GULP
He expected a more grand and relaxed state of being post-death.
Not… whatever he was suckling on right now. A runny spoilt-milk texture ran down his throat each time the nipple dispensed its contents, and he wasn't certain if he wanted to have a look-see how it looked when he spit it out. He gathered that was what the nipples were in reference to.
The food nipple was as crude as it sounded in dialogue. Sustenance in the Covenant was rather lacking in that respect, especially when it comes to catering for their lowest common denominators.
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He was in what looked like a multiplex, probably 20 floors high, dedicated to feeding the Unggoy. He didn't have the proper mindset to take in his surroundings just yet, but the echoes of the groans and bleats of his fellow Unggoy paint an operation of the highest of scales.
They were being handled like livestock.
His people were the cattle, shoved into each row where our designated suckle belched in anticipation. His was on the 12th floor, slightly toward the centre.
Apologies if he did not keep up with Unggoy lore but he was fairly certain that nipples were meant in the literal sense, which existed in the Unggoy homeworld.
Don't ever mistake it for the Covenant showing a kind hand to the Unggoy, despite the generous helpings, and the keeping to tradition. It was the same food from the same nipple every time, day in, day out. It was almost exclusively optimised to bring about the most optimal physical growth spurt.
He did not want to ponder the logistics of creating different rotations for meals for a people whose air consists of methane gas, but you can bet your ass he cursed the Prophets to hell regardless.
In these premises, education was non-existent; no one to teach his kind how to read or write. It was straight out of an Orwellian fiction. To not learn is to not live, and to not dream. By virtue of limiting, one's life experiences to military training, there will be a lessened chance of rebellion – even more so if one was brutally oppressed.
He read about it in a book – learned helplessness and indoctrination. His… very late mother would always point out that he should learn a thing or two from stories such as those, that he sometimes strays too close to some of the characters who act as foils for the protagonists.
He would point out that he already did a literary analysis of it for Literature class.
Smart Aleks were naturally born into the Walker family, it seemed. Yes, once upon a time he was Marcus Walker. And once upon a time, he had been a prospective mechanical engineer.
He had also once been a human and didn't have scales for skin.
Third year undergraduate, credit/distinction average, and he was just about to hand in his major project. He settled for a rover which could detect and pick up trash from the ground. Nothing too amazing, and the technology for AI training was already readily available somewhere on GitHub.
He was not exactly talentless, but he was nothing amazing either.
He had always admired the balls of people to pursue a pure math major. Truth be told, he'd rather deal with symbols than whatever the hell C++ was supposed to be.
However, his 15 minutes foray into research and threads of random internet people interacting was met with nothing but walls of text about competition, stress and low graduate-work rates, he had lived by the mindset that he will never get a pure math job 3.5 years and counting! Committal issues or something along those lines. He wasn't afraid! Not really. He simply knew he'd fail before he even tried. Just unlucky.
Not only was it a time sink to write the code, but the trial and error aspect of almost all math - especially computer science - was something he abhorred. His propensity for lounging about with not a care for the world was something to covet.
See, Marcus was not that good of a thinker. If he was, he would have thought a way out of this situation already.
How would you know if you haven't even tried?
Why bother?
He could almost hear her mother admonishing him like he had just killed someone in front of her. He hated people trying to psychoanalyse everything he does, everything he thinks. Where did this and that stem from? His mother was one of the worst perpetrators. She would always spout some variation of that statement to him on a constant basis.
But this, all of this, paled in comparison as to not having all that nagging accompanying him every day. That nagging was his emotional anchor, one which proved that people cared for his wellbeing. She was the one that pushed him through life and encouraged him to follow through plans he himself conjured, no matter if it failed or not. For all that to be stripped away…
He slowly started to realise that, in his isolated thoughts, he was unremarkable in life, and to them as well. And that's the hard part. Realising that if he wasn't there, nothing significant would affect their lives. Maybe a few thoughts and worries, but feelings past with time. Memories don't.
And in those memories, to them, he was only a small microcosm of their lives. A blip they loved to spend time with, but never liked.
"You okay, yes?"
Marcus jolted upright, stubby hands to his side, almost instinctively shoving his knee on the ground as was custom to addressing higher races.
It was nothing to worry about. He glanced to his right, and eyes as wide as snow globes bored into his. So stupid to even think there was a higher-up on his feeding platform. They never come near his kind if it was not for their own benefit.
Just Pimya being Pimya.
"There tears on your face!"
He was so good-natured Marcus could cry. Of all people he had met so far, Pimya seemed to be born naturally good. Pimya did not discriminate between anyone, Sangheili or Kig-Yar, and strived to always help, even if it was at the cost of his health.
"Yeah. Yeah. But I cry at anything." His stubby hands smear across his eyes almost haphazardly, and he soon bore a faint smile. "Sometimes I wonder why you bother putting up with me."
"You help, so I help. Like you say, 'simple as that', yea?"
He was so taken aback he couldn't help but chuckle. "God…"
"Still have not told me who God is! Isn't it gods? How you have only one god?"
"It is a bad habit of mine. But I don't think it will be in the interest of my health for me to elaborate."
"You can tell me…"
"It's not you I am worried about."
Two faced lie.
One thing Marcus definitely did not expect in his new life was to be ruled by religious fanatics hellbent on a 'Great Journey'. They razed entire societies and peoples in their conquest for this boon. One would also think that, by principle, they would not be at all worthy for this journey if it takes killing millions of people who were murdered on the basis of disagreeing with the other party's religious beliefs. And so far, he wasn't sure how well their words started to take root in Pimya's brain...
Then again, who was he to judge—when he has only been here for a month. For all he knew, the gods were eldritch abominations who delighted feasting on the souls of the dead, and we have to appease them so they are sated. Hah.
Regardless, concerning the Prophets, he couldn't see how people would ever take what they say at face value. Their tone and the way they phrase their sentences were too saccharine and sweet to be true.
The Prophets hold all the cards, and every other race were the players. Establishing a one way relationship was smart. Other races will have no choice but to obey that their word is law, as is heavily implied by the mysteriousness of their power spread by propaganda and clever dictatorship.
They fight without ever shedding a drop of blood themselves, from what he could tell. They have not interacted with Marcus' kind in person at all. He had barely seen them address his superiors – arguably the most zealous in their worship.
He never paid attention much to the lore, only the barebones of it. Come on, he was probably ten when Halo 2 came out.
Slimy politicians seem to exist in any universe, even in this one, where society has reached type 3 on that one civilisation scale thing.
And people like Pimya were falling for it hook, line and sinker. But how could he and many others like him not? They have to. Otherwise, what would keep his kind going in these awful conditions, awful treatment?
A life of suffering for an afterlife of eternal content and bliss.
Without that, how else would they be so willing to charge in as cannon fodder?
It hurts him so much that people like Pimya view themselves so eagerly as that. But what can he do? He was only one person with a bum leg. The laughingstock of the Covenant army, where every other race towered over his.
He would never, ever have come to sympathise with the aliens until he walked a mile in their shoes.
"Come on," he said, pulling his head out of his own thoughts. He tilted his head toward the nipple. "We gotta finish this."
Pimya's face slowly became sullen, and a slight frown adorned his face.
"Okay."
So Marcus resigned himself to his nipple, sulking, mulling over what ifs that will never come to fruition. It was all set in stone; it was his fate. He was only one guy. One guy helping billions and trillions of others who didn't know between right and wrong, unknowing their whole identity and culture had been a lie.
They didn't deserve to die. But what could he really do to change the course of what was coming?
GULP!
It was disgusting. It was nourishing.
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Hi everyone. Just to temper everyone's expectations... this won't be a macro story about how the MC might go about starting a revolution in the most optimal fashion. He was only human in his previous life. I conceived this story as more of an opportunity to employ a character study of how established or original characters might react to an Unggoy with a vastly different onlook on life. You may find him frustrating at first, but I hope people will be invested in Marcus' story as he becomes the role model the Unggoy need him to be.
This fic is also available on FF and Spacebattles and contains the latest chapters (until only chapter 4... lol). Posting on RoyalRoad just to feel gratified for writing, but also potentially obtaining feedback on how the plot is going - the reader perspective on how well the story reads. One thing people noted was how casually the Sangheili speak in the fics. I need to hone that down. There may be plenty of other errors of the like, like the incorrect use of Covenant grenades (which may make some of you cringe lol).
So yea. Please review!!