A lot of the staff who tagged along with Tartarus Squadron called out sick the next few days. Then they started showing up to work drunk or high. So I fit right in when Lance's little love letter broke my brain so hard I could practically hear the crack-ping of fracturing steel inside my skull.

I was someone who drank almost every day from university onward but that was the first time I could really say I had a drinking problem rather than a simple problem with drinking. Alcohol was rationed during quarantine so I started brewing my own in buckets using baker's yeast and table sugar from the canteen. Then I used an electric distiller meant as an emergency water purifier to distill it to like 195 proof and filter it through activated charcoal (which is standard issue in every medkit across the galaxy). So it didn't matter how shitty the ingredients were, I was as close to pure ethanol as you can get considering I was brewing it in my closet. I'm glad, I'm a big guy so I need a lot of it.

The night I watched Lance's video, I had taken a few shots to work up the nerve to watch it and to help blunt the impact. Then I just didn't stop drinking for awhile. I was processing everything and it was just too much. It was like I was watching an eclipse through smoked glass; I knew that without the alcohol this would all annihilate me, just as surely as my retinas would be annihilated by gazing directly into the sun.

Quarantine was a wild time, and nobody was at their best during it. So we all kind of looked the other way, with the understanding that once things were back to normal we ourselves would get back to normal. I definitely judged the hell out of everyone else, so me becoming one of those drunks I looked down on was just one more slice of humble pie for me to eat.

I called out sick at 2 in the morning the night I watched Lance's video because I knew I wasn't going to be getting any sleep or be in any condition to work. Or exist around other people. Or leave bed at all.

I spent most of the day in a fitful drunk haze of twilight consciousness and trauma, struggling to deal with all this. Then I found myself returning to that wonderful little movie I had saved in my head; killing the entire base with biologics, taking down Tartarus Squadron in the process, and going out in glory and gunfire.

It was the only thing that made sense to me now. I couldn't continue to live as a Nakunan. I couldn't spend the rest of my life participating in this nightmare. No matter how well it paid. My life's work was less than worthless, it was all in the service of something so deeply flawed and abhorrent.

The one redeeming factor of it all was that now I had the opportunity to use all that work against them.

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That was what kept me going through the final months of quarantine. I had to survive to make sure I took out enough people for it to really matter.

After the video, Lance seemed to avoid me or at least stop actively seeking me out. I think he was legitimately just bored with me, or disappointed. He couldn't use me anymore, so he hurt me and then discarded me in search of new toys. I deleted the group chat off of my communicator because just seeing his icon pop up gave me panic attacks. I'm sorry I don't have that anymore.

I think the thing that drove me to tranquilizers was that I had to keep doing my job well to avoid suspicion. At first I thought about sabotage or at least dragging my feet, but best case scenario I get fired for negligence and lose the opportunity to make up for what I've done.

Whenever I was in the lab, I would find myself thinking back to the prepared cadavers I've examined. The samples I've worked with over the years. How serene they had looked compared to the humans on Lance's video. But they were just as dead, and I had killed them just as surely as Lance had killed those human. It was just nice and clean and orderly

The Way Things Are

and I only saw and touched a tiny part of it, so I never really had to take it all in. It was like a firing squad or a stoning, no one person has to feel responsible for the dead body they created.

But now I felt very responsible. So if I wanted to get through this, I was going to have to numb myself. And since I have a degree in biochemistry and access to a lab, it wasn't really that hard to use industrial solvent and lemon juice to whip up something that would get the job done. It would probably eat holes in my brain after a decade, but I wasn't expecting to make it to my 40th birthday let alone my 50th.

I actually don't remember much of these last months of quarantine, they were uneventful and I was taking drugs that mess with your ability to create long-term memories. When I was in the lab, I was occupied with my work. Afterwards I'd go home and drink and cry and play the same song on loop for hours. Occasionally, I would think about The Plan. I was terrified of making notes and being discovered so it all stayed in my head, percolating.

One day I woke up, and when I got breakfast people were talking about how Tartarus Squadron had gone missing overnight: their walkers were gone, their quarters were empty, and they were in such a hurry to leave that aside from a few fresh holes in the drywall courtesy of Rema they didn't even leave a goodbye note. I was terrified that another human ship might have crashed

It turned out that Nakuna was contacting high-value assets so they could arrange travel ahead of the announcement that the Mark Starr Syndrome quarantine was ending. The squad were the only people to get this treatment on Ryzeen, though it could just be because their top-of-the-line Komodo walkers were so valuable and in demand.

By that point, the work we had been brought there to do was long done so ships arrived to pick us up as soon as they were able to. Then I was back home with a few weeks vacation, while the powers that be starting revving the war machine back up to full throttle.

I could finally start planning this thing for real.

But first I needed about a week to dry out.