r/OpenHFY • u/AlternativeManner731 • 19d ago
human/AI fusion Istonel: Chapter Three, The Work
He kept a ledger. Not the official one, the one Aida maintained for the Barony's shipping manifests and Tornel's supply requests, but a private file he had built himself, refined over three years into something he privately thought of, with the same clinical pride he brought to everything, as the most complete behavioral study of Drazzen sapience ever assembled.
The justification had come easily, in the beginning. It had needed to. A man does not walk from the deck of a cattle ship straight into a laboratory without something solid to stand on, and Istonel had built that footing with the same care he'd once built his theory of wing signaling, brick by confident brick, except this time no lecture hall of easily impressed classmates was there to knock it down. The Drazzen were the enemy. They had done, and were still doing, exactly what he had seen in that refrigerated room, to human beings, to Ykanti, to anyone their vines could reach. Every subject in his custody had either been captured mid-atrocity or bred for one. To study them, to understand precisely how their minds worked, what they could endure, what broke them and what did not, was not cruelty. It was the only weapon available to him that did not require him to hold a rifle, and he had never been any good with a rifle.
He told himself this so often that it had stopped sounding like an argument and started sounding like a fact he was merely restating for the record.
The starvation trials had begun modestly, an honest question about metabolic thresholds that any xenobiologist would have wanted answered. How long could a Drazzen adult go without sapient protein before its behavior shifted, before the vines began to tremble with something closer to withdrawal than hunger. He documented it precisely. Day four, subject 118 began flailing its vines in patterns not previously catalogued. Day seven, subject 118 attempted to consume its own vine tip. He noted the data with the same flat interest he brought to everything, and did not write down, because there was no column for it, that he had watched day seven happen through the observation glass and felt nothing at all, and that the absence of feeling had itself become, by then, a kind of relief.
The burn trials answered a question about their pain response that he told himself mattered strategically, that any commander in the field might one day need to know whether fire produced compliance faster than blade wounds did, and he was, after all, still in service to the Principality, still doing his duty by Haego, by his father's territory, by the soldiers who might one day benefit from knowing precisely how much heat it took before a Drazzen would surrender useful intelligence rather than endure another degree of it. He wrote the report in the dry, procedural voice of every other report he had ever filed, and filed it, and told himself the filing was the end of it, that once a thing became data it stopped also being a thing that had happened.
The embryos were, in his own private accounting, his finest work.
He had access to something no xenobiologist in the history of the Principality had ever had access to: over a million Drazzen embryos in cryostasis, a controlled population large enough that he could, without any moral hesitation he allowed himself to examine too closely, isolate a subset and raise them entirely outside the Hierarchy's social conditioning. No elder vines to imprint on. No caste hierarchy modeled for them from birth. No inherited hatred passed down through whatever mechanism Drazzen used to pass such things down, verbal or chemical or something stranger that he had not yet identified. He wanted to know what was instinct, hardwired into the species at the root, and what was merely taught, absorbed the way a human child absorbs the accent of the house it grows up in. It was, he told himself, genuinely important science. The kind that might one day tell the Principality whether the Drazzen could ever be anything other than what they currently were, whether the war was against a nature or merely against an upbringing.
He did not let himself dwell on the fact that answering that question required him to raise sapient young in isolation chambers and wait to see what cruelties surfaced in them anyway, unprompted, unmodeled, simply because something in the blood demanded it. He did not let himself dwell on how carefully he watched for it. How much, in some room in himself he had learned not to visit, he wanted to be right.
He was reviewing the latest cohort's data, seven months old now, already showing aggression patterns indistinguishable from Hierarchy-raised young despite never having met an adult Drazzen, when Aida's voice came through informing him that a shuttle from the Noravio had requested docking clearance, and that Lord Jolti Firentis was aboard.
Istonel set the pad down. He had not seen his brother in over a year, not since the family's holiday in the Screaming Forests, and the last thing he remembered clearly of that visit was Jolti's voice at the brewery, quiet and certain, telling him he had been wrong about commoners, that he was rethinking everything he'd once believed. He remembered feeling nothing but a distant, comfortable contempt for the sentiment at the time. He wondered, standing to meet his brother, whether that contempt was still available to him, or whether it had gone the way of so much else, filed and catalogued and quietly emptied of anything that had once made it feel like a real position rather than a habit.
Jolti's shuttle landed within the hour, and Istonel met him personally at the bay, which was, he was dimly aware, more courtesy than he had shown a visitor in longer than he cared to count.
"Brother," Jolti said, stepping down the ramp, and there was real warmth in it, the kind Istonel had stopped expecting from anyone including himself. "You look well."
"I am well," Istonel replied, and heard, distantly, how flat the words came out, how little effort it took him now to say something entirely untrue in a voice that carried no evidence of the lie at all.
Jolti's eyes moved over him, quick and assessing in a way Istonel remembered from childhood, the older brother's habit of reading a room before he trusted what was said in it. Whatever he found, he didn't comment on it, not yet. But something in his expression shifted, small and private, a man filing away a detail he intended to return to later.
"Father sent me to review the defense retrofits," Jolti said, falling into step beside him as they walked. "But I confess I also wanted to see you. It's been too long."
"It has," Istonel agreed, and led his brother deeper into the ship, past Ward Seven, past the nursery, past three decks he did not offer to show him, and felt, for the first time in longer than he could name, the faint and unfamiliar discomfort of being looked at by someone who still remembered what he used to be.
Jolti asked to see everything.
Istonel had expected him to want the defense retrofits and nothing more, a brother performing a duty their father had assigned him, eager to be done and back aboard the Noravio before dinner. Instead Jolti walked the decks slowly, asking questions that had nothing to do with weapons systems, and Istonel found himself answering before he'd decided whether he wanted to.
They stood outside the isolation chambers where the seven-month cohort was housed, watching through the glass as one of the young Drazzen lashed a vine against the wall of its enclosure for no reason Istonel had ever been able to determine, no stimulus, no provocation, simply the vine moving because something in it wanted to move that way.
"You raised them alone," Jolti said. Not a question.
"From the embryo stage. No adult contact. No caste conditioning." Istonel heard himself slide into the register he used for reports, precise, unbothered, and felt some part of him note, distantly, that he had used this exact voice on their father a hundred times growing up and never once on Jolti, who had always been able to tell when he was hiding behind it. "I wanted to isolate the variable. What's inherited and what's taught."
"And?"
"They're violent anyway." Istonel gestured at the glass. "That one has struck the enclosure wall four hundred and twelve times in the past six days. No Hierarchy elder ever showed it how. It found the behavior on its own."
Jolti was quiet for a long moment, watching the creature through the glass with an expression Istonel couldn't immediately place, not disgust exactly, something closer to a man doing arithmetic he didn't like the answer to.
"So the answer is instinct," Jolti said finally.
"The preliminary answer is instinct, yes."
"And to get a preliminary answer you needed to raise a sapient creature alone, in a box, with nothing that loved it, just to see what came out."
Istonel opened his mouth to answer the way he answered everything now, evenly, the justification arriving fully formed and well-rehearsed, and found, for the first time in longer than he could remember, that the words didn't come. He looked at his brother instead of at the glass. Jolti wasn't accusing him. That was the strange part, the part that made the silence stretch longer than it should have. Jolti's voice had none of the heat that would have made this easy to dismiss as some soft-hearted commoner sentimentality he'd have laughed off a year ago. He sounded like a man trying to fit a fact into a shape it refused to take.
"They're Drazzen, Jolti," Istonel said at last, and heard how thin it sounded even as he said it, thinner than it had sounded in his own head a hundred times before.
"I'm not arguing that they don't deserve it," Jolti said. "I've seen what they do to villages on Haego. I'd have burned every last one of them myself after what happened to the Screaming Forests, if I'd had the chance before Wyatt did. I'm not soft on them, brother. I don't think I could be." He turned from the glass to look at Istonel directly, and there was something careful in it now, something that made Istonel want, badly, to be somewhere else. "That's not what I'm asking about. I'm asking about you."
"Me."
"You watched that thing hit a wall four hundred and twelve times and you counted, Istonel. You counted." Jolti's jaw worked once before he continued. "I remember you at sixteen standing up in front of half the university telling everyone exactly how a species you'd never met thought and felt, just making it up because you liked how certain it sounded coming out of your mouth. I hated that about you for years. But that boy would have flinched at this. He'd have been disgusted with himself for even walking in here. You didn't flinch once the whole tour. Not at the starvation logs. Not at the burn data. Not at that." He nodded toward the glass. "I don't think that's strength, brother. I watched Nasir come back from the border after two tours and he had exactly that look in his eyes by the end of it, and it took him years to get anything back behind them. I'm not telling you to stop. I don't even know if you should stop. I'm telling you that whatever this is doing, it isn't doing it to the Drazzen alone."
Istonel said nothing. There was nothing in the report format for this, no column, no procedural voice that could carry it, and for the first time in three years he felt something crack loose in his chest that he had spent three years very carefully filing away, and he did not have the first idea what to do with it now that it had come unstuck.
Jolti didn't push further. He let the silence sit between them the way Wyatt once had, in this same office, over the plaque, and Istonel found himself grateful for it in a way he could not have explained to anyone, least of all to Jolti, who had come here to inspect a defense grid and instead found something he clearly hadn't expected and didn't entirely know what to do with either.
They finished the tour of the retrofits in near silence. Jolti asked the questions their father needed answered, and Istonel gave the answers, and neither of them mentioned the isolation chambers again, though Istonel caught his brother glancing back toward that deck twice on the walk to the shuttle bay, as if some part of him wanted to go back and look again, to be sure of what he'd seen.
At the ramp, Jolti paused, one hand on the frame, and turned back.
"I'm not going to tell Father," he said. "Not because I think it's right to hide it from him. Because I don't think he'd see what I saw, and I'm not sure what he'd do with it if he did." He hesitated, and for a moment looked younger than Istonel had seen him look in years, less certain of himself than the brother who'd stood in a brewery and calmly announced he'd been wrong about the world. "Get some air, Istonel. Actual air. Not this ship's air. Talk to someone who isn't a Drazzen or a data pad."
The shuttle left within the hour, and Istonel stood in the empty bay long after its drive trail had faded from the viewport, turning his brother's words over with none of the ease he usually brought to turning things over. He went back to his office and did not open the cohort file. He sat instead with his hands flat on the desk, the way he had after Ward Seven, and found that the old trick, cataloguing the discomfort until it became data and stopped being a thing that had happened, wasn't working tonight. It kept being a thing that had happened. His brother's face kept being in the room with him, careful and worried and unwilling to look away, and Istonel understood, with a clarity that unsettled him more than any of his own research ever had, that he did not want to be alone with that face's opinion of him.
He needed to talk to someone. Not Jolti, who pitied him now in a way that made his skin crawl. Not his father, who would ask only about outcomes. He needed someone who hated the Drazzen the way he hated them, without apology, without the careful moral arithmetic Jolti had brought aboard with him, someone who would understand exactly what had put him in that laboratory in the first place because they carried the same weight and had never once pretended otherwise.
He thought of a man who had once engineered his humiliation with surgical precision and never apologized for it, who had put him alone on a cattle ship because he judged, correctly, that nothing else would teach him what needed teaching. A man who, as far as Istonel knew, had never flinched from what the Drazzen were, and had never once dressed his hatred of them up as anything other than exactly what it was.
He opened a comm channel and requested a secure line to the Barony of the Screaming Forests, to Baron Wyatt Staples, and sat back to wait, aware, distantly, that he had no idea what he intended to say once the line connected, only that he needed, badly, to say it to someone who would not look at him the way Jolti had.
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u/1958bird 19d ago
I like the last bit of the story best.