This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Few_Zookeepergame105 on 2024-12-24 21:44:21+00:00.
It was our fault.
We’d been trying to cure a terminal illness for our species. It was supposed to eliminate the disease from our genes, allow us to grow older but age slower, to increase our strength and intelligence.
The first mistake came in the labs. We were warned by the Tertiary Council of the risks, the dangers inherent in messing with DNA, the very building blocks of our being, but we ignored them. The promise of a better life for our children, and their children, to achieve a state of near immortality, to rise and take our place among the great space-faring races that controlled the stars, was too great.
A technician merely dropped a flask, containing the proto-genetic chemicals that were to be the base of our salvation. A simple case of their protective clothing being slightly wet. Condensation, perhaps. We do not know.
The chemical interacted almost instantly upon touching air, changing and vaporising almost immediately. The room was sterile, and air tight. The technicians died quickly and painfully.
That should have been all the warning we needed.
The room was purged, and a new effort was made to achieve the stability the chemical would need.
Months passed, teams of scientists across the globe working tirelessly, day in, day out.
We moved to biological trials. Started small. Bacteria, microbes.
The effects were immediate, and were exactly as we’d hoped. The organisms showed an extended life cycle, limited ageing, increased metabolism.
We moved onto larger creatures. Domestic animals. Livestock. Aside from some limited cases of stress, the creatures all exhibited the same traits as the microorganisms did.
We clapped ourselves on the backs, congratulated one another over expensive flasks of alcohol.
We moved to the final trials the next day.
The adult male was roughly average in size, weight. Nothing interesting in his back story . No previous convictions. No history of drug or alcohol abuse. No records of medication use, and no history of mental health issues.
A perfect tabula rasa for us to try and save our species with.
We proceeded to administer the serum intravenously, as we had before to the animals, and waited.
We kept him calm, sedated, and observed constantly.
After approximately two hours, we noticed changes to his heart rate. It slowed. His metabolism quickened. Things appeared to be going well.
He then began to sweat, profusely, and at a rate we were struggling to rehydrate him, even with a mainline directly into his vein.
Within an hour, his heart rate suddenly spiked. The sedation wore off. He awoke, and violently attacked one of the medical doctors.
Tore her throat out with his teeth.
There was so much blood.
A security team came in. I’d never seen anyone take a round before, at all. They shot him over fifty times.
He managed to scratch one guard and break the arm of another before they took him down.
When we studied the corpse we noticed some very odd things.
His blood had thickened. His cells had reproduced, like cancer, increasing their density but making them unstable, almost necrotic.
His pupils had contracted, and all of the fine capillaries had burst, presumably due to the semi coagulated blood.
We were going to open him up, examine his brain, but an alarm called us away.
An emergency, code blue.
Several of us ran to the source of the alarm, but…
It spread quickly. Within an hour, the entire medical centre had been infected. In a day it had spread to the entire district. Whole towns fell, and the military’s attempts to quarantine utterly failed. I barely escaped with my life. We… Never mind.
We had accidentally unleashed the most virulent, utterly savage disease our world had ever seen.
We prayed to our gods, said goodbye to our loved ones, and awaited the inevitable.
Then they came. Great transports, thousands of them, dropping soldiers into the centres of the most heavily infected areas.
Armed with projectile weapons, armoured in plasteel and wearing heavy duty respirators, they cut impressive figures as they dropped.
We watched from our safe rooms and the last few uninfected places as they moved in, brutal, efficient, calm. They mowed the swarms down, using well placed headshots to kill, doing with one shot what had taken us fifty or more rounds.
I met one of them, once. It was a female. Tall, very tall, but lithe, agile. She moved like a predator. They were beautiful, you know. When she removed her respirator to talk to us, I was reminded of the old stories. The ones your grandsires told you about. Of elves, graceful beings, equal parts indomitable warriors and artful muses.
She told me not to worry. That other species had made the same mistakes.
Her own, in fact. She said that on her world, such plagues had been written about for hundreds of years. She got embarrassed. Turns out the pandemic on her world was caused on purpose, by some lunatic who wished to usher in an apocalypse.
They had the country cleared within the week.
They were gone as soon as the job was done.
And now we realise that, for our genetic faults, we have nothing to worry about.
Her race, the elves, have had more than their share of the same trials we face. The same illnesses, disasters. The same struggle to be accepted by the Tertiary Council.
And now they run it. Galactic peacekeepers, the strongest force in the universe. Pioneers of science, peerless in war, and unmatched in the arts.
They saved us.
Her name? Gloria. I think it means ‘victory’.
That’s how they are. Their names declare their intent, the way they live. We are forever in debt to them.
Their real name? Humanity.
My name for them? The Angels.