[Original Novel] The Eternal Mysteries of Vril, Part 13

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Previous parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12}

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He turned the page. This one depicted an arn of the nordic type shaking hands with Hitler, a vast fleet of saucers soaring overhead in tight formations. “There was majority support for the alliance at first. But when it became clear both what degree of barbarism Hitler was prepared to commit, and that he would certainly lose the war, the alliance was severed.”

The next page depicted rioting Vril-ya, brandishing familiar looking laser pistols. Chunky looking, shaped like a single serving cardboard milk carton on its side, with a cylindrical muzzle protruding from the wedge and a large dial on the side to control beam intensity.

“The strongest supporters of the alliance would not accept this outcome. They persisted in illegal support of the Third Reich, supplying them with small numbers of saucers, guiding them to disused ancestral outposts excavated deep beneath the ice sheet of Antarctica.”

In fact, I vaguely recalled something about that during my internet searches. “The eventual confrontation between our own government, and that of the nation which continued to collude with the remnants of the Third Reich...did not end as most anticipated. My proud, beautiful country was laid to waste. Overrun with fanatics, so enamored with the Reich’s racial ideals that they desperately sought to embody them.”

The next page depicted what I assumed to be a lab of some sort, walls lined with machines containing row after row of vials. “Their ambitions would have amounted to nothing, had all this not coincided with their discovery of genetic engineering. They wholly transformed themselves in the span of two generations.”

The final page depicted scenes of war. Saucers converging on a population center, blasting buildings apart with lasers, while troops bearing Vril staffs advanced below. “They altered not only their appearance, but their brains as well. Despite numerical superiority, we found ourselves bested again and again by sophisticated strategies we could mount no successful opposition to.

So eager were they to attain that advantage over us, that they did not stop to question whether their understanding of neurology or genetics was sufficient to account for possible unintended effects of their tampering. As a consequence, besides an improvement to their general intellect, their capacity for empathy was greatly diminished.”

The big picture came into focus as he spoke. I felt pangs of guilt, having believed all this time that it was the Vril-ya who inspired the Third Reich, rather than the other way around. Our own ugliest political philosophies are what infected their minds. Only down here, their equivalent of the Third Reich was the side which emerged victorious.

As I studied the engraved image of the saucers firing upon the city, something dawned on me. In all the commotion, all the fear and panic of being rescued from the wreckage, somehow I never made the connection until now.

“You killed Neil” I muttered. He gestured for me to speak up. Tears in my eyes, I shouted at him. “YOU KILLED NEIL!” When I realized he didn’t recognize the name, I accused him of shooting down the saucer.

“If we didn’t shoot your saucer down, where would you be now?” I wanted to say I didn’t care. I was in no condition to tolerate this sort of cold rationalization. “You’re just a bunch of terrorists.” He digested that for a bit. “I suppose that’s accurate.” He concluded, matter of factly.

I lay there, aghast that he accepted the title without protest. “You killed him. I mean, I...I know he served their interests. I saw for myself what sort of...work...he does for them. Still, you didn’t know him. I got to know him, and I…”

I choked up, tears now flowing freely. When he reached out to comfort me, I pulled away and refused to look at him. He obliged, backing away by a few steps. “This is war. An insurgency, anyways.Tell me, do you believe he could’ve been reasoned out of his devotion to them?”

Of course, I knew Neil would’ve died protecting them and slain me if he thought for a moment that I posed any sort of danger to his beloved masters. Yet my heart rebelled. “You accuse me of killing thoughtlessly.” he added. “You say I didn’t know him, that I cannot understand your loss.”

He pulled back curtains on the opposite wall this time. A great balcony overlooked the decrepit, bombed out ruins of a city built within a sizable cavern. Fragmented remains of Roman style columns, and Egyptian looking pyramids testified to a once great civilization.

“This is where I was born. Everybody I grew up with, everybody I knew and loved once lived here. Most died in the initial attack. The rest were picked off one by one during the subsequent occupation. I was powerless to save them. Do you know what that feels like?”

I didn’t answer, but neither did he wait for me to. “Of course not. How could you? You’re but a pampered child. Look at this.” He brushed his long, black hair aside to reveal a long, ugly scar running up the side of his face. “Do you know how I got it?”

I shook my head, meekly. “I tried to hide my sister from them, when they came for her. They could’ve easily killed me, they just thought it was more amusing to disfigure me instead.” He gestured to the darkness behind him and he was soon joined by three of his men. “Show her.”

They all revealed scars of their own. I asked why they didn’t simply use their staffs to heal themselves. “They gave us our scars out of disdain for imperfection, but we’ve embraced it. For only the imperfect have reason to doubt themselves. To stay their own hand, to hold their own tongue and second guess their presumed virtue. Our enemy’s physical perfection comes at the cost of compassion! They have no shortcomings to motivate humbleness, tolerance and patience.

It is also because they are perfect in their own eyes that they do not regulate their own actions. They place themselves upon the throne of the universe, indulging their every cruel and selfish impulse, feeling wholly deserving of absolute authority. Of total control over life and death.

So these scars are badges of honor, you see. In a society which demands perfection, to be deliberately imperfect is the ultimate rebellion. An affirmation of gentleness over cruelty, of softness over unrestrained power. So it is in our eyes, that to be truly perfect, one must be flawed.”

I couldn’t believe it at first, but I caught myself feeling some small shred respect for the man. The same man who left Neil to die in the wreckage. It still didn’t explain why they did it, though. To get ahold of me, surely. But why? When I asked him, he instructed me to get some rest. I fumed, but upon trying to get up, I found that I was indeed quite weak still.

In his absence, I was tended to by the strangest robot I’ve ever seen. It possessed no visible joints despite being made from that pale yellow metal. I’d seen so many technological wonders down here that I had no idea whether I should be afraid of it.

When the woman I first awoke to returned with a meal and steaming cup of fragrant tea, I asked her about it. “You...have not...servitors?” She pointed up, presumably meaning the surface world. “If you mean robots, we do. Sort of. They run on batteries. They have gears, motors, that kind of thing. Nothing like this.”

She struggled to explain in broken English for a while before giving up on it, and picking out a book on the topic. It wasn’t much help, being that it was in their own language, until I spotted the upper section of a Vril staff in the center.

The rest of the “servitor”, if the diagram could be believed, was simply solid metal. From what I knew of a Vril staff’s capabilities, it stood to reason that it could simply re-arrange the metal around it on a molecular level, causing it to take whatever shape is required from moment to moment.

Something like a high tech golem. Though for it to have any intelligence at all, there must be something like a computer chip in there someplace. I wondered at how advanced their computers must be, and if there was any area in which our own technology exceeds theirs.

I fell asleep a few minutes after the servitor cleaned up after the meal, lumbering out of the room with the tray in hand. My sleep was fitful, plagued by nightmares of hideously perfect aryan god-men storming our refuge...vaporizing us as indifferently as one might fumigate a house infested with ants.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 14!}