Ivan Wyke and the Weeping Company

Diplomatic action

General Ivan Wyke of the Elysium Protectorate officially announces the existence of the Heras L-Gate, the Weeping Company military organization behind it, and details as to joint operations taken by both sides during the fight against The Still Lady.   General Wyke passionately argues for the native Herans to surrender the bodies of their dead to the Company, allowing them to use the biomass for new organic bodies to house brain slates. An official pact of friendship was signed between the Protectorate and Weeping Company as of this meeting.

Ivan greets the Weeping Company guests before letting a minder take them to their seats in the large press hall. Reporters and their camera drones file in and take their usual assigned spots, then prepare to take notes for this impromptu meeting. Coming in from the side of the stage and taking the podium, Ivan gives himself no introduction. A brief courtesy throat clear quiets the room and brings the attention onto him. Only the local H-SPAN live holofeed begins streaming the affair, a station that countless people find themselves tuned into after waking up with the holoscreen still on. There had been rumors that Ivan hadn't appeared the same as when we first obtained his title, with some mocking that he spent a fortune on hair restoration yet couldn't explain how he got taller and more muscular at the same time.   "People of Heras," Ivan begins, still channeling a face of stoicism as best he can. "A secret had been kept from you since before the time of the Protectorate and possibly even before the time of the Khanates. A people have been existing only a short distance away, yet on another world entirely." Ivan pauses, letting the originally nonplussed reporters reporters perk up and pay a bit more attention than they had been, for a general mentioning the existence of a 'secret' was not the usual press release.   "The planet Nesuna is not on any of our drill charts, but instead it is accessible via a portal deep underneath the castle in Chiron. The upper echelons of Protectorate government have known of this portal, called an L-Gate, and we have known that it bears human inhabitants. They are the Weeping Company, a group that we did not know how to approach for some time."   "The L-Gate and the Weeping Company behind it have been kept a secret since past minds did not know the implications of releasing the information. For some time the Protectorate and the Company have sat on each other's side of the gate, offering only cursory trading and occasional diplomats, and admittedly, wondering when the other side would come marching through with an army. The Company are fierce warriors, while the Protectorate has a wide economy with a large population, and, at the beginning, leaders that answered more with the blade than the pen."   "But little did we know that we were pitted against the same enemy. The Still Lady, one who has plagued all Iron Stars polities with armies and spies, the one our late Herald had died fighting, was ravaging Nesuna and the Weeping Company. One portal away stood a group of people fighting for their lives, and in effect, inadvertently fighting for our own as well. There is not a single doubt in my mind that had the Weeping Company failed, Heras would have been invaded."   "I bring these facts to light because of a gratitude I have towards the Company, even if it was not their intent. But there is also regret. Regret that suspicion and fear had left them stranded. Regret that through non-communication with a neighbor, the Protectorate had allowed a threat to come so close to itself. Nowadays we are wiser and band together with our neighbors, and the Weeping Company should not be an exception."   "Forces still loyal to the Still Lady had plotted a scheme to drag the Protectorate and the Company into a war and create openings for their own takeovers. Cooler heads had prevailed, and I had the honor of providing a small amount of help against those enemies. But in that small amount of time, the Company had not only opened up their home and shared their technology with me, they had given me the tools and trust to prevent the loss of some of their most defenseless citizens. In their hour of need, they trusted a man and his team of roughed-up soldiers that had, only moments prior, walked through the L-Gate investigating the source of Chiron farming attacks."   "They have offered us exploration of Nesuna, which can be a civilian affair when the time is right and the remaining threats are mitigated. They have offered us the skills of their fighters. Their medical technology is unparalleled, for the Weeping Company are transhumanists. They have the technology of not only masterful body modification and bioengineering, but the ability to transfer the human mind to new bodies. The tool they gave me as thanks for my help, which I accepted of my own free will, is this body. My own squad monitored me through the procedure - I am still Ivan Wyke, to calm any detractors."   "They gave me this gift despite there not being enough organic material to restore the brain slates of their people that they keep in storage. They gave me this gift knowing full well I would be taking it back to Heras with me and deprive them of one body that could rebuild the society that was nearly torn apart by a coup only a short time ago, and one that had been on the brink from constant Still Lady attacks. This leads me to this conference, of which I have no way of making this sound pleasant:"   "The defenseless citizens the Company entrusted to my protection at the very last moment were thousands of shelved brain slates. Thousands of individuals that have no human body. The Company can make them from scratch, but at an unsustainably slow pace. They cannot make up their losses, so they have asked for our help in this final matter. They can utilize donor material to make bodies for their comrades. They can make use of human cadavers."   "People of Heras, I know it has only been a short time since the curse was lifted and your dead can now sleep whole without one final violence. But I ask of you, for the sake of our neighbors that had sacrificed so much and allowed us to sleep a little more soundly in our ignorance, to please consider one of the ultimate donations - your body, when your time on this mortal plane is complete. I only ask this of the willing. No human body destined for their desired funeral rites will be snatched as a geopolitical bargaining chip. The body may be donated for use whole or to be reshaped at the cellular level into a new shape at the discretion of the donator, but it will be a choice made with no strings attached, much how one would donate an organ or their stem cells."   "With this we can help rebuild the Company. With the Company and the Protectorate side-by-side, we can expand access to the L-Gate and explore Nesuna and bring her secrets to light. The Company can join the Protectorate in expanding far beyond their restrictive planet and learn from us what a society in a time of peace is like. From them we can learn advancements in medical technology and add their defenders next to ours, where I feel they should have been all along against the Still Lady - whether it is on Nesuna, here on Heras or our member worlds, or in pitted final battles on faraway worlds like the one Herald Wilhemnova had fought."   "These are developments that I want to see for they benefit both of us. They are slow even with ample manpower, and the Company lacks that. Alternatives have been investigated, but have not worked out. A corpse is only a memory of a loved one, a vessel that once carried the light of life. I do ask the unaskable - I ask for your dead, Heras, to allow another life a chance at living. It would be no simpler than allowing your body to be used for science, or organ donation, or any other charitable cause. The need is also only temporary until their bioengineering facilities are back to full capacity to maintain their population."   "The Company has kept my old body in storage. Another honor they gave me." Ivan looks at the delegation. "To instill trust in this program: my old body is not me, nor is this new body. I am whatever I occupy. Knowing this, and that my old body carries nothing, I hereby entrust it to the Company to be recycled into a new body for those waiting in your slate vaults." Ivan turns back to the reporters, looking into their holofeed drones. "I have led our efforts into multiple battles, and this is no different."