Abduction

When one brings up the topic of aliens these days one of the first things that comes to mind are abductions. People being plucked from their homes or daily lives into strange rooms surrounded by even stranger things that poke and prod and interrogate them. While not all of these are carried out by the Ecumene or even by nonhumans at all, the Ecumene is the one that has made a science and way of life out of it. Every year hundreds of thousands of people go missing and the Ecumene makes up a sizeable chunk of those disappearances. Sometimes they are dropped back home or at least on Earth with scrambled or altered memories, a rare few having them kept intact by some means or another, many more will never see Earth again. At least not as themselves.

## Life for an Abductee; the Panopticon in the Stars

Abduction is a highly valuable part of the Observational Fleet's process and as such is entrusted to dedicated professionals who are skilled at nabbing people and items and transferring them over to the tender mercies of the interrogators who will squeeze every last bit of information willingly or otherwise before the subject is finally turned over to the Research Division for whatever purpose they see fit. The subjects are in most cases, stripped fully naked to induce a feeling of powerlessness and to make it impossible to conceal any potential weapons. Despite lurid erotica written by inspired but lusty authors however, virtually none of the Ecumene's species are even capable of attraction to humans thanks to wildly divergent methods of reproduction and determining suitability for mating and such a thing would be considered disgusting deviance by a culture that by and large; considers humans to be very ugly. Subjects will typically be kept in observational quarters, thrown together with other abductees without regard for nationality, age, gender, or status to demonstrate to the prisoners that they are all equally beneath them, and are made aware of constant monitoring to evaluate who amongst them shows promise within the Darwinian hierarchy of the Ecumene.

While food, water, hygiene, medicine, exercise, entertainment, and beds are all provided for and calibrated to ensure that prisoners are kept in peak condition (sick or weak prisoners are generally poor test subjects for most experiments); there is no privacy from each other or from their captors as they are condemned to a continual panopticon and a regimented schedule to ingrain discipline, rob people of the free time to plan action against their masters, and maintain fitness. And to further sow discord amidst the prisoners, some will be shown favour should they attain enough of a merit grade to warrant it, with such elevations to get some additional comforts, to be kings amidst slaves, or even emancipated to join ecumenical society (in as much as anyone in the Ecumene is free) being deliberately designed to induce a desire to compete with one another and tear each other down. And those who are continual problems or refuse to cease unecumenical behaviour are due for dreadful fates at the hands and tentacles of inventively ghoulish researchers who officially own each and every one of them.

The legal status of abductees is essentially slavery. They are the property of the Research Division to be bought and sold as they see fit and used for whatever they please. Most Researchers will make a point of never using the names of abductees, instead ascribing them nomenclatures more fitting for ecumenical research as they order them around like whipped dogs. Often times, their "research' is little more than a form of sadistic amusement and power trip, as is so often the case with scientists who feel no obligation towards any sort of ethics. It is a nightmarish existence and a hellish undeath where one is not even given the dignity of being allowed to age out of it or grow sick and die as they are kept alive and in useful condition by Femtites unless they wish to test variables that involve old age or infirmness. One simply exists as a thing to be slowly ground down until they embrace being a tool, and if they do have children as can be expected by keeping so many people together; those children are also property, and their children as well.

In the decades of observation entire generations have lived in the Observational Fleet and its colonies on Jupiter and its Moons and beyond to be part of one form of experiment or another. Many have never even seen Earth, and have internalised the life of invisible chains for themselves. And to the satisfaction of the researchers, many have internalised the darwinism of the ecumene as well, reproducing its anxiety, its stress, the constant rat race for status and favour and grovelling submission towards superiors. It is proof to them that humans can be civilised in their dreadful conceptualisation of the idea. That once man has given them all of its secrets, they will be good and loyal servants of the great winds and storms of order like so many before them.

## Love, Pledge, and the Arena

Of course, there are different categories of abductees depending on what they are being held for. The ones who die the most frequently and the fastest are those who are allowed to keep their weapons and clothes; because these are the Combat Trial Variables; who are forced into mock battles with each other or with whatever the Ecumene wants to test in controlled conditions. To guarantee a stock, some are even, in essence, husbanded, using their social engineering to try and replicate the mindset and doctrine of that faction into other subjects or ones that are grown in biopods and equipped with stolen MCVs' production to participate in these blood games. Which are often televised throughout the Jovian armada for the entertainment of the masses, with some even being donated to the Entertainment Companies to partake in mock-war tournaments for baying crowds.

The most infamous of these being the Vetraxila Jelgarnir; run by the Usdantik Company which runs both traditional gladiator games, combat tournaments, battle royales, as well as mock-wars and other forms of blood sports. While like the gladiator games of old they try to minimise outright death, with their medical technology simple mutilation is considered an acceptable amount of harm done to the performers to please the crowds and gather interesting data. These people's lives are generally brutish, violent, desperate, and if they're lucky they'll be found too disinteresting to patch back together if fatally wounded. And to encourage the ecumenical mindset, the human abductees are also offered a chance to watch, sometimes even a chance to sit in the stadiums and see it with their own two eyes.

Regulated betting, with such enticements as a possible chance at more luxuries, status, or even freedom is done to encourage them to be willing to step on their fellows to get ahead, to ingrain the mindset of this cruel and bloody regime into them until they're baying for the blood like the others. And when they are pitted against volunteers, professional fighters, or in an experimental trial force, they can expect that at the very least; their upcoming fate will be as spectacular as possible because the numbers are everything.

Jupiter's moon of Io, the closest of its major moons to the planet and the one most intensely wracked by the intense radiation storms caught by its Magnetic field as well as devastating volcanism from the tidal effects of its planet and siblings is a favourite place to have these battles in atmosphere contained mega-fields, ensuring that all the Ecumene has to do to kill off any who get the idea to try and break the hard-light fields encapsulating them into their arenas is turn off the radiation screens and expose them to the vacuum or flood the arena with Io's endless supply of lava.

Unsurprisingly, those that the Ecumene has deemed as suitable for future collaborator governors are often willing participants in this display of cosmic barbarism. Ecumenical officials regularly watch the games, and learning the ins and outs of their favourite sport is a good way to establish connections and rapports with the aliens you're hoping to work with. Many of them are simply good eough at selective empathy to be entirely unconcerned that these are games where people are invariably going to be injured or even killed. Many even get into the spirit, and certain Syndicate companies that focus on the hyperelite clientelle have caught the gladiator fever.

Perhaps most audaciously, recordings of this are sold to the Syndicate with some editing to pass it off as science fiction programming and the latest in shockingly ultraviolent content with hyperreal special effects. The wild outrage that the incredibly violent and disturbingly realistic acting and effects generate become their own marketing buzz as they pitch them as the latest in edgy content your parents don't want you to see. The fact that religiously motivated groups backed by the Talon are often the ones pushing the opposition to the content of shows like "Colosseum Carnage" is used to emphasise the cool "forbidden fruit" factor to potential audiences and those interested in the merchandise. And these shows even have enough clout to request some match fixing.

And with the privileged status the Syndicate enjoys, with its representatives being allowed to visit with the right clearances and forms signed for those who are deemed trustworthy. They often participate just to get a chance to test out their own gear or earn a killing in the proceeds of the highly profitable blood sports with professional teams like the Myrmidions who have a stellar track record in the Vetraxlia Jelgarnir games. In terms of individual skill, Hades, the so called Bogeyman of Nyxopolis has claimed the grand champion belt in the Xaxalax Battle Federation where he's always eager to earn prize money, get in more violence, and ensure that his legend spreads not just across the Earth but the stars themselves.

Furthermore, the Syndicate often is there to buy or sell "stock", both of equipment or people, a growing trade in the Vantablack market between the Syndicate and the Ecumene that is serving as the basis for the hoped for collaboration regime to come. The Syndicate in particular often needs convenient ways to remove certain problem elements in a way that will ensure that nobody ever finds them or can ever prove the Syndicate was involved. And they also have a high demand for alien technnology, or the creations of the Geneforges and Techeggs that the Ecumene uses to craft organics, often making "product" to order on commission for particularly wealthy buyers. In turn, they offer test subjects, samples of Earth technology, information, and connections crucial in the new order to come.

The Unionists also participate, testing their most elite strike teams in the fires of real battle with a minimal risk of permanent death. To make themselves emotionally numb and used to killing people for no reason beyond that you were asked to. To confuse Network infiltrators who tend to not be deeply invested into the world of sports, the Unionist teams are named after actual American sports teams such as the New York Yankees; a Kill Team with a truly impressive win loss ratio in games of "capture the flag", or the Baltimore Ravens who excel in simulated base assaults. While the more individual focused arenas aren't really the unionist's forte, many operatives try to cut their teeth in battle royale games, taking advantage of the Ecumene's medical science to learn to get over the fear of death and pain.

## In the name of Science

The Ecumene's researchers are depraved to degrees that would turn the Shiro Sanitarium's stomachs. For them, very often the cruelty is the entire point of the experiment, to find how to best terrorise and cow the weak into submission and to establish a pervading sense of hopelessness and despair amidst the abducted and their descendants. To really hammer it in that the Ecumene has absolute power over them, and the only way to escape is to submit and embrace the Ecumene's dog eat dog worldview. And even when they are actually doing genuine science rather than glorified torture, the Ecumene has very little concern for the safety of the subjects unless that is the variable they're testing for.

The fact that humanity has close resemblance both physically and genetically to a number of species both alive and long dead who developed far away from Earth fascinates the Ecumene. Believing this to be the work of the ancient Hyksos whose homeworld was the fourth planet in this solar system before the Scrin wiped their empire from the universe in a colossal war billions of years ago and left Mars a barren desert; the Ecumene has noted that like the other "Hysosoids", humans have a high tendency to display extremely aberrant from their baseline properties in response to certain stimuli. Stimuli that they will test over, and over, and over to ensure a degree of confidence to the margin of a mere one in a trillion chance of false positive before moving on.

And their experiments go far beyond conventionally painful. They also tend to be deeply psychologically scarring, especially as mental deconstruction is a key part in their process. They will take everything you love from you, let you fall in love all over again, then crush that new hope in front of you until you break. Many who feel that this tendency for extreme suffering inflicted upon test subjects are ultimately being counterproductive due to the increased efforts needed to keep the products in line find themselves shunned, demoted, mocked, or simply ignored. Millions of years of standard operating procedure can't possibly be wrong when they were founded by people of greater rank and thus merit than you. So this continues unabated.