Chapter 21:

One Hour Giant

A Place between There and Now


“Hello?”

“Hello?”

“Yes, I’m sorry I just thought about something.”

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I smiled, maybe I did see a ghost of sorts in the things she just said.

“Do you want me to continue with Europe’s experiments now?”

“Sure, if you still want to go on. If you need a pause, go ahead, I can wait.”

“If you ask me like that, I could maybe use a glass of water”

“You won’t find that anywhere here but if you want, we can search for a lake or a river. The last one I saw though was around a four-hour walk from here, but you reminded me that I should be thirsty right now, I was the first two days, so why not now?”

“What do you mean with that?”

“I will explain it to you sometime else.”

“So, if it could talk hours to find a bit of water, I think I can go one for another few minutes, we can search for water after that.”

“Sounds good.”

“Like I said not only Inditaid but also Europe experimented with changing human code, they were more open to the public with the experiments and overall meet way more human standards, they didn’t use human subjects until they stopped having in any way unexpected results. After that, they proceeded with light modifications on volunteers. Though the experiments grew more and more extreme, the press claimed this to be because of the pressure that politicians and chairmen applied on the researchers in their desire for what they just called “progress”. In reality, they just wanted the next hot top seller for their gigantic catalogue, but you can only apply so much pressure on an egg before it breaks. All studies and research on Human manipulation were stopped after the results of the Darmstädter-University were met with huge backlash. They experimented with </10374-Size[071.246.031]/>. Their results were in no way as bad as those of inditaid but not like them they didn’t have total control over the media and their hardwired systems of democracy still had influence over the political appearance and decisions. In other words, they still had a public image they could care about, though this would change over the next few years. The problem with their results was that they couldn’t hide them, no matter what they tried the public would see them and once the public noticed they couldn’t be silenced. Within hours everyone even those that resisted using any kind of technical equipment knew about what happened, they knew about the giant.”

“They made the size stat [999.999.999].”

“Not exactly but yeah, they didn’t know what the three values meant so they tried to keep the ratio between the numbers about the same. They were rumours that people were turned into cubes or other unhuman forms by giving them three times the same value but those were never proven. Anyways they created a human whose values were about 2000 times higher than they originally were. The result was that on the 17th of August at 21:17 a 29-year-old man stood 3.7 kilometres tall in the middle of Darmstadt. It is believed that this was an incident because nobody would be stupid enough to enter those values because whoever would, would be dead at the very moment they would press enter. By the way, this is the one thing Gazation knows about code manipulation and the usage of the T-Code on real objects, you need to be near it. The man killed about 50% of Darmstadt’s population the moment he became a giant or in other words about 500.000 people. Though he was one of them, one of the people that died that day. His body was just too big, his heart and all other organs failed within seconds but before that, the brain was already destroyed, a brain on that scale just couldn’t function at least not in this way. In the following hour, everyone still alive tried to flee the scene they tried to get away. While all this was happening, A few programmers in Berlin took a copy of the code of the man, which they got from a participant list of the studies. They changed its scale in a virtual room and just looked how long it would take for him to fall and what damage he would cause. But their results shocked them. At 21:55 the president of Europe gave a speech which was shown on all screens in Darmstadt and everywhere else in the country. It was split into two parts, part one was directed to all people in Europe, that they should prepare for a giant earth quack, that everyone should stay away from buildings and the other half was directed to Darmstadt and the surrounding area.”

Here is a copy of the speech published in the New York Times the day after:

To Everyone, everyone that’s still alive, everyone that still walks among the streets of Darmstadt, we are with you, we give you power, and we want you to know that we feel with you, you all. I hope you understand that what I say now pains me and that nobody should ever be forced to say this but scientists in Berlin ran a simulation of the situation and the results led to us giving the earthquake warning. There is one thing I didn’t say until now, and I want everyone in Darmstadt to listen to me when I say this. <pause> The giant man will fall in exactly 28 minutes, and we can’t stop him, nobody can. When he lands, he will cause a shockwave that nobody can survive within a 250-kilometre range and that’s only on the ground, in the air it’s even worse. You all, you are lost, you can’t escape, in the history books you will already be dead by now, but we can change that, you may find comfort in the fact that you can’t change it, but I don’t, so everyone, everyone that is like me, that is scared, everyone that just doesn’t want to die, everyone that rejects reality, everyone that turns to Jesus or any other god, we are with you, we are with you until the end and after the end, you will live on inside our memories, this is something I think you all have heard before but I never saw the meaning in it before this very moment, you will live on, not in person but in our memories, thousands of people will shed tears when they remember you. You are not like others, you will die here but you will be remembered, we will remember you, I will remember you and I hope you can find comfort in that. While everyone dies you will live on in the memories far longer than most others and I hope you find comfort in that. You will be just one of 12 billion humans, but you will still be special, even in a thousand years and I hope you find comfort in that and while I don’t think you will care I need to do this. I will stay here, I’m in Frankfurt right now only 30 kilometres away from Darmstadt, I could maybe just maybe escape with my resources but I’m not special, I don’t want to use my power like this. I could use my chance but I’m a captain and I will go down with the ship. To the very end and beyond for those that come after to remember us, everyone is alone, but together we are bonded in death and what comes afterwards.

“The speech while being way too dramatic and trying way too hard to sound epic was perceived exactly how it was supposed to. It was maybe a bit too patriotic but that didn’t matter to the public at that moment, in their eyes the president was a hero. There were of course people that were sceptical about the whole thing and of course your standard lunatics that claimed that it was all staged by the government as a publicity stunt to strengthen the trust in the system. This however wasn’t a problem until one month later when the government sent scouting groups to look at the damage at different distances to Darmstadt. They found a crashed private jet only 200 kilometres away from the impact zone, it was the president’s jet. After inspecting the five corpses that they found inside they conducted that one of them was the president. They tried to hide it from the public but one of the scouts talked to his psychiatrists about it and he told it to the news, in his eyes this was something so important he just couldn’t let it slip under the table. This destroyed the last bit of trust the public put into their government. After that, they got rid of democratic systems in the political sector and became more oppressive.”

“So, Matrix and the Walking Dead and Attack on Titan are real now, and the Erwin wannabe ditched the stage?”

“If that was some sort of reference, I’m sorry Gazation put Attack on Titan on the blacklist a few years ago so I never watch it.”

“Why not just pirate it.”

“The penalty for not obeying the censorship is based on the amount and the grade of critical information that the viewer sees, in a society like ours and can vary between 5 years imprisonment and death.”

“What the fuck did Attack on Titan do to get censored in the first place?”

“How should I know that, if they said to the public what it was about it that got censored, they would bring this information to them either way.”

“I guess if that’s how censorship works in your country, but couldn’t they just give a general statement what it was without directly showing what and how it was delivered.”

“Anyways in the end around 70 million people died in the incident and it caused casualties on the scale of a war in less than two hours. From that point on it was referred to as one of the biggest disasters in human history, far outclassing every nuclear attack with the exception of Day-0”