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aberrantangelsI've been shamefully lax in posting this.
The main thing I have to add to this is that, in early transcriptions of this segment, I referred to the dead mullah as "Ruhollah Sa'ati" because I thought "Ayatollah" was a title that had only ever been held by the late Ruhollah Khomeini. Also, I include the next bit now because Aberrant: Teragen doesn't really give a sense of how long it takes.
Benatti had the sort of eruption that Project Utopia would prefer not to have Joe Sixpack hear about, and the sort so disgusting that you may regret clicking that cut to read about it. His node kicked in while he was dying of brain cancer, but the tumor (which "rivaled his gray matter in mass" even after the chemo) got most if not all of the benefits. He first realized something was going deeply wrong when his brain started literally leaking out of his ears, and hurting when he tried to mop it up.
His skin was the only organ not affected by the quantum-powered cancer. "He realized his bones were disintegrating when his eyes slipped inside his skull. He felt his intestines slide down the interior of his right thigh..." The cancer, "now a living organism that fed off anything it touched", gave him only one real benefit: a force-field that served as an exoskeleton, keeping his "visceral soup" in "a roughly human shape".
Utopia offered him a (nonexistent) cure for his condition, got him on a plane to Bahrain, and quietly marked him for euthanasia on arrival. His writeup calls it "good luck" that the transport pilot defected. Since it means he's still alive and thus has a shot at being cured, he probably agrees. If they'd told him "Look, there's no current hope for you, but if you let us study your remains, there might be hope for some other poor SOB", he might have agreed to that. Since Æon doesn't think like that in the Nova Age, we'll never know.
July 5
[Aberrant] Conservative Tehran mullah Ayatollah Sa'ati is openly assassinated by novas declaring themselves "members of the Teragen." T2M superdiplomat Ichiko "Geisha" Iko persuades the imams not to declare jihad against all novas. Count Orzaiz and other known Teragen spokesnovas disavow the assassins, claiming that the Teragen neither is an organized institution nor has any single agenda. (In fact, [Divis] Mal sends [Jeremiah] Scripture, along with Arab Terats K'toub, Noor and Wah'esh, to uncover the killers and make them examples for anyone who would take the name of the Teragen in vain.) Nonetheless, Project Utopia and the UN take greater pains to monitor known or suspected Terats.
The main thing I have to add to this is that, in early transcriptions of this segment, I referred to the dead mullah as "Ruhollah Sa'ati" because I thought "Ayatollah" was a title that had only ever been held by the late Ruhollah Khomeini. Also, I include the next bit now because Aberrant: Teragen doesn't really give a sense of how long it takes.
Eventually, Scripture and his colleagues encounter Tarik ibn Mahmoud and his "Companions [of Allah]." Ibn'Mahmoud hands over the corpses of Sa'ati's two killers and puts the Companions' network of cells and contacts at the One Race's service. Through Giuseppe "Sloppy Joe" Benatti, the Teragen has proof to support Bounty's allegations regarding Utopia's secret agenda.
Benatti had the sort of eruption that Project Utopia would prefer not to have Joe Sixpack hear about, and the sort so disgusting that you may regret clicking that cut to read about it. His node kicked in while he was dying of brain cancer, but the tumor (which "rivaled his gray matter in mass" even after the chemo) got most if not all of the benefits. He first realized something was going deeply wrong when his brain started literally leaking out of his ears, and hurting when he tried to mop it up.
His skin was the only organ not affected by the quantum-powered cancer. "He realized his bones were disintegrating when his eyes slipped inside his skull. He felt his intestines slide down the interior of his right thigh..." The cancer, "now a living organism that fed off anything it touched", gave him only one real benefit: a force-field that served as an exoskeleton, keeping his "visceral soup" in "a roughly human shape".
Utopia offered him a (nonexistent) cure for his condition, got him on a plane to Bahrain, and quietly marked him for euthanasia on arrival. His writeup calls it "good luck" that the transport pilot defected. Since it means he's still alive and thus has a shot at being cured, he probably agrees. If they'd told him "Look, there's no current hope for you, but if you let us study your remains, there might be hope for some other poor SOB", he might have agreed to that. Since Æon doesn't think like that in the Nova Age, we'll never know.
