I… have no truck with the Corpus. The greatest damage done by avarice, for the sake of avarice, is precisely that it, without remorse or relent, demonstrates the easy sale of men and women who lend their bodies, their intellects, their voice… to ends in which they themselves do not believe. The Temple of Profit is an ideology that teaches one thing only – that all creations of the mind, words, images and ideas, are meaningless.
And that is how you keep people beaten. By starving them not only of models of something better, but draining them of wholesome inspiration, denying them examples of a higher way of being and sapping them of any belief that they can achieve it.
To be blunt: to Hell with the Corpus.
Although… although. There was one Corpus, a singular man, for whom I make a singular exception. His name was Sigor Savah.
I was a younger man then, an assistant to the efforts of Morphology Specialist Sigor Savah, though I don't think he ever knew my name. Morphology Specialist Savah's job was to catalogue and assess whatever lifeforms – dead or alive – were uncovered as Venus sprang back to life. That man sacrificed everything – career, future, perhaps even his life – to save a kavat, if you can believe that. I know, because I helped him. Though he never knew that, either.
The kavat, Specimen VK-7, had been tracked to her lair and was to be destroyed. Sigor prevented that at the cost of his liberty, and was soon to lose his life. Coward that I was, I told myself there was nothing I could do.
Then she was there. VK-7. In front of my hab, waiting, looking at me with more intelligence than any kavat should have. And she dropped keys at my feet. The keys to the security centre.
It was I who opened the door to Sigor's cell. Who watched as VK-7 dispatched Sigor's would-be executioner, a Corpus I had often worked with in Reclamation 3. It was I who ensured one cargo pod in particular was replotted, to intercept an outbound Solaris Rail tractor. It was I who sealed multiple bulkheads, to stem the flow of troopers meaning to end them both.
Why did I do it? Hmm.
I remember Sigor best this way: he puts down an instrument, respects me enough to look me in the eye, and he tells me: "Every living being longs to be whole. Every living thing yearns to defy death. If from death you returned, yet the part you loved best did not… what then?" That was the last thing he ever said to me.
That is why I helped him. In saving that animal, Sigor Savah had saved himself. How many of us can say that? I was not about to stand by and let the Corpus steal from him the one thing that was truly his.
To a flaming Hell with the bloody Corpus.
Cetus, is where Sigor went. The Plains. His story is out there, if you want to hear it. To this day, I hope he is, too.
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