Ringside Extraction Solutions - Official Archives
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Item #274599234 - Last recorded message of RES Subsidiary Io Refineries Employee #385556-1
The following is a transcript of Employee #385556-1's final audio recording. Within 30 minutes of this record's creation, Employee #385556-1 disregarded Post Safety Regulation 14-A regarding unharnessed approach of the Io Refineries Central Refinery Shaft aperture, and suffered a self-inflicted fatal accident. Io Refineries has been found to not be responsible for the incident. The body could not be recovered.
TRANSCRIPT BEGINS HERE:
She is beautiful.
I stare into Her, and am in awe.
She dominates all in Her gaze. Her depths surpass the puny foundations of our pathetic structures, surrounding like supplicants to the sacred mountains of old Earth.
For that is what they are. She is our goddess, and we are Her faithful.
The gods of the sky are gone. All that remains above is void and the pale light of false suns. But She is with us. As the light of God once pierced the heavens, so too does she pierce this strange new Earth. She drives into the heart of the world, and from it Her is birthed its riches.
I was afraid when I first saw Her. The towers of the refinery, tall as they were, paled in comparison. A hole, a mining shaft the size of an Earthside city. My mind reeled. Part of me could not believe in what I saw. It was too vast, too incomprehensible, something so beyond anything I had or could imagine.
It was the first time I truly understood the fear of God.
The others feel Her call. She is always with us, always present in everything we do. Her lights shine in our barracks windows. When we work, when we speak, when we rest, She is on our minds, even when we cannot explain it.
For we are the keepers of Her temple.
The bosses may call it what they will; they would not understand. Cannot understand. We tend to Her as faithfully as any monks, toil as dutifully as any priests. Without the “Io Refinery Shaft”--as they call Her–there would be no facility. Without a God, what is a temple?
I have heard Her speaking to me.
She is calling to me. I hear Her voice in the steam and hiss of Her machinery, and am beguiled by the playful winking of Her service lights. I have been chosen. I am to serve a higher purpose. A higher call.
Production quotas have not been met. Resource extraction has been down thirty percent from the first quarter. All projections show that this trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. The bosses do nothing but dither on and on about “overexploitation” and “gas deposits” and “topographical errors”. Believing themselves wise, they became fools.
I know the truth.
The Pit demands sacrifice.
No service to a higher power comes without loss. Other believers have their days of fasting, their abstinence of worldly pleasure, even their offerings. The old gods were generous, but even they demanded something. Why should the new Goddess be any different?
I have read the manuals. Her supports dig deep into the mountains we carved to place Her here. Were She to break them, She could swallow us whole, an entire temple falling into the bowels of Io's fiery mantle. Or, should the wrong gas pocket be struck, She could birth smoke and flame, enough to send us to a Hell of her own making.
But I know She would never do it. She is a loving goddess, after all. No, she demands far less from us than that.
She calls to me. I will answer.
I have longed for it in secret, though I did not know it then. It was not fear I felt when I saw Her. It was anticipation. I feared falling into Her . I feared Her embrace. I feared it, precisely because it was what I desired.
But the fear is gone now. Now, there is only desire. Soon I shall cast myself from this world and fall into her, never to leave again. We shall never depart, and I shall remain in the house of my Goddess for eternity.
She is beautiful. Oh, she is beautiful.
I'm coming, my Goddess.
END OF TRANSCRIPT