Tau

Shardahn Temple

Jarvis Tetch was now old.  His hair had turned white and most of it had fallen out.  He wore thick lensed glasses and was stooped over.  Only ten years had passed, but those ten years had not been kind to Jarvis Tetch.

He worked on fixing genes, and yet his own genes had betrayed him.  A retrovirus had become malignant and triggered neuro-degeneration.  As fast as treatment and replacement cells were used, the virus would pop up again, somewhere else.  Tetch, the man who would play God, was cursed.  And yet, his life's work was complete.  He stood and looked out over the vast hall in front of him... and felt like a God.

Rank upon rank of clones stood in the stark white hall.  While Tetch's face was old and wrinkled by time, the faces of the clones were beautiful to behold.  Tetch turned to his young assistant, who held his hand to support the old man.

'What do you think of my angels, eh?'

'Quite some sight, sir.'

In truth the clones did look like angels, with feathered wings rising from their backs.  The wings had been a by-product of the retroviral sequences used from the Lake Turkana samples.  A curious side effect, the image of beautiful winged angels had appealed to the Bio-Weapons Division.  To the masses the Away Task Group clones were Angels, who would save the world; exploring the depths of space, paving the way for colonisation of new worlds.  Much of that, though, was spin and propaganda.  The starving masses had been given hope by the creation of the New People.

Whilst starvation, water shortages and natural disasters plagued the Earth, it was hope that kept the masses going.  And in just ten years, Jarvis Tetch, just like a God, had created a new religion.  He had started it, almost as a joke, as the Temple of the Darkest Dawn.  The Temple had been for his Angels: something for them to believe in, when they had been cooked up in laboratories and test tubes.  For all that they were artificial, they needed something to believe in.  Without mothers or fathers, it was The Temple that gave them structure, a sense of belonging and purpose.

The moral of The Temple was that the brightest light comes after the darkest dawn.  The Angels, the New People of the Away Task had arisen, even as plague, death and disaster stalked the Earth.  What had been most incredible was that the masses had also turned to The Temple, looking for hope and a way to escape all their woes.  The clones had carried out many good works, and won favour and even the adoration of the people who could so rightly have viewed them as monsters.

Tetch mused over all that had happened.  The Away Task clones were now called 'Howejtadt', or New People.  The Temple of the Darkest Dawn was now The Shardahn Temple.  And much of that was down to Jarvis Tetch... a cynical non-believer, cursed with a disease possibly of his own making.  The irony of his situation was not lost on Tetch.  If there was a God, he was having a good laugh with Tetch.

But the end of Jarvis Tetch's gifts to humanity did not end with The Temple and his golden Angels.  Tetch's greatest gift to mankind also stood in the hall before him.  Alongside the ranks of white-clad clones, but dressed in black, were the agents of the final solution.  That had been the beauty of the samples from Lake Turkana.  Some of the samples gave rise to angels. but the ones that impressed Tetch even more were the ones that gave rise to demons.

On one side stood the angelic Howjtadt, noble and made to serve.  On the other side, dark, fiercesome and perfectly lethal stood the black winged, barbed and spined demons: the Barracoi.  It was the Barracoi who would ultimately solve all the problems of the swarming mass of humanity... and it was the bitter sweet irony there that now brought a smile to the face of Jarvis Tetch.