Mine to Possess

THE FORGOTTEN

When the Psy Council proposed, in the year 1969, to instigate the Silence Protocol, a protocol that would wipe all emotion from the Psy, they were faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem—a lack of racial uniformity.

Unlike the cold, isolated Psy of today, the Psy then were an integral and entangled part of the fabric of the world. They dreamed, they cried, and they loved. Sometimes, as was only natural, those they loved came from a race other than their own.

Psy mated with changelings, married humans, bore children of mixed blood. Predictably, these racially impure Psy were among the most virulent opponents of the Silence Protocol. They understood what drove their brethren to denounce emotion—the fear of vicious insanity, of losing their children to the madness sweeping through their ranks in an inexorable tide—but they also understood that in embracing Silence, they would lose everything and everyone they loved. Forever.

By the year 1973, the two factions were at an impasse. Negotiations ensued, but neither side was willing to compromise and the Psy broke in two. The majority chose to remain in the PsyNet and give their minds to the emotionless chill of absolute Silence.

The fate of the minority, some with mixed blood themselves, others with human and changeling mates, is not so clear. Most believe they were eliminated by Council assassins. Silence was too important—the Psy race’s last hope—to chance disruption by a rebellious few.

There is also a rumor that the rebels died in a mass suicide. The final theory states that those long-ago rebels were the first patients of involuntary “rehabilitation” at the newly christened Center, their minds wiped, their personalities destroyed. Since the Center’s methods were experimental back then, any surviving patients would have come out in a vegetative state.

Now, as spring dawns over a hundred years later, in the year 2080, there is only one consensus: the rebels were neutralized in the most final way.

The Psy Council does not allow dissent.