You’ve all heard it. You’ve all said it. An eight-kilometer-tall megastructure appearing out of the North Atlantic helmed by interventionist demigods is a threat to us all.
Of course, the phrase means different things depending on who you ask. The Spire should not exist, say the Consortium, because it is a physical impossibility. The Spire should not exist, says Washington, because the actions of the Vaetna threaten the very concept of international diplomacy. The Spire should not exist, say the Zero-Day nutters, because it should not be possible for ten people to rule a nation composed of tens of millions of refugees, plus dozens of flametouched, without mind control or at least the violence the Vaetna are so known for abroad. The Spire should not exist, say the billionaires to each other on their private islands, because it hurts the bottom line.
All of these are very valid reasons to not want the Spire to exist, which is why we have Eschaton; I’ll loop back around to that in a bit. But the fact remains: the Spire stands, and the world has had to adjust to its presence. In light of that, before getting to the meat of the matter, let me start this memo with a history lesson, because I know many of us try our hardest to not think about the Spire when we can help it, and it will help clarify the importance of PIR 5875 and the situation with V-06.
As early as three weeks after the Spire’s Raising at the end of the Firestorms, HUMINT operators from over a dozen NATO member states were sent amid the countless refugees, hoping to embed long-term and gain a better understanding of life on the inside, the Vaetna’s strategic capabilities, and the advanced magitech that allowed such a society to exist at all. It was assumed that such espionage would be necessary, because nobody could quite believe that the Vaetna’s purported transparency about these things was the full story. The preliminary reports justifying these espionage operations cited the Spire’s geographic isolation and tightly controlled modes of entry as a reason to suspect that there were far more sinister and totalitarian modes of governance at play, especially when taken together with the extreme violence of the Vaetna’s foreign policy.
Within six days, every operator was trivially flushed out, in some cases literally hoisted by the scruff of their necks. It was made abundantly clear they had been made from the moment they’d stepped through their respective Gates. The Vaetna claimed no hard feelings and personally returned each and every operative safely to the office of the leader of their respective agency. To those of you who were around for that, I need not recount how humiliating it was for us all.
The Vaetna then extended personal invitations to take a much more open look at the Spire, top to bottom.
So began the series of studies that would together become the United Nations Cultural and Economic Report on the Spire (UNCERS). These studies ran the gamut, from demographic and quality-of-life surveys of the various refugee cohorts that made up the population, to the technical details of the hydroponic systems used to feed them, to the systems of governance that maintained societal order. This report was concerned primarily with the Spire’s function as a refugee nation running on infrastructure quite literally created ex nihilo and was surprised to find at every turn that things just…worked.
The Spire has all the trappings of a post-scarcity society when it comes to the basic needs of its population. There is money, the suna, but it is reserved for luxury goods; housing, food, and basic household items are all provided. Housing is allotted to encourage different refugee blocs to mingle, though care is taken to not overly separate communities that arrived as a unit. Rations of staple ingredients and spices are distributed to every household, making best efforts to match to their cuisine, all grown from the hydroponic gardens.
The gardens are of note because they form the Spire’s economic backbone. Due to a near-total lack of traditional natural resources, the nation suffers from a critical deficit of raw materials. To combat this, the hydroponic gardens not only produce the nation’s food supply, but also engage in the magically accelerated production of renewable raw materials, especially wood, organic-derived polymers, and cotton for textiles. Metal is especially limited; where required for household objects and electrical systems, it is taken from automated shipbreaking operations on the south face. The Vaetna have displayed a strong preference for buying ships whole and dismantling them themselves or retrieving wrecks rather than buying scrap. Since the initial report, stoneware has also become common thanks to oceanic sediment mining operations within the Spire’s territory.
All of these materials are mostly for household use, and cannot be produced or synthesized in quantities sufficient for the sheer scale of the Spire’s physical infrastructure. For this, the Vaetna leverage the unique solution of lattice-manifest (LM) matter, deployed and integrated at a scale that remains unrivaled. This is thanks to their abundance of Flame energy; upper estimates put the Vaetna at 80% of the PCTF’s stock. Combined with their cutting-edge mastery of magical engineering, this has allowed the infrastructure of the Spire to operate with a labor force of essentially nil; maintenance of the Spire’s physical structure is carried out by the Vaetna themselves and various automated systems.
Thanks to this level of automation and social support, there is no expectation of labor for citizens. People are still permitted to work, and most pursue a craft or education thanks to the Spire’s aggressive poaching of academics worldwide. The 31 flamebearers taking asylum in the Spire at the time of the report did not yet have a clear role; there were loose expectations that they would contribute to the Vaetna’s magical research, but not to commit their Flame resources to infrastructure, and were otherwise treated as regular citizens. This has largely held true to today.
At the time of the UNCERS, it was unclear whether this social order would be sustainable, but thus far, it has stood the test of time, and the current strategic understanding is that there is little leverage to foment internal unrest even if operatives could be inserted without detection. By all accounts, the people of the Spire are happy, the society functions largely headlessly, and the nation enjoys a largely self-reliant economy with low dependence on strategically critical imports.
So, where’s the catch? As far as the UNCERS found, there isn’t one. Per the report, there were no secret sanguimantic engines to provide magical power and no draconian legal system to maintain social order. And, perhaps most tellingly, there have been no cases of the nation’s now 72 harbored flamebearers abusing their power, either in organized attempted coups or as the individual cases of megalomania or instability that seem nearly pathological among flamebearers on the outside.
Of course, it is entirely possible that the Vaetna are simply that good at deception or intimidation, and that there did or does indeed exist exploitation or a fatal flaw in the organization of the society, and we simply didn’t turn over the right stones. But as the years went on and further reports were filed, the initial report has been more and more validated; the Spire seems to be equipped for the long haul as a post-scarcity civilization helmed by the Vaetna, with no smoking guns to suggest otherwise (at least when it comes to their domestic policy; their foreign policy is beyond the scope of this memo).
The main takeaway from UNCERS and its subsequent reports has been that the Vaetna are the lynchpin of the Spire. Their magic quite literally forms its structure and automates so many of its operations that the people are near-redundant. And there are only ten of them.
This brings us to the classified strategic report appended to UNCERS, which was concerned with strategic weaknesses. It was determined that despite the Vaetna’s martial prowess, any attempt to destabilize the nation should target them over the Spire itself.
A successful operation would, at minimum, shake the public impression of their invincibility, and at best, take one out of commission in such a way that allows for their considerable quantities of Flame to be harvested. Taking out one-tenth of the Spire’s infrastructure would both sow internal unrest and weaken their overall military strength. If done in a way that could also allow for harvest, even a single Vaetna’s Flame resources would dramatically shift the global balance of power and set up the Task Force for new frontiers of paranatural research. Most importantly, though, it would hopefully cow the remaining Vaetna sufficiently to reduce their interventionism.
So that was the task: kill a Vaetna, or at least strike a meaningful blow against them. To this end, the Task Force established a classified unit, codenamed “Eschaton.” But despite the expenditure of considerable resources and impressive ingenuity, little progress has been made. Even the Vaetna’s most egregious blunders (Dubai, Jharkhand) have only served to underscore the absurd difficulty of actually bringing one down, and no plan has ever reached a stage where execution was considered. In July 2020, Eschaton estimated that another five years and $800B would be needed to crack the dermis alone.
The situation changed on 11 February 2022, and this brings us to the heart of this memo. At 0512 SST (0712 GMT), a standard-sequence flamefall (Ripple Emanator 1242) abruptly changed heading to launch itself directly at the Spire. It was intercepted by V-02 (“Heung”) and splintered into four segments, which dispersed to four hosts:
Dalton Colliot, United Kingdom (at large; see attached Paranatural Incident Report 5872 and collated documents on “Ezzen”, as well as Paranatural Actor of Interest 385 “Lighthouse”)
Noah Gaspard Holton, United States (at large; see attached PIRs 5873 and 5882 and further documents on the Thunder Horse Inferno)
Ana Baker, United States (contained; see attached PIR 5874 and further documents on PAI 554 “Zero-Day”)
Artek Konieczek, Poland (decohered; see attached PIR 5875)
Konieczek was a typical decoherence case and was safely eliminated with no casualties by V-06 (“Katya”) in the Polish countryside at 0544 SST, an entirely normal Vaetna response with their usual rapidity and cleanliness when it comes to standard-sequence flamefall. V-06 returned to the Spire without incident after.
Here’s where it gets interesting: her public appearances have dropped off a cliff since. She was present at her next scheduled event the following day, and has since then only been seen once, for a very brief and boilerplate press statement on the events of PIR 5875 on February 15. She has missed fourteen expected appearances between February 11 and the time of writing of this memo. Such absences are not completely unheard of, especially in the wake of Dubai, but it is highly atypical following such an utterly unremarkable inferno cleanup.
The current theory is that she was injured by Konieczek’s ripple emanations, despite how clean the kill was. The implications speak for themselves: a Vaetna being seemingly taken out of commission by a routine inferno control deployment is potentially world-shaking. It remains to be seen whether V-06 will suffer any sort of long term harm, but even if she doesn’t, this is the first recorded chink in the armor.
We have reason to believe that the other flamebearers carrying segments of RE 1242 may also have some quality to their Flame or its ripple emanations that have a deleterious effect on the Vaetna. At time of writing, this is speculative, but strongly corroborated by anomalous behavior documented in PIRs 5872 and 5873; in both cases, Vaetna were on the scene early enough to have complete priority over retrieval teams, but did not intervene. This is especially notable in the case of Colliot, where three(!!) were present but allowed a PAI 385 member to abscond with him rather than intervene, despite his status as a person of interest to both them and the Task Force. In the case of Holton, V-10 (“Brianna”) could have easily evacuated him off of the actively-burning Thunder Horse oil platform, and the fact that she did not is also anomalous.
Taken together, there is evidence that the Vaetna are wary of something about this flamefall cluster. This is the biggest lead Eschaton has had since its formation, and steps are now being taken to capitalize on this information.
Currently, the Task Force only has one member of this cluster in hand, Ana Baker, who entered custody willingly and has been cooperative. She is currently under care and observation at the Center for Paranatural Studies at Argonne Laboratories in Chicago, but plans are now underway to transfer her to Eschaton custody while further plans for testing are drawn up. She may be fit for field work; see the attached psychological report.
Eschaton also aims to retrieve both of the remaining members of the cluster. Holton was rescued from Thunder Horse by an unknown PAI and remains at large; resources are being diverted toward locating him. Colliot’s whereabouts are known with exactitude; he appears to be putting down roots with PAI 385, which complicates operations significantly. His status as a person of interest in paranatural engineering already made him worth diplomatic attempts to retrieve despite our thorny history with Lighthouse, but we are now diverting significantly more resources to guarantee his retrieval.
It would also be desirable to get Lighthouse themselves on an actual leash. They have consistently been a nuisance for Retrieval, and harboring Colliot in light of this new state of affairs is the last straw. February 19th’s “Barbecue Inferno” (PIR 5910) presents an opportunity for significant leverage in bringing them to heel. See attached documents on PAI 114 “Hikanome.”
To conclude, I’m very pleased to say that Eschaton finally has a chance of returning on its considerable investment, and that we already have a critical piece of the puzzle in hand. More concrete plans for analysis and retrieval to come by the end of February.
Adam Eckhart
NATO PCTF Subdirector of Retrieval Operations
Author’s Note:
Big end-of-arc Author’s Note available right here!
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