Martin Hoffesommer

Civilian Engineering Corps Foreman Hoffesommer was one of the surviours of the devastating Scrin attack on Berne. His psyche completely shattered by the mayhem, he had to be put under hypnotic regression to explain what happened in Berne.

Therapy session transcript
"I was about to go off the clock when the evacuate order came through. Klaxons, sirens, broadcasts on every channel. Even the damn billboards and street signs were telling us to get out of town. I called my wife, or tried, but every network was jammed ... jammed or just static. We lived in the Central District, worker family housing. I had been supervising the final touches on my chunk of the anti-Tib wall, out on the east side. Half a city away."

"Within ten minutes, I had abandoned my car and started to run. The vehicle exit points had jammed up less than ten minutes after the first alert, plunging the city into gridlock. Seconds later, I was sprinting past Holovision Kiosks, and the ones that were still broadcasting, all I could see was destruction. Death. Fire ..."

(The Subject places head in hands, mutters inaudibly for 48 seconds)

"... so I'm running and I start to hear this low hum. At first I think it's just the static from the Public Address System, gone dead a few minutes earlier. It isn't, it's something more. Like a machine, but alive, also, somehow. It starts to grow, the sound larger and larger as I sprint, and the sky is now dark, and the City Walls are falling, the City Walls I helped build ... and there are things, things in the sky ..."

(The Subject places head in hands, mutters inaudibly for 32 second)

"... glowing, blue and glossy. Machines, but alive. I keep running. My lungs burn, my sides ache, but I'm getting close to the city. There's a thing in the sky, like the others, but huge, noise deafening, a massive ring, rotating around a central object, some kind of control pod. I am too close to take it all in, to know how it works. It's nearly over me, over Central Berne, and now it's glowing, drawing up some kind of energy."

"I lower my head and run."

"For a second, everything is silent, as if the gigantic thing had sucked the sound right out of the air. Then light, everywhere, all consuming. I fall, shielding my eyes."

"Light, light and silence."

"When I come to, there ..., there is no Central Berne, no worker family housing. All gone. Just a pit, gouged from the Earth, a pit where a city used to be. At the centre, there is something blue ... blue and glittering ..."