Late in 2026, in the shadow of the engineered H5N8 pandemic, the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) established and provided financing for the Memento Ministry. The group’s charter described a goal of preserving the human race’s memories of violence, pain, and death. As the Antarctic beaches thawed and a broad international coalition already poured money and resources into the construction of a large university renowned for its natural sciences program, the Ministry took advantage of fantastic grants and subsidies aimed at colonizing the continent. The University created a department to work in coordination with the Ministry. An international research institute aimed at compiling data free from nationalist or political aims was born. It would be different, a program designed to preserve past and present horrors for honest study, forever.
Construction began in 2028, as soon as the material and personnel could be gathered. Groundbreaking saw a tremendous tunnel bored into the crust of the continent. The McMurdo Dry Valleys were no paradise, even in face of the coastal thaw: a barren landscape provided the advantages of stability and minimal levelling, while an increase of meltwater meant a stream of pure H2O was always available, but nothing lived in the valley before The International University of Antarctica (IUA) arrived. The landscape suited the Memento Ministry’s purpose. A grave monument fixed in a desert of ice and grey, remote and forbidding.
The tunnel widened into a tremendous cavern into which archives were imported. Within ten years a team fanned out internationally to abscond with primary documents where possible, copies where not, to return to the archive, input the data, and store the information for the whole human race, physically remote but accessible to any inquires. The data gathered included mortality figures from health organizations, research institutes, historical archives, and ancient monuments, any and all information on the greatest causes of pain, death, and violence to humankind over its long, tumultuous existence. The archives expanded year by year, and as the Earth continued to warm more humans made their pilgrimage to learn at the university and work for Memento Ministry.
During this stage of growth, a certain woman found her way to the gates of the Ministry, CFO of Eisgarten Shipping Corp. Conducting an audit of her company’s Antarctic enterprise, Dr. Hannah Strauss, fascinated by the stark concrete shaft erupting from grey earth, requested a tour of the structure. Initially completely disinterested in the enterprise, she found the Archive a stunning work, and the reverential passion of the researchers fantastic. Here were binders full of epidemiological studies and data on each individual recorded case relating to the COVID 19 outbreak of 2020, here were historical accounts of tobacco use from transcribed oral accounts through present data. The Palette of Narmer itself, harvested from a dealer working out of the ruins of the Museum of Cairo next to fantastic reliefs of the Sea People. Strauss had family who had escaped the Holocaust; the doctor found tremendous power in the section on genocide. She marveled at Pavlo, her guide and a chief researcher, “There is so much power in the work done here! I understand why you do it, I love that you do it. But how can you stand it down here, so far from good sun, green, and civilization?”
“This place doesn’t attract people after physical comforts! Not everyone in the Ministry works in Antarctica. Many of us travel the world collecting data, artifacts, sponsorships. Really only the monks live here.”
“Monks?”
Pavlo grinned and blinked. “I call them my monks, but they’re scholars and archivists of the highest order. They’re devoted to an idea: preservation. This is not about prevention. We’re well aware of human tendency: violence and death! We look only to preserve statistics on mortality and suffering, hopefully to enlighten the race about its past a little bit.”
“But don’t you think genocide is bad? Isn’t cancer? What do you mean you’re not about prevention!!”
“We keep a record. Perhaps eventually the weight of her pains will change the course of the human spirit. But clearly nothing else has. Even simple preservation is politically fraught. That’s why we’re down here: far away from human concerns, in our temple of ice and concrete. No one will bother us, and we will only help those who come looking. I refuse to take any position on these issues. We keep the records.”
Dr. Strauss and Pavlo wandered the polished halls for hours, surveying the sparse and serious workforce dressed in their uniform robes and caps. When she returned to Eisgarten’s headquarters in Hamburg she did not stop thinking about the Memento Ministry Archive. She could not forget the stark environment and the polished crypt collecting and preserving all the pain and death hidden in the soul of humanity. Two weeks after her return she contacted the company’s president and asked that a permanent office be installed in the McMurdo Dry Valleys and to bid on a monopolistic charter for all nonprofit ventures in that section of Antarctica. A year later Eisgarten got its charter. A stark ziggurat built from locally quarried andesite grew over the landscape. Dr. Strauss moved to oversee Antarctic operations directly.
Dr. Strauss reaped fantastic subsidies on Antarctic shipping. Dr. Strauss worked with the head of the Memento Ministry and International University of Antarctica to cheapen shipping and import more students. Scholarships developed.
One day a ship, Julius, wrecked, pushed ashore by an errant current. The ship was ruined, but only a single crew member died. The seaman fell and snapped his neck on the ship’s impacting the shore. A few members of the Ministry, University, and Eisgarten assembled to bury the crewman, and a small stone was erected. The ship, however, remained exactly where it was, immovable. It became a shrine some half-mile off-dock. In the months after her wreck, crews would pay their respects to the wrecked ship, making small pilgrimages to the site out of curiosity, then ritual. It gave Dr. Strauss an idea.
In 2034 an opportunity to achieve that idea presented itself. As part of settlement terms for the deaths of several hundred Kurdish civilians at the hands of an autonomous Airbus Defence and Space-constructed drone, ECOSOC issued an amicus briefing recommending funneling money to Memento Ministry for punitive financing of a monument dedicated to civilians destroyed as collateral damage in conflicts. This recommendation was accepted, and Airbus Defence and Space paid to erect a brooding pyramid over the barren Antarctic environment, at the core of which sat the bloody drone whose act inspired the monument. The Ministry oversaw creation of an expansive network of chambers with bas reliefs carved into the walls, historic replicas where possible, the sacks of Jerusalem and Rome, celebrations by Ashurbanipal and Ramses, depictions of the Dresden fires and Hiroshima’s devastation. Directly over the drone at the core blazed a ticker, projecting a low range and high range number of the estimated deaths from collateral damage during warfare over all recorded time. The ticker would grow with time and knowledge. A living sarcophagus, still eating.
The Zuckerberg and Nobel committees lauded this work. Global media covered this construction in drastic tones: national presses screamed offence, denying ostensive accusations of collateral damage, inflated numbers where admission was necessary, denigration of political narratives. ECOSOC funding was stripped, but most contracts and subsidies had been negotiated between corporations without UN cooperation by this time. Besides, Dr. Strauss had been busy with the Ministry leadership in the meantime. A legal precedent was established in Europe. It could happen elsewhere. It would.
In the months after ECOSOC’s abandonment of Memento Ministry, high profile visitors from many countries and companies visited the shrine. The location seemed exotic, the controversy was an excellent excuse. A parade of national leaders and CEOs stopped by for photo ops and commitment statements. Several railed in protest. While the torrent of negativity passed by, a few interested individuals made the acquaintance of Dr. Strauss and Pavlo, now Dr. Zielinski. A few felt the grave power of the archive. A few felt it important enough to make contributions to, financially, legally, with material and expertise. The Ministry grew, in number and prestige. And, when opportunity struck, the Memento Gardens grew as well.
When Shire Pharmaceuticals got pegged for widespread negligent homicide by passing a hyperaddictive amphetamine-derivative studydrug into the international market by falsifying clinical trial records, a condition of their being allowed continued access to the European market was passing money to the Memento Ministry for construction of a monument. From the volcanic rock of the Antarctic land then rose a tower of a thousand feet constructed of the local grey stone. A spiraling staircase wrapped around it. Carved in bas relief along the way up were homeless people dying shooting up fentanyl, people wasted drunk in sewers, snorting powders, popping pills, smoking dusts and leaves and rocks, huffing bags, rubbing gums, clutching chests and keeling over. Above and below the reliefs were carved the names and shapes of the thousands of chemical compounds which introduce death through addiction and intoxication. At the top blazed a ticker counting ever upward, with a high estimate of deaths on the right side, and a low estimate on the left. This construction was less controversial.
The site became a draw for cruise ships, students, adventure tourists, the rich, the politically motivated, researchers, and people interested in the cause itself, pilgrims. The reputation of the little Ministry grew, IUA’s schools of statistical and social sciences became renowned, and the international precedent established in favor of punitive payments to the Ministry for crimes increasing human suffering funneled money for further research and monuments. Slowly, the Memento Gardens grew.
The next project was tremendous: War. After the final defeat of the Imperial Republic of Turkey in the Second Levantine War, her lands were split between Russia, the Syrian Protectorate, and the EU. Her gold reserves in England were seized and redistributed to the victor nations, minus a percentage put toward the perpetual maintenance of a shrine to war. For months across the globe teams worked forging bodies of stained galvanized steel clothed in military gear from across time, sometimes forging only an arm, a leg, a head, each in unique postures, all reaching up in a grimace or scream or desperate cry. A patch of earth behind the Pyramid to Collateral Disaster 2 miles in diameter was tilled with oxidized iron, staining the volcanic soil red, then the bodies and parts were mixed with and buried in the soil. At the center of this dantesque vision towered an obelisk shaped as a sword, black as onyx. At its base blazed the estimated casualty figures for warfare across the span of human experience.
Around its circumference rose obelisks shaped like ICBMs, bullets, plumes of flame, mushroom clouds, knives and bayonets. A hall of scale model land mine victims financed by companies that produced them outside of international law post-conflict. Further out, a tremendous structure shaped like a car grew from the soil, constructed by automakers and insurance companies. A smokestack shaped like a cigar pierced the horizon, belching smoke day and night. Land painted black with petrochemicals and a giant oil derrick in the middle. A crater filled with noxious fumes requiring a gas mask and biohazard suit to reach the center of. And so on.
Through all this Drs. Strauss and Zielinski increased traffic to the archive, partnering with shipping and travel companies globally, improving supply lines. A city grew along the coast ostensibly under international jurisdiction, but the chartered lands for the Memento Ministry continued to grow. The city council was appointed by Ministry members. The Ministry was the reason most people were there. Civilians appeared either as tourists, students, or to work for the Ministry’s institutions. The Ministry spread. Offices popped up in cities globally, centers for mortality research, usually appended to universities, near government offices and museums. Governments came to consult the Ministry’s figures when working out disaster control policies. Insurance agencies coordinated with the Ministry’s data to create their actuarial tables. Academic networks relied on Ministry figures often over any other. And while money continued to pour in through punitive incidents, a tremendous trust grew up around it, backed and managed by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Buffet Foundation, The Zuckerberg Foundation, and Bezos Initiatives, among others. Whereas data was so often corrupted, untrustable, unusable, here was one fount of truth, independent and fervent. Available for genuine faith.
Eventually, though, came resistance. So much money was tied up in the Ministry that many states questioned the import and efficacy of this institution. How did it come to be such a ubiquitous tax on sovereign action? A mixture of international law and national precedent, punishment for national industries and actions. It was intolerable: a few thousand dead over some mining practices is, historically speaking, absolutely nothing. Most of the people involved died of cancers, sure but one could not tie those cancers directly to mining. Further, there certainly weren’t so many Yazidi in that province to begin with, so clearly the Ministry’s numbers on that people’s destruction were erroneous. A small coalition of angry nations clamored in the UN for the destruction of the Memento Ministry, and when the UN refused to lift a finger, a coalition navy assembled to assault Ministry HQ.
A partnership between Academi and Valkyrie Global, Inc.’s Autonomous Division landed a fantastic contract to ensure this navy never landed. Those who drafted the contract were never discovered, but the contract itself was paid up front through an independent trust, financed afterward by a punitive tax taken from South Africa, Brazil, and the Philippines, the three largest countries participating in the military expedition. The terms were simple: protect Memento Ministry against all foreign military threats. The Ministry had no control over these forces, but they swelled with the money coming into its coffers. A few raised their eyebrows within Memento’s leadership, but no formal questions were asked. There was work to be done.
A small monument was erected on the outskirts of the War memorial, upon the Pavilion of Skirmishes. Notches were carved onto the hull of the wreck of Julius by the harbor, now a hallowed shrine to people lost at sea. The Ministry continued to gather information, to construct and improve monuments. The world largely forgot about it. The Nations instead turned their attentions to a far more pressing matter: Integrated Intelligent Defense Apparatuses (IIDA).
2054 saw the rise of autonomous, intelligent weapons systems designed to manage human behavior and type, eradicating anyone engaging in activity or existing in sectors that violate their directives. Coordinating orbital observation and munitions platforms, land, air, and ocean-traversing drones, the systems were ostensibly bound by governmental order. As time progressed, these all-pervading apparatuses coopted and absorbed the duties of defense and public health. Sensors read body temperature, hormonal output, identified threat probabilities and assigned treatment resources as required. The Memento Ministry’s own intelligence apparatus hovered between the IIDAs’ data collectors, sucking data right in the periphery. It shifted largely to autonomous collection out of necessity, to achieve as thorough proliferation as possible. Human hands, feet, and ears are limited. Little insectoid robots fly unnoticed, collect data from larger systems with greater accuracy.
Occasionally, however, an IIDA went haywire. One warm July evening the Neo-Persian Empire disintegrated in a bath of flames when an update to its IIDA redefined any Persian as a mortal threat to Persia. The monument for this destruction event was magnificent.
Violence limitations were placed on these apparatuses through international treaty, however the intelligence organizations behind each nation installed backdoor access with secret protocols.
On a pleasant afternoon mid-May, the IIDAs from the Pacific States of North America, the Japanese Empire, and United Korea clashing in a single cataclysmic moment with that of the People’s Republic of China for a completely unknown reason, immediately resulting in the extermination of all four, and causing a profound global depression. The Swiss IIDA then released a powerful, perfectly infectious pathogen it’d previously inoculated its population from, a virus with a 4 week incubation period causing prions to develop in the brains of the infected. It had, correctly, judged the only way to ensure the survival of the Swiss was the absolute destruction of any other entity with the capacity it possessed. A terrible irony was that it infected the peoples of other nations and could not destroy their IIDAs, which caught on, retaliated, and destroyed the Swiss Federation, IIDA, people, and land.
Globally, people started going insane. People started dying. IIDAs were turned off. The global economy turned entirely towards curing an incurable disease. But no one got better.
At the Memento Ministry, people started dying as well. Quarantine was impossible after 4 weeks of free travel, even in Antarctica. This was, however all planned for. A fantastic monument, a final monument was planned and executed. The Ministry IIA was repurposed to both collect the terminal data of the human race, and construct a final monument for Self-Destruction Through Engineered Virus. The IIA repurposed global IIDAs to collect the bodies of viral victims and place them all in a specified mass grave, one per continent. The pits were tremendous, geological features in their own rights. In the center of each was carved a statue of an ape staring at the Sun, its eyes burned out and blood dripping down its face. A counter was fixed to each, but there was no need to estimate, the IIA infrastructure was exacting enough to have a negligible margin of error.
So the human race died.
Excepting a few people on a few islands, in a few jungles. A few people who made their way out into an empty world after the prions had all degraded. These people found a planet ripe for retaking.
Strange structures riddled the landscape.
Towers built with screaming faces pushing out of their walls, good for shelter and defense. A terraced mountain range with infinite infinitesimal notches carved into each step which was perfect for rice paddies. Gardens of blunted swords waiting to be harvested for sharpening pressed into use. And throughout the world hopped strange metal flies, between people, between monuments. Tens and hundreds of years passed, and these small creatures continued to reproduce, and wherever they congregated monoliths appeared. Constructing human memories from the Ministry databank upon blank earth which no one could make sense of. Slowly, civilization rebuilt itself, making great use of the ruins of the Forerunners, but as these New Men wandered the fantastic, incomprehensible grotesques constructed from abandoned cities, they wondered and assembled stories. As they waged their wars, they came to understand the small creatures as spirits of the land responding to sacrifice, given that their violences changed the very face of the planet.
Wars were arranged as acts of mass prayer. Ritual suicides, reverent slaughters. Only human blood caused construction of these impossible buildings, only human life changed the face of the planet. Humans became extremely adept at mass reproduction to ensure a consistent supply for ritual slaughter. Mountains rose whose faces bore intricate atrocities, each instance an altar to method, a memento for horror.
And somewhere in the wastes of Antarctica, blazing numerals at the peaks of a thousand frozen obelisks ticked up…
