Innocence Devoured (Butterfly Soldiers) (Patreon)

Helmet Cam image of the famous security specialist  ("butterfly soldier") Pink Granger, Immortalis upper canopy, Circa 2329. UNTITLED, Collected in "Innocence Devoured; The Beautiful Abbatoir, a brief visual history of Immortalis", Alibaba Digital Publishing, 2368

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The death world of Immortalis would be devoid of humans if it weren't for the pesky fact that the spores of the Puer Aeternam fungus virtually stopped aging in humans, making it the most valuable, and sought after, resource in all the Known Worlds.

Corporations were quick to capitalize on the astonishing discovery, which promised immortality for those bold enough to take it. Unfortunately the first Aeternam harverster teams met with much the same fate as the first exploration teams; they were torn limb from limb and devoured by the planet's voracious plant, and animal life forms. With the possible sole exception of the Aeternam mushrooms themselves everything on Immortalis was anathema to human life. The atmosphere; toxic. The oceans, streams, and rivers; acidic. The animals; huge, voracious, and poisonous. The plants; equally terrifying if even more subtle.

Nevertheless, the promise of immortality beckoned and once the first collection teams were all dead more harvesters were sent in. The quintuple canopy jungle that covers Immortalis' surface was far to dense for vehicles to operate under the eaves of the trees where the mushrooms grew. Only humans with flight packs were small enough to maneuver through the cramped spaces. The second wave of harvesters was guarded by soldiers equipped with disintegrators to protect the teams from local wildlife as they gathered the precious spores. Such was the value of the spores that even a single gram of the material was worth many human lives, even given the expensive death benefits that the corporations were paying out as their employees were killed in the many terrible ways that Immortalis meted out death.

When the zones of the corporate harvesters began to overlap as Immortalis became the unwilling host of more and more different corps seeking riches someone had the bright idea to order their soldiers to fire on the collection teams of another corporation to scare them away from "their" corporation's Aeternam mushroom find. The results were predictable. Both teams took appalling casualties and in no time at all firing on the collection teams, and soldiers, of other corporations became the standard operating procedure for everyone on the surface.

The casualties were atrocious, of course. Since no effective armour against disintegrators has ever been discovered, and since the native inhabitants of Immortalis seemed able to easily pierce, bore through, or dissolve the best armour that a person in a flight pack could possibly carry, corporations sent their collectors and soldiers down into the jungles without any. Disintegrators were, of course banned for use on humans by the De-Escalation Accords of 2312, but since the nominal use for the disintegrators that the butterfly soldiers carried was to protect themselves and their collectors from local flora and fauna it was inevitable that they would see widespread use against people. As a result there are now thousands of square kilometers of Immortalis' surface littered with the hermetically sealed skeletons of young women.

Many have wondered why young women are being used almost exclusively as soldiers and collectors in the Immortalis corporate conflict. The reasons are as multitudinous as they are insidious; Young women are light, and require less food, life support, and other resources than larger, bulkier males. This makes them cheaper to transport and maintain on station. Since armour and bulky weapons aren't required; disintegrators are very light weapons, after all; strength is not an issue. What's more, smaller, lighter soldiers are faster and more maneuverable in their flight packs. Since armour isn't an option speed and agility are a butterfly soldiers only defenses, and a well trained woman is as dangerous as two equally well trained male counterparts and only 1/3 the weight. Finally, the women, because they are women, can be useful to the corporations in other ways as well, and it is an open secret that collectors and butterfly soldiers are expected to see to the morale of their male counterparts in the Immortalis conflict zone.

Many corporations even have a lucrative side business selling live feeds of their soldiers and collectors as they watch them at every moment of every day; from the moment they arrive, when they sleep, carouse, patrol, serve as prostitutes for the corporations and right up until the moment of their deaths. The soldiers are collectors of Immortalis are truly used in every possible sense of the word. Some even get in on the game themselves, and a few have becomes successful sex-cam hostesses in their own right to enhance their already lucrative corporate contracts.

Pink Granger, pictured above, was one particularly enterprising sex-cam hostess. She had more than one billion followers galaxywide before her death in a minor skirmish at the age of 21. Her gut-wrenchingly gory, painful death became one of the most viewed thrideos in the galaxy up to that point, garnering more than twenty billion views in the first 24 hours. The livestream of her death proved to be so popular, and lucrative, that the corporation decided not to follow their own humane termination protocols and allowed her to die from slow toxic poisoning after her suit was breached, rather than grant her the quick death she begged for for a grueling twenty three minutes before she finally lost consciousness and, mercifully, succumbed to her injuries...

Seologom, Bavmorda. Corporate Wars of the 24th Century: Theory and Practice. New Shenzhen: Alibaba Digital Publishing, 2357. Neural Induction.

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I realized I never posted this image, or indeed much of my artwork for this series, and certainly not in one place, so I've corrected both oversights now :D