In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work. Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a vehicle that shall bore its way under the soil like a submarine under the water, or an aeroplane as independent of its base as a sailing-ship; others explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun’s rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth’s centre.
Fifteen years earlier, and a few centuries later, and Pietrok-112 reminded me of that farm in Israel. Silence in the night, long, low sheds of bunks for its workers, a fence to cut it off from the rest of the world – a hostile, frightening world of darkness and things that rattled in the night. Where the Golan Heights had stood above us as a monument to the god of another tribe, in Pietrok- 112 the mountains were of unmarked concrete, temples to a new, rational deity of atoms and numbers.
"The outside world doesn't exist here, just walls of ice and rock. There's only the work, the discovery. It's easy to forget why science is guided by ethics. Maybe we're paying for that now..."
— Dr Palon, Mass Effect
"Wanderlabs are specially built for performing dangerous research, far away from population centers. But big labs are big labs, you know? So in classic Goldie style, they say hey? Why don't we get these things to walk there themselves. Amazing stuff, tiny hitch though! They're known for getting a bit lost..."
— Alexandria, Here There Be Dragons, Episode 20
