NinthFeather's Meta Archive

 

The people running the SSI are, of course, competent enough to at least impress politicians, and able to at least appear concerned about ethics if a reporter asks about it.  But the majority of the staff are people who wouldn’t be hired anywhere else, either for reasons of past ethics violations or simply because they aren’t really up to standards in their areas.  After all, it’s a classified job located on a space colony that, for a person with normal empathy levels, would be very stressful.  I doubt people are lining up at the door, no matter how many patriotic speeches they hear–scientists can work for non-classified, more ethical parts of the HRL military and actually get public credit for it.  So the SSI has to resort to lowering hiring standards a bit.  On one hand, taking some people who failed to follow their institutional review board’s human subject research standards isn’t really a problem for the SSI.   But it’s a problem when they’re forced to consider applications from repeat-offender plagiarists and people who demonstrate little actual knowledge of the field their degree is in, and when they eventually hire some of them.  What this eventually results in is a lot of shoddy methodology, and a lot of mistakes–including Marie’s paralysis and Hallelujah being very violent and unstable instead of somewhat violent and good at taking direct commands.

 

So, not every scientist at the SSI started out evil.  But they all got there because they were desperate, and the ones who didn’t decide that being desperate was better than experimenting on children, even the ones with the best intentions of changing the way the SSI did things, eventually ended up the same as the rest–either willing to go as far as necessary to create a perfect soldier, or willing to go along with their colleagues in those attempts.

 

Since Kazakhstan, Allelujah’s canonical country of origin, was one of the areas affected by the Solar Energy Wars, I like to think that Allelujah may have been part of that last group, and that he may have even had a relatively happy infancy followed by an early childhood as a refugee that eventually ended in kidnapping.  He may even have family in Kazakhstan who believes him dead.

(I may have written a fic based on this)