Editing Degenesis (section)

===Palers===
As the Eshaton came closer, Recombination Group stepped up their survival plan a notch. In the months before the asteroids' arrival, RG's middle-class wageslave caste, imbued with memetics, was sent into the cryogenics facilities where HIV-E victims were stored and they went about emptying them. Back then, they were called 'Guardians.' They just scraped out the frozen bodies, threw them into carts without caring if they shattered or not, and sealed them away in storage units to rot. The facilities were then converted into 'dispensers,' to hold the higher caste of Sleepers who would wait out the Eshaton. The Sleepers came, climbed into their stasis chambers and were frozen.

By the time the media found out, it was too late. Sure enough, the asteroids fell, just in time for the Guardians to seal themselves away with the Sleepers.

The Guardians watched over the Sleepers, maintained the backup systems and the reactors and analyzed the information on the screens that streamed from the cryogenics pods. At least, that was where it was meant to come from. In truth, most of the information that they monitored was laced with memetics, with suggestions that the Sleepers were nothing other than divine.

Not all of them surrendered to the brainwashing. Some Guardians blew open their dispensers before their Sleepers awoke and became Clanners. Others waited and were subjected to the memes, again and again. Gradually, non-essential systems shut down once the memes were sufficiently reinforced, with light being one of these. The dispensers became pitch black except for the blinking lights of machinery. They adapted. Intercoms also died. Again, they adapted, communication by smacking on tubes that reverberated throughout the bunker. As conditions became more primitive, their faith in the divinity of the Sleepers only grew.

When the Sleepers did awaken, the Guardians blindly followed their lead, no matter how addled the minds of the Sleepers were thanks to the 2^16 virus that had infected the dispensers. Other dispensers suffered worse fates and never had their Sleepers awaken at all when they were intended to. In these bunkers, the algae became poisonous, mold grew over every surface and the dispenser became uninhabitable, forcing the Guardians to break out of their vaults and enter the surface world. The name that the surfacers gave them has stuck with them: Palers.

They still retreat to their homes, to look over their sacred charges, the divine Sleepers. However, they also send out spies to infiltrate surface society, raiders to pilfer food from surface settlements and scouts to locate other dispensers and unite with the Palers within, if they haven't broken out already. They are pallid, inbred little monsters wielding strange technology that even they treat like magic.