>>5572
Then there was Ernst Polis. He, too, had been on the base, and was a Munitorum logistician. He had no training at all, and had simply been planetside to assist the coordination of our supply lines when the disaster had struck. He was one of the most cursed men I had ever met. He had an eidetic memory, and had never experienced combat until Golgotha. Every atrocity and monstrosity he witnessed, he retained with perfect clarity. I don't know what this balding little man had been like before his capture. I imagine a rather tiresome obsessive consumed by minutiae. Now his eidetic memory had become a curse. He was barely sane. **Trauma had produced a
deep autism** that was the only thing keeping him alive. He held awful reality at bay by erecting a screen of itemisation. He catalogued and numbered everything he saw. It was possible to converse with him, but only just.