The Colonel had earned his rank by having people train computers with the sanitized half-truths of a thousand atrocities so they could weave with mechanical creativity blueprints for a hundred thousand worse ones. This was patriotic but, he knew every morning when he woke up from untroubled sleep, insufficient. He wasn't the worst of his peers - what deterrence could there be in plans that didn't disturb him?
With a military linearity that was itself a form of atrocity he set out to design one that would.
The Colonel was not by nature an imaginative man; there were drugs and machines for that. He furnished his mind with the artificially evocated experiences of hundreds of man-made hells until his mind repressed memories of things he had never gone through. He knew in the muscles of his neck the sound of helicopters and the silence of drones. The long queues of the living dead and the smell of hills of flesh rotting under the sun.
He dreamed then of brutal acts, yet in all of his dreams he was among the victims - and when he reverse-engineered his nightmares there was nothing original in them. His psychologists warning him about an event horizon of empathy he would be unwilling to return from, the Colonel had them remove from his mind most of the memories and all of the emotional growth he had gotten from them.
More drugs and machines were conjured up by the familiar rituals of national security. The Escher clockwork of his neurochemistry was loosened up to a young child's, then even further, and masses of historical and personal information were blasted into his receptive mind while a carefully tuned-down brain tumor insinuated itself between invading circuit and confused tissue.
The Colonel went mad as planned. The second part of the plan was less certain; his scientists were almost sure at one point that they would not be able to bring him back. But fear, brilliance, and money all did their part, and after most of the modifications had been undone the Colonel still retained enough strangeness to remember
a planet larger and older than Earth, its white sun large on a shimmering sky. Understanding zooms in and the shimmering resolves to a million points; each point is a thing flying or floating with horror for a mind and terror as a shape; all of them together at an abominable midpoint between a mind and a million, a multitude of shapes and a single one. What little intelligence is left below them, on the surface of the planet or the hells underneath, keeps itself quiet and dull. How the things in the sky sense thought and what happens when they do is
something he doesn't know he will be able to live with for long but has no choice but to build. It's not their morbid shape or sickening methods that makes the insides of his skull feel covered with some spreading filth, but the clarity with which he remembers an engineering beyond understanding but not replication. That, and the parts of the design that have nothing to do with flying, hunting, or killing (and other things less kind than death) and just whisper about themselves across unexplainable distances with the obsessive patience of the lucidly mad.