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Slider Files ((Taken fro mthe Aberrant List, Written by tmiller@cornell-iowa.edu)) April 14, 2004 Ok, I think this is weird. Me writing a journal (writing, as if anyone actually writes anymore. Typing would be more accurate). And the only reason that I am not using the vox programs is because that would be way too much like talking to myself. (and I haven't found one that doesn't piss me off with its grammar program - I want something that gives the way I talk, not what is grammatically correct!) Some of the things I am wondering about are crazy enough without that. And I need to be able to think about some of them, maybe putting them down will help me get them out of my head. Ok, here it goes. I am wondering about some of what is going on. The two big ones are why haven't any Novas been able to have a baby (the way that Corbin's been going at it, it's a wonder he hasn't started a litter!) and why T2M hasn't stepped in on the Equatorial Wars. I mean, technically there is a cease-fire, just like technically the stealth bomber didn't exist. Jeez, how many gotta die, how long does the fighting have to go on, before someone stops it? Sorry, just got off a little there. I don't know why, but that has really bothered me for quite a while now. Damn, there goes the alarm. Talk later. April 29, 2004 Had some time to think about it, and talked to a couple of people about the conflict part of it. I guess PU doesn't have the mandate to just waltz in and boot some head, like they would need to do to stop the Equatorial Wars. I guess I hadn't thought about that. (Part of why I'm not one of the leaders, I don't like having to make the hard decisions. Besides, I would just "slide" away and not have to worry about the consequences) Still not sure about the babies, but I've been doing a little bit of studying (Mr. Tepper would be proud!) and come up with the idea that maybe Novas and baselines are just different enough genetically that we can't interbreed. That would cover Corbin and the Portmans. So far, the population of Novas is relatively small, so I don't know how many Nova-Nova couplings there have been. (Yeah, can you imagine me trying to go around asking that!) Well, at least I know that Pax hasn't (can't imagine him doing that!) and I doubt Antaeus has either. I know it is really superficial of me, but even thinking of kissing him in his Nova form....ugh! It's be like kissing a bag of peat moss. Don't get me wrong, I really like Spence a lot, and really respect him. But its almost easier to picture my parents doing it than him. Oh, and on a completely different note: I got a pet - a little ferret. She is so cute. And, as a side bonus, she really pissed off Pax. I first got her and brought her in (they actually gave her an exam and x-rays (like she would have an explosive in her...). I showed her to Pax, who wasn't thrilled about the idea of having pets in the building, but there aren't any regulations against it (he looked it up) so he couldn't say no. I suggested that maybe if he held her, he would see how nice she was. He took her in his hands, and held her up so they could look each other in the eye. And she threw up on him!!! It was hilarious! Pax, being Pax, tried by be proper about it, but that little bit of ferret vomit dripping down his uniform just ruined it. I quickly scooped her up and slid to my room. Poor thing had a cold. June 27, 2004 Overheard a bit of a conversation that I wasn't supposed to. Big Al has a bit too large of a mouth sometimes. I don't mind, it's a good source of information, but I wonder sometimes what he says about me when I'm not around. And they say that the worst gossips are women! Anyway, it was about the shuttle rescue back in March. The official story was that a meteor had struck the shuttle. And, as everyone knows, members of T2M were up there to help save the day (dramatic music). But, to hear Al talk about it, that wasn't what happened. According to what he was saying, there wasn't a meteor, but an eruption. Apparently one of the astronauts erupted while up there! But if that is true, why didn't they let people know? Why the cover story? And where is the guy? I mean, if he erupted, he would have survived, right? From what I know, he would have to survive the eruption, even if that eruption caused him to be exposed to vacuum. I'll do some digging. July 5, 2004 Happy 4th of July, a little late. Pax may be an ass sometimes, but he sure knows how to have a hell of a BBQ, and got some incredible fireworks! Ok, did a little checking on the shuttle incident. I managed to do some digging and found the original NASA report on the shuttle. Gotta love bureaucracy. Any time something happens, gotta make a report. But this one was buried. Deep. Thing is, all of the damage indicates an outward explosion, that things got blown out of the shuttle, not in. In fact, there wasn't any indication of anything from outside the shuttle penetrating the hull. So, how could it have been caused by a meteor COLLISION? Now, some of the hull is missing, having been blown off. So the impact point could be missing, and that is why the "entry wound" (been watching too much OpNet police dramas) hasn't been found. But the missing pieces were from the shuttle bay, which was depressurized at the time of the accident. Could something in the bay have gone off? So, right now I think here are the possibilities about what happened: 1. Petalan was blowing things out of his ass again. 2. The meteor went through the bay doors and collided with some part of the payload, causing the explosion. 3. The meteor collided with the shuttle, but didn't penetrate. The collision caused damage in the shuttle/payload which led to the explosion. 4. An astronaut erupted. I think these might be in the order of likelihood. September 8, 2004 Been doing a little bit of work on something that happened a couple of months ago, the Midnight Sun incident. Late at night over the West Bank, there was a huge blast, which was at first attributed to a controlled nuclear strike - complete with EMP. Closer investigation revealed that there were huge traces of quantum energy. Nova. A friend of mine, Elliot Menken, was assigned to investigate and find what he could. This was his "final test" to get into T2M. I was sort of mentoring him, and gave him a ride over to the West Bank and then I went to Ibiza for some R&R. Elliot kept in touch. He said that he found evidence that a Palestinian Nova, who erupted during a fight with Israelis, had been in the area, and building up sentiment against the Israeli and Utopia presence. Elliot figured that this guy was somehow involved with the incident. He then talked to some people around that night. He heard that a glowing man was flying towards the Utopia complex. This glowing man, Elliot was assuming this was the Palestinian, was met in met flight by a man "made of metal strands and over-large bones." The metal man grabbed the other, and there was an incredible blast. Elliot assumed this was the blast that was observed. The metal man then flew off so fast he was barely a blur, and the other wasn't seen. Elliot did a quick check of Novas assigned to the Utopia facility, and didn't find any meeting the description of the metal man. He then wrote up a report, supposing that the metal Nova was associated with the Teragen. However, Elliot then disappeared. I got worried when I didn't hear from him for a couple of days, and slid over to check on him. I was told that he had disappeared, while on assignment, and that search teams were looking for him. No trace was ever found. The reports that I have seen indicate that the Palestinian was consumed by an uncontrolled surge of quantum power as he tried to make a late-night raid on a military compound. No mention is ever made of the metal man that Elliot told me about. And I know that, if Elliot told me, he told his contact while making periodic reports. But no MENTION of this metal guy? I did a check of all known Novas and couldn't find any that matched Elliot's description. What happened to Elliot? October 13, 2005 God, I hate bureaucracy! Can you believe it took me this long to get through and get some answers! I tried talking to some people at NASA, and tried to find out what was in the payload to see if that may have caused the shuttle explosion. And to see if the meteor would have had to have penetrated the hull to cause the explosion. At first, they were pretty helpful, giving me info about most of the experiments, and assuring me that all of the satellites, which was the only thing they could think of that would explode with that force, had been deployed. And that just a bump, even a serious one, couldn't cause the explosion. But when I tried to find out specifics on what system(s) blew, things dried up. I couldn't push too hard without setting off too many alarms. I need to keep this quiet. I can't let anyone know about my ideas until I have proof. I have moved this journal off the OpNet and only use isolated terminals. I then tried to check the crew manifest. After all, if an astronaut did erupt, there are only a few possibilities as to who it could be. According to everything I could find, there was no loss of life, and everyone was saved. But, when I looked at the video, there was one fewer astronaut getting out than there should have been. Because of the crises, they were wearing suits, so I couldn't figure out who the missing person was. When I tried to follow up on them now, they were either listed as dead or "unavailable". This has really started to make me wonder. (Gotta stop watching that old show X-Files) I've started working on a computer program to check for discrepancies in documents, to see if I can find evidence of tampering, like revisions to reports, etc. February 19, 2006 It occurred to me that something is a little weird about me. (hush!) My periods are fairly regular, far more so than before I erupted. In fact, I can tell you when it will start, to within 20 minutes. (I tested that a couple of times. Really embarrassing.) I asked Pratima and Trudy if it was the same. They said that it seemed to be, but they hadn't paid that much attention to it. There are several Nova-Nova couplings, like Firefox and Makarta - I know those two go at it like bunnies (or dolphins) and nothing. They've even told me a couple of times that they don't use any protection. And no babies. How, if our bodies are optimized in so many ways - healing, eating, no body fat, that we apparently can't reproduce? It doesn't make sense that, if we are a new species, we can't reproduce. That seems so counter to everything I know about evolution and biology. And even if we aren't a separate species, there still isn't a reason we shouldn't be able to reproduce. Corbin started saying some lines out of an old movie to try to explain it, but it didn't make any sense. Then he broke into "There can be only one!" He can be almost as big a jerk as Pax sometimes. December 21, 2006 Ha, an early Christmas present! I was looking through some old files, and found a file on Pax. Get this: Pax is really Shelby Eisenfaust! I love it! Next time I see him, I am going to try to picture him as a Shelby. January 7, 2007 Another year gone. It's a good time to look back. So I did. Guess what I found? An old picture, from the early days of the Aeon Society. It's an old black and white job, a little fuzzy, but you can easily make out faces. Front and center is Mercer, the one who started the whole society, and by extension, Utopia. I wonder what he thinks of it now? And there is another notable face in the picture: Divis Mal! I'm not joking. I ran it through every identification program I could think of, and got a 99.9974 correlation between Mal and the face in the picture. Everyone has said that there weren't any Novas before N-Day, but ... Could it be there were? It has been shown that exposure to high levels of quantum can cause an eruption in a latent Nova. And the explosion of the Galatea has always been assumed to be the triggering event, but no one has been able to come up with a reasonable mechanism. What if the cause of the explosion were a Nova? Could Mal somehow be associated? Gotta be careful, its easy to blame him, but I really don't know much about him, and don't want to close off other ideas. I am going to run my program to check past newspapers for indications of Nova activity before N-day. April 21, 2007 Another friend dead. God, sometimes I really hate this job. I know you have to expect it in T2M, considering what we do. You know going into war zones that people can and will get killed. But this wasn't a war zone!!! Rafia wasn't even in T2M, but a Utopia specialist on terraforming. He was using his gravity powers to help break down some the mountain material (he said it was something like sending pulses through the rock) into topsoil. However, according to the official report, this caused a rockslide which crushed him. But that doesn't make sense. Either he was at the top of the slide area, in which case he could just levitate himself above the danger. Or he was in the middle/bottom of the slide area, in which case he could still levitate himself to safety. I get so angry when I think about it. He was essentially getting ready to farm when he died. Farming!!!! Novas don't die farming! I've had a theory that there is something going on - some conspiracy that somehow links so much of what I've ranted about here. If that is true, could it be that Rafia found something he shouldn't have? Or, could he have pushed himself too far? The docs around here have talked about some cases of some quantum disorder, where the quantum powers start to affect the body in uncontrolled ways, sort of a quantum cancer? Could that have done it? When I start thinking along these lines, I look around and realize that there are very few non-human looking Novas (It being one of them) Actually, most of the non-human ones are part of the Teragen (Orziz being an exception). Something about that nags at me, but I can't figure out how to look at it. Is it that something about the Teragen causes these mutations? Then how to explain Orziz, one of its oldest members? Does the Teragen somehow gather these Novas to itself? I haven't seen any fliers for it, and no indication that It has been approached. Could something be "culling the herd" so to speak of the more Tainted Novas? Then what about Montoya-Bernal? Or It? Both have mutated physically. Are they in danger? Could the Teragen be doing a "join us or else" thing? November 1, 2007 I think I may have found something big! The Bahrain facility! It went online in 2004 and is the only Rashoud facility that isn't open to the public. Ok, that by itself has sent lots of conspiracy theorists into a tizzy. I'm not that bad (am I?). But I have found that a lot of Novas captured by T2M have been sent there, even the Saxon after his problems. But it wasn't SUPPOSED to be a detainment facility, according to Utopia. But was it? It seems to have been used for that almost immediately. And it is on a peninsula, so it is physically isolated. It piqued my interest, so I decided to poke around a bit. I found lots of money being transferred between the facility and Triton. At first, that didn't seem to weird. It made sense, but then I looked at the amounts, and how it was being moved. That was what confused me. And the personnel transfers... Then I started looking at other money transfers. And a lot of it went to DeVries, and other agencies. These went back years. There are lots of deadends. As if someone were trying to hide something. I want to find out what. January 13, 2008 It looks like the money that Totentanz was paid back in 2001 may have come from Utopia! It is really complicated, worse than the RusCon budget, but that's what it looks like. That means that Utopia was paying to Totentanz when he killed Slag and Pursuer! Or is it Utopia? Could it be another sign of this group that was doing it? Could this conspiracy want Novas dead? Between the Equatorial Wars, Kashmir, and the ambush of T2M AP, our numbers are going down. But not the Teragen's. Is there a connection or am I just seeing shadows? February 9, 2008 Proteus. That is what this conspiracy is called, according to some of the things I've found. But what are they doing and why? Everything leads to more questions. May 13, 2008 Corbin can be such an ass! I tried to talk to him a couple of days ago, and he acted as if I were crazy! I turned to him as a friend, and he gave me some of my worse fears. (Which would be worse, to be crazy or right about this?) I tried to tell him my suspicions. He finally started to listen. I don't know how seriously he takes it, but at least he isn't making jokes to my face. We have talked a couple of times since then, and he is doing some looking on his own. I have started to share some of my suspicions with others. In fact, I am going to pass this on to someone, just to be sure. Got to make sure that we don't have to keep reinventing the wheel. And, I think that I may have told some people who I shouldn't have. I have a bad feeling and I need to get moving. I will be resigning - in fact, the letter is already written and waiting for Reed in his Calcutta office.