Field Report No. 187101045
CNP Field Agent for Culture and Education No. 562, Fredrick Dermont, Northeast Division.
Reporting To:
CNP Senior Officer of Community Stability and Improvement Initiatives, No. 072, Betty Lamont Cress, Northeast Division.
Any persons other than the above reading this report is committing a federal crime punishable by life in prison or death.
May God bless these United States of America!
As per our discussion I will keep the tone of this report informal, this should in no way be taken as a sign of disrespect to you, your office, or the party. Also I would like to apologize for my writing skills, they have atrophied since my school years. I fully understand the need to keep this report off of the Pick system though, so I guess written reports are the safest alternative.
I arrived in Pittsburgh three days after a fire had destroyed much of the city’s south side. The fire was preceded by a severe cholera outbreak leading to widespread speculation that party health officials had set the blaze. For this reason the university sent an armored car and two militiamen to meet me at the airport. If word got out that I was a party official, security could be an issue.
The city itself is a god-forsaken hole of filth, but when you cross into the university district, you enter a bubble of stability. The biotech money flooding the coffers of UPMC have overflown into the surrounding community, and there seems to be a militiaman on every corner. You have to pass through two checkpoints to enter the university district, and my escorts informed me that there are attempted attacks on a weekly basis.
Carnegie Mellon University is at the forefront of biotech, nanotech, and quantum computing technology. The military application wing of the university is doing the research and development necessary to keep us one step ahead of the shit-eating traitors of the western states. CMU developed the first generation of nanotech cloud and was instrumental in weaponizing the technology.
Doctor Rajash O’Mara, the professor whose work I was there to assess, does not work in the military applications wing of the university. In fact the board of the university think so highly of his research that they let him create his own department, the Department of Theoretical Substances. Despite its name, this department deals mainly in CRITs which are a good deal more than theoretical.
CRITs, or critters as the department personnel refer to them, are very real, and in my opinion very dangerous. The acronym stands for Consciousness Reflective Inter-dimensional Tendrils. They were first discovered as a mathematical anomaly by Dr. O’Mara, who published his findings in 2037. Most of the academic world dismissed the paper, but no one was able to disprove it. The consensus was that it was too vague to be disproven, but it turned out to be correct. The original paper published by Dr. O’Mara is attached, god bless you if you can make head or tail of it, you’re smarter than I am.
The testing of his theories has progressed unimpeded for the past four years. Dr. O’Mara himself is a very difficult person to talk to, especially on the subject of his work, but his senior research assistant, Dr. Richard Denarsick, is quite good at explaining things in layman’s terms. My discussions with Dr. Denarsick are the chief reference for the information I intend to lay out in this report.
The debriefing I got at the Maryland office indicated that the department had created CRITs in a lab experiment of some kind, but Dr. Denarsick described the process in quite different terms. According to him the critters exist in a hidden plane of time and all they had to do was create the circumstances necessary for the critters to enter our present. They didn’t create the CRITs, they opened the door and waited for the CRITs to come through.
The primary reason these things are so dangerous is that they self-replicate. For this reason the critters are contained within a strong magnetic field. To be more precise they are contained within three magnetic fields, a point made abundantly clear to me. It was continuously stressed to me how seriously they take safety concerns at the facility. I think they assumed I was there to determine if the project was a threat to public health, a view I did nothing to dissuade them of.
Sometime in the fall of 2042 the central magnetic field reached the saturation point. The central magnetic field is a magnetized metal box about the size of a large room. It is outfitted with sensors of many kinds, including a number of spatial time scanners. In order to test the consciousness reflective properties of the tendrils it was necessary to put a living creature within the CRIT saturated field. They used a research monkey, getting him into the box through a lock system built into the room. The research team was surprised when the tendrils transformed into oxygen immediately. This was a huge vindication for Dr. O’Mara. The monkey expected oxygen and there it was. The creature wandered around the box for a number of hours and finally fell asleep. When it woke up, all of Dr. O’Mara’s other predictions turned out to be correct as well.
The monkey woke up in the cage it lived in at the university’s research facility, or more accurately, it woke up in an exact replication of it. A facility worker came and fed the monkey, and later, another came and cleaned out his cage. The tendrils recreated the monkey’s entire existence, including all the people and other animals it encountered.
The important thing to understand in this is that those people were real, the food the monkey ate was nutritious and the facility worker took the monkey’s feces out of his cage and left the room and it was gone. Actually gone. We are not talking about the monkey’s perception here, when dealing with the tendrils we are talking about actual reality, real reality.
The implications of the work done at the Department of Theoretical Substances are disturbing in the extreme. The more experimentation the team did, the more disturbing it became.
The monkey in the original experiment was destroyed and the tendril saturated chamber reverted over time to a neutral state. the next experiment the team conducted involved putting two monkeys in the chamber together to see how the CRITs would respond. The two monkeys were from the same facility so they both expected to see the same things and eventually they recreated life as they knew it in their facility, including workers who interacted with them both and other monkeys in the other cages.
I think I have to reiterate here that this was not an hallucination. The environment and people the critters created were real, and continued to exist as long as they were in the presence of one of the two original monkeys. The team then introduced a third monkey, one recently captured in the wild, to see what would happen when the critters encountered a radically different set of expectations. The tendrils, Dr. Denarsick explained, form a kind of consensus world, and since the world the two monkeys had created previously already existed, and due to their outnumbering the new arrival, the new monkey was forced to live in their world. He was put in another cage, like the others.
The team decided to try to undermine the three research monkey’s consensus reality by introducing equal numbers with radically different expectations. They did this by using long acting sedatives on wild monkeys and transporting them into the tendril-saturated chamber while they were unconscious. The results were something quite unique to behold. I have included the spatial time scan of the resultant conflict on a small-screen expansion datcom for you to view (again, I understand the need to keep this stuff off the Pick network).
The wild monkies woke up very confused and agitated within the lab environment. The three lab-conditioned monkeys and all the CRIT-created monkeys in the other cages began screaming wildly at the new arrivals. The CRIT created lab techs came in and tried to subdue the wild new arrivals, but the wild monkeys killed the two lab techs, and managed to escape the room. They ran through miles of hallways, of course never leaving the magnetically sealed chamber, until they finally got back to the jungle they’d been taken from. Everything in the chamber is created by the tendrils, including the floor, so they could run for miles on a sort of three-dimensional treadmill. Eventually they put themselves back in the jungle where they came from.
From the perspective of the researchers the two sets of monkeys lived ten feet away from each other, but they were never aware of the other group’s proximity. Everything from the air they breathed to the food they ate was all actually critters.
This is how it stands now, there are six actual monkeys within the chamber, three of them in one consensus reality and the other three in another. In recent months Dr. O’Mara has begun trying to get the groups to interact again, so far his efforts have been unsuccessful. His feeling is that if they were forced together for a long enough period of time, they would be forced to create a consensus reality incorporating both group’s expectations, or that they would fight and kill each other until one group was eliminated.
Conclusions:
If the CRITs were to escape their chamber they would saturate the entire magnetic field of the earth within fifty years. We wouldn’t know the difference, and the only way to prove that it had happened is through an elaborate chemical process the doctor’s team has developed. We would create a vast consensus reality and would have about as much control over it as we have over our current reality. Dr. Denarsick told me that we are probably living among creatures very like the CRITs already.
The value I see in the critters lies in their being separate and distinct from our reality. As long as the CRITs are held apart from our world we could create things that do not exist in our reality. The problem is that if it were some valuable material, platinum say, we couldn’t take it out of the field without releasing the CRITs. Anything made from them contains enough of them to begin the saturation process.
But what could be conceivably transferred safely from the chamber to the outside world is energy. Suppose we built fusion power plant with a CRIT saturated chamber where the reactor should be. In this example, no actual nuclear material would be necessary, just workers who expected to see it. The turbines could be real and they would turn and power a generator. The workers would never leave the chamber after entering, although they would believe they were going home after work every day as usual, it would be a CRIT-created existence. In this scenario there would be no actual nuclear waste. On the other hand the workers themselves would be a kind of waste product. After many years of work they would reach the point of retirement and would just be taking up space in the chamber. At this point they would have to be disposed of, but a human can be disposed of much more easily than nuclear waste, so it’s still a benefit.
Of course this is all just an example, there could be much better uses of the technology than I can think up. I’m sure there are some brilliant minds in the department that could come up with something better or more useful.
Recommendation:
I believe the party should take over the Department of Theoretical Substances as soon as possible. the potential benefit to the party and these United States could be huge. This could be the technology that lets us finally defeat the dog fucking cowards out west. For all we know their scientists are working on the same technology.
May god bless these United States of America!
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Nutrient Slop