We're celebrating Klordny Week, Superboy!

Something of a rarity.

February 28
[Aberrant] Le Monde reports that endangered monk seals off the coast of Hawaii faced a threat from a diesel fuel spill before T2M-Americas worked with American government novas to clean it up.

Outwith these sort of clearly defined moral dilemmas, the US government and Utopia get along like a house on fire (in Pterry's sense of rising flames and frantic calls to the emergency service of choice). Personally, I suspect it's because America resents having any rival, even a technically multinational one, for Top Nation status.

Interrupted for different reasons, but still...

January 16
[Aberrant] On Week in Perspective with Walter Donovan, a man named Culpepper expresses doubts about the long-term damage Operation Eden may have done to the Ethiopian ecosystem, while a man named Bryant insists his counterpart is just being a worrywart and rattles off a laundry-list of Utopia's accomplishments.

Culpepper points out that the prominent ecologists who've praised the Ethiopian reclamation were hired by Utopia: "Isn't that something like the tobacco companies' hired health experts of last century?" Bryant's list of "the other positive works that Project Utopia has completed" includes the overthrow of Yaroslav Radocani, "the virtual elimination of Bangkok's child prostitution trade", the AIDS and cancer cures, hypercombustion, Operation Clean Sweep— "Maybe you like the idea of the UN granting virtually total latitude to a group with all the potential military power of any two European nations, but I happen to think—" Donovan interrupts the interruption to ask if he might change the subject.

In an OpNet chat room Vancouver RCMP Officer Brian Chu, Officer Bernard ter Haar [@brill.op], Officer Laurence Posner [@opamerica], Officer Ma Sik Yu of the Hong Kong Triad Society Bureau, and Officer Georgina M. Shrubbe [of Interpol] discuss the difficulty of getting someone inside the triads in general, and the Heaven Thunder Triad in particular, until "trace1@?.gov.op" [Operator W1, presumably of Branch 9] sees the discussion straying into sensitive areas and shuts it down. Afterward, W1 and "nereid@directive" wonder whether the triads picked up on the discussion, and also wonder who exactly was playing whom.

(Well, the datestamp on the transcript in Aberrant: Underworld says 2008, but the sensitive topic was an Australian government attempt to put a shapeshifter into one of the triads, which Posner thinks took place around 2009 or '10. Also, the conversation between trace1 and Thetis "nereid" reads like she was the one who called the halt to the chat; maybe she spoofed trace1's name onto the warning "Gentlemen, none of this is cleared for these channels, and this discussion needs to end right now. Log off, boys.")

And I've never mentioned Branch 9 before, have I? According to the Adventure! corebook (for those of you who don't have it), it was founded by Teddy Roosevelt during his Presidency to deal with crimes that crossed state lines, and soon shifted its ambit to crimes that crossed the lines of consensus reality. In the Inspiration Age, at least four other countries — the UK, Mexico, China and France were all known — had their own Branches with cryptic-yet-bland names, "such as Britain's Supplemental Resources Office and France's Field Research and Development Unit". The Chinese Branch was compromised by the Ubiquitous Dragon, but it's not known whether this persisted past the end of the Inspiration Age, let alone into the Nova Age.

Yeah, I've been dragging my heels on this. Mostly the transition to a new flashdrive, with a possible subconscious dose of "Maybe if I don't do it this year, I can pretend that the tragedy of May 13 doesn't happen."

January
[Aberrant] This month's issue of Humanity magazine (v.1 #4) contains Gwan Myung-sun's article "The Day the Coconuts Fell Without a Sound", on the disappointing reaction of Utopia to a personal complaint by the families of people killed in a T2MA/P raid on a Nakato-gumi warehouse.

The name sounds Korean, but somehow, I don't think of Koreans as using metaphors like "the ripe coconuts of our hearts". Then again, given what White Wolf's writers of the time were able to say straight-faced about northern Europe and the southwestern US, it probably shouldn't be surprising that they can be equally de-informed about Asia.

[Aberrant] Nathan Black hosts the N! special The New Gods: Humanity's Next Step.

It includes a demonstration of electrical power by Detroit franchisee* and part-time Utopian Jonas "Kikjak" Kincaid.

January 3
[Aberrant] This week's issue of Newsweek carries an article "Eruption of Wonder: Science in the Nova Age" by Dr. Paul Tandy.

Here in OTL, I'm not sure there was an issue of Newsweek for that week (it would've been cover-dated January 7, I think).

January 7
[Aberrant] Amanda Wu, CEO of Novelty Consulting, sends congratulations to all researchers and analysts working on "the Kim project" (a planned land-grab by North Korea).

First time I've had occasion to mention her, and I wish it were going to be the last.

* Licensed urban defender.

See you in the funny papers.

November 16
[Aberrant] Andrew "Skew" Parker leaves a voicemail for Novation editor-in-chief Jerome Grant: "what kind of drug-guzzling knuckle-walking college dropout do you guys have writing my dialogue?...And the art sucks. We've talked in your office, what, twenty, thirty times? Has my hair *ever* looked like that?"

Specifically, he points out that he has "never, never, since my eruption said, 'Nowhere but in the hands of Team Tomorrow will a brighter future be found'", contrary to those words being inserted into his likeness' mouth in T2M: The Noble Cause #71, and that the four-color Skew looks "like I'm ready to defect to the QNA or something." He wonders if Jerome can get back the artist they had five issues or so ago, the one who drew him and the rest of T2M closer to the way they actually look.

Not yet. I think the dumbass was about to cut the shithead.

September 18
[Aberrant] Devon Works <sliderfetish@unca.edu> replies dismissively to an anonymized poster's all-lowercase claims about the scientific suppression carried out by Utopia's S&T department.

It's a sign of how much the 'net has changed since 1999 that this exchange was supposed to happen in the alt.fan.utopia Usenet group. These days, "2Wikkd@im.not.going.to.let.them.trace.me.com" would be an anonymous poster on a Utopia fanblog, maybe even Dev's own.

In addition to posting without use of the shift key (well, except to generate punctuation [mostly exclamation points] and one piece of all-caps), 2Wikkd is terrifyingly nonspecific "about all the things [project utopia] don't let us see or have", saying only that

my
brother is a scientist, and he was working on something relly
important that would have made all our live alot easier but
they came in and took all his files and now he drinks alot and
can't get a raise cause he just wasted all his time working on
something that utopia wont let us have! you utopia slaves suck!
by the way this story is TRUE but i'm not going to say who my
brother he works for because they (utopia) might find out and
he'd get fired or arrested or something.

My reaction to a post like that would have been something along the lines of "Well, *I'm* convinced." If I were on his side, I'd have elaborated to the effect of "Well, *that's* a compelling evidentiary trail that would be sure to persuade anyone not already inclined to doubt S&T's enveloping benevolence. Please quit being on our side, dude; you're making our side look stupid."

That's not how our boy Dev rolls, though:

Look, hobgoblin, the UN granted Project Utopia the power of scientific regulation for a reason. Did you hear about the guy who was working on a virtual OpNet interface that would be wired right into the user's pleasure centers?... As far as I'm concerned, Project Utopia (something properly spelled with the "shift" key, loser) has every right to their environmental and scientific regulatory powers. Might as well go to somebody with the staff smart enough to use them wisely.

(Well, now we know another reason for jachilli's writer credit on the Aberrant core rules, besides the Duke Rollo material.) Again, I'd be tempted to reply asking for a citation, but I'm like that.

Once again, I'm running out of month.

June
[Aberrant] In a personal memo to Caestus Pax, Justin Laragione opines that T2M needs to rethink its recruiting strategies to put more focus on character. "Corbin let us down in this respect. He had no humility and no sense of the greater good. He has his infamy now, I suppose. Let's not allow another Corbin to happen to Team Tomorrow."

André Corbin had recently been kicked off the Team after a few short months when it became clear that the graceful taking of orders was not really in the ex-footballer's nature. The final straw was pieing Pax in the face at the Berlin Waldorf-Astoria, with Corbin's emotional-amplifier power spreading his glee to every baseline in the room.

The infamy he has now is his participation in a soft-porn film called Hardballs. One wonders how Jennifer Landers, his only real friend on the team, felt about it.

Situations.

April 27
[Aberrant] Project Utopia sends an operational memo to all new members assigned to Mexico City, reminding them that Mexico is an independent nation still worried that Utopia's presence may curtail that independence.

Maybe they cracked down a little too hard after that Teragen rally six months ago?

Aberrant: Teragen doesn't specify what time of day this happens, just uses it to illustrate the concept of the Portent omen.

April 22
[Aberrant] During a shuttle mission, Utopia's Domenic "Blinker" Thule defects to the Teragen.

According to the intercepted chatter between Atlantis and NASA Houston, shortly after Atlantis opened its bay doors for a test (presumably of how well he'd handle himself in microgravity), he removed his suit, looked at the shuttle crew, waved to them and warped out. In his wake, he leaves a Tarot card — Major Arcanum XVI, The Tower — with the word TERAGEN written on it.

Correcting an error, among other things.

March 16
[Aberrant] Nimal Dharmasena writes in his journal about the latest in a series of progressively-unsettling meetings with Antaeus.

Yes, his journal. He mentions a wife and kids, which makes my earlier identification of him as a "her" obviously wrong.

Dharmasena talks about being obliged to go "very, very deep in[to] Sector 3" to report to Balmer, about having to wander around and literally sweat for a whole hour before before sitting down to rest, at which point Antaeus came "heaving... out of the ground, geocarapace and all." (Dharmasena wonders if Spencer Balmer's body has replaced human flesh with soil and vegetation, or if he even has a permanent body.)

( How is it that he can be so impossibly brilliant in the field of ecoscience, so erudite as 'Dr. Balmer,' and yet, as 'Antaeus,' practically autistic when dealing with people? )

Insert witty comment here, please; it's too early for me.

February
[Aberrant] Andrew Parker erupts with an electromagnetic pulse that blacks out much of Miami. Government and Utopia personnel comb the area for the next two months trying to find the culprit.

I was holding off for a blackout in Miami at whose "real" cause I could hint, but we're almost out of month and I don't see that happening.