We're celebrating Klordny Week, Superboy!

Further down the spiral.

August 3
[Aberrant] An article notes that Project Utopia's approval ratings within the US, Australia and parts of Europe have continued to drop since the Slider murder last year.

We aren't given a source for the article, nor does it give actual numbers, but it has a bar graph that shows Utopia's US approval ratings as over the S and A of "Strongly Approve" in January (of 2008, I'm guessing), between the R and O of "Approve" in June, and just left of the A by December. It also quotes a Utopian press release that's "confident Project Utopia will weather this storm.... Project Utopia rests on its record of humanitarianism and hard work for the benefit of the people of the world." (Okay, that link was me being sarcastic and ruining your life.)

One day, his deeds will be erased, but for now, he is a hero.

July 28
[Aberrant] Donald Zeleckis, a Jewish-American tourist and nova, dies while stopping a nuclear missile which has been launched at Syria. Israeli officials deny authorizing the escalation to nuclear weapons. Syrian officials don't believe Israel is responsible and will not respond in kind.

If Israel hasn't destroyed its nuclear stockpile yet, it's probably in large part because (like their OTL counterpart) that would require them to admit having one. (The Aberrant Storyteller's Companion says they're similarly coy about whether they have any novas of their own.)

Pretty much the last TitTU post of 2008.

December 15
[Aberrant] The Electoral College votes.

By canonical default, confirming Randel Portman as the 45th President of the United States.

Well, the next update would be the election, and that's tomorrow, so I guess I'd better get off these things I've been sitting on.

October 8
[Aberrant] Mark Anthony Green writes in his journal: "It seems cruel that the Lord told us of Heaven. [Earth] is a satisfying world in many ways...but God dangles Heaven above us like a man teasing his dog." He opines that to attain great power — to erupt as a nova, for instance, or to be elected President — is to become like God, and vows that "If I become like God, I will not tease the people with stories of Heaven. I will teach them to love the world they have."

That's a vague relief, even if it's not clear he'd expected them to act on that love, and even though he considers power the defining attribute of a Godness.

October 9
[Aberrant] Soguk Birlesme, a baseline post-doctoral assisting Dr. Dmitri Kasheyev in his fusion research, writes home to his parents in Thailand about a recent accident at work in whose resolution he got to see Dr. Kasheyev's powers in action.

The previous week, Dr. Kasheyev had returned to the DAIKOKU facility from the inertial containment lab, after "some sort of quarrel" whose nature was a mystery to Soguk. Without Kasheyev's ability to sense subatomic structures, and his ability to solve the relevant equations even more precisely than DAIKOKU's computers, the research had stalled.

On the 8th, Dr. Nakazawa decided to show Kasheyev a test-run of a "plasma configuration we'd had some luck with." Kasheyev didn't think this was wise necessarily, and it turned out he was right: "the plasma tied itself in knots and burned a hole in the containment tube!" The plasma jet wouldn't have hurt Soguk (200,000,000° sounds like a lot, "but the plasma is so thin and dissipates so quickly that it doesn't have time to burn"), but Kasheyev threw himself in its path anyway, and "his whole body glowed" when it struck him.

Neither of them was hurt, but they went to see the doctor anyway. The doctor recommended Soguk take the day off, and he was so light-headed he agreed. The next day, the DAIKOKU staff discussed the accident only in terms of preventing a repeat. Only time will tell what effects the whole thing had.

Okay, I've blown this off long enough.

September
[Aberrant] Jane Mason, a plant for Marietta Jackson, joins the Portman campaign.

(Or the Green campaign, if that's whom the PCs are working with and the ST wants to keep them involved.)

First, Bard Crosby of the Dominoes convinced another campaign (probably President Pendleton's, which previously had no novas working with it) to hire the Dominoes, giving them an excuse to follow the characters from political event to event. Then he contacted Mason, an associate from either his allegiance or academia, and spent a week or so rewiring her personality until she believed herself to be an ally of the Dominoes who "became a bit complicit in some illegal stuff" and wants out.

She will approach the PCs and give them information about upcoming Domino schemes. Once she's proven herself, the Dominoes will use her to lead the PCs to schemes that weren't actually going to happen... schemes whereof, in the authorities' eyes, the characters themselves will appear guilty.

Stuff in general.

September 2
[Aberrant] Geyser, a novice Tomorrowite, writes home about her first days on the job with T2M-Americas.

They flew her and Christoph Yannik to Mexico City on a private jet, where Skew himself met them at the airport. "And god, is he handsome! I thought I was going to melt!"

After getting showered and changed into their official Team Tomorrow eufiber onesies unitards, they proceeded to a pig roast ("three whole hogs roasting on spits") attended by a lot of reporters, "at least a hundred other [ordinary] people" and the entire rest of T2M-Am "except Ana Graça Texeira, who had something else to do, I guess". (You guess right.)

Things got a little tense for awhile, when one of the reporters started asking questions about Slider, but Mr. Montoya-Bernal was so cool about how he answered the questions and then moved on so that the reporter couldn't bring everybody down. It was a party, after all and nobody wanted to talk about sad things.

She breaks off there, as she's about to head off on a mission and will be too busy to talk (even if she were allowed to, which she suspects she won't) for a couple of days.

Marietta Jackson, a developed sphinx, turns the Dominoes, a group of novas under her direction, against Randel Portman.

Marietta's body, animated by a subconscious mind that does a completely convincing imitation of normal human consciousness, tends a bar in Garza Bay, Costa Rica. "Her conscious mind wandered off long ago into abstract realms of number theory and linguistics, and it's not planning to return until it can drag its body into those realms with it." Her subconscious considers that Portman poses a threat to her just by the two of them existing, and is enacting countermeasures.

The Dominoes are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction have an allegiance "generally opposed to the [player] characters', ideally one with an interest in protecting America." Silvia "Anne Steiner" Calendri is a former NSA crypto expert who became a chaos generator after a virus wiped her hard drive. Bard Crosby is a body-hopper and social monster. "Mary Mary" Martinez is almost entirely focused outward, which means she doesn't pay enough attention to herself to stay the same shape from moment to moment. Reginald Daniels, the optional big gun, is an old-school angel, praising his God but with one wing dipped in blood.

Go on and psychoanalyze that.

August 15
[Aberrant] Corby Carter, nominally a Utopian nova but privately a "smart egg" (Portman's term for an undeveloped Sphinx), begins moving against Portman (who suspects Corb of Sphinx status).

We aren't told what, specifically, Corb plans to do to the Fireman, but we're given examples of the things he'll do to PCs who come to his attention: causing police to show up to take them into psychiatric custody, police primed to "watch for the known personal habits and mannerisms of the character as signs of the alleged condition," then come in as a special consultant and goad them into acting out (in the words of Bryan Lambert to the Malkinistas, "That's your A-game?"*); incriminating messages and other threatening actions; associating the Clytemnestra blog with the characters' allegiance to a degree that they can't attack him without attacking their own side; turning one of his followers into a PC's ideal mate, such that the Corbite will be heartbroken if the beloved turns against Corb...

August 16
[Aberrant] The "World's Opinion" segment on N!terview asks "Is the world ready for a nova President?"

A Moscow house painter replies "Why not? Russia has one." Ivy Latimer, a graphic artist in Bedworth, is "quite convinced that nothing is too crazy for America." Jenina Goudreau, a geneticist on Boston, considers that "A one-in-a-million curiosity of nature doesn't represent anyone." Kirsten Kinney, an elite of no fixed address, says "The wolves'll tear him apart." Josette Nicholson, a retired programmer in San Jose, believes it'll "keep[] the number of threats down. Plus, The Fireman has demonstrated his integrity in the face of power."

* Don't getta me wrongo; the prospect freaks me out, to the point where trying to write about it was one of the chief reasons I didn't get this posted yesterday. And I've never actually been through it, whereas it's quite possible that Ryan Sean Borgstrom/Rebecca S. Borgstrom/Jenna K. Moran have seen the quirks of one of them used against the entire Hollyhock God(dess) system and the body it inhabits. But it strikes me as spectacularly petty on Corb's part, not to mention hard to ST a way out of.

It all starts here.

July 24
[Aberrant] Science magazine carries an article, "The Greening of Ethiopia: How Long Can It Last?"

Sharon D. Isenberg of FSU-Tallahassee, lead author of "Long-term Effects of Operation Eden" (Bull. Am. Met. Soc., November 2007), points out that, while it is indeed breathtaking, "there is evidence that the environment Operation Eden created on the Ethiopian plateau is not self-sustaining and may never be." Nova intervention is still required to keep the changes from reversing themselves.

Our old friend Nimal Dharmasena disagrees: "One need only look out at the transformation of the Ethiopian landscape to be convinced of the success of Operation Eden.... What garden doesn't require tilling and weeding?"

Isenberg is unconvinced: "The transformation of Ethiopia is remarkable, of that there is no doubt. The question is... will their miracle become self-sustaining or remain an artificial garden, dependent on nova 'caretakers' forever?"

Sorry I'm late, but I've been tired and demotivated lately.

July 10
[Aberrant] "The Voices of Clytemnestra" (the OpNet identity of Utopian nova Corby Carter) discourse.

It's entirely possible that Clytemnestra is still known as a "blogger" in a world where the Web was replaced by the OpNet. After all, the term "weblog" was invented in 1997, and "blog" was coined in early 1999. That could be just a rounding error of history.

"Objective Clytemnestra" talks about the Washington Post's recent connection of Mark Anthony Green to the Institute for Historical Review (a Holocaust-denial group) and calls Green's response a doctrine of original virtue: "One man, however fiercely he supports the propaganda of another, bears no responsibility for that other man's crimes."

The response in question was a statement of "'regret' for the 'insensitivity' of his youth" and the observation: "The people of the institute are historians; would you have some kind of original sin attach to them from a 20th century war?" (My answer is "Given that they're attempting to whitewash the reputation of that war's nigh-unquestionable villains, yes I fucking would.")

In contrast, "Narrative Clytemnestra" mentions that one Jules Courtnay, an André Corbin fanboy who carried his admiration of the Bender to the point of imitation, was arrested last month for killing his wife (in imitation of Corbin's alleged murder of Slider): "If Corbin's the innocent victim here, Jules has... struck out on his own and started redefining what being André Corbin means. If the sporty, nova-ish guy can't keep up, too bad." Finally, "Emotional Clytemnestra" sums up its opinion of original virtue with a quasi-paraphrase of Nietzsche: "If you wave your pom-poms for the monsters long enough, eventually you get to play on the monster team."

There's a certain irony there. Contrary to his optimistic statements on N-Day, candidate Portman is not 100% sanguine about how all novas will interact with baselines, and "Corb" (as Carter's delightful boot-slaves friends call him) is on his list of those to watch.

It started after N-Day, when Portman's wife Jennifer had to become something of an expert on novas purely in self-defense, as her poli-sci and history students interrupted her classes with nova-, Fireman- and quantum-power-related questions. Her old and new fields of study led her to conclude that hyperintelligent novas, "sphinxes" as she called them, would truly transcend their humanity, and would probably be unable to avoid rearranging human society to their liking. She told Randel about her theory, and they've opposed possible sphinx manipulations as best they can ever since.

They suspect Corb of being an "adder", a tool of the sphinxes, or a "smart egg", an incipient sphinx. The second guess is correct. His 2006 self-publication, Principles for an Ethical Society, lays out in public a proposal for the sort of societal reorganization that a full sphinx would conduct with discretion, and carries encoded in its complicated mathematical proofs a subliminal sales pitch. It also carries a hidden message from its caterpillar to any butterflies that may read it:

I know I am as a child to you. Before you attempt to interfere, please remember that the mass of humanity is much less than a child to you. You may grow lonely for my company in time.

All in all, it carries the feel of early Borgstromancy about it, from the period where RSean/RebeccaS were just starting to weave their spells.

Short...

July 1-4
[Aberrant] The Libertarian Party's national convention, which, to the surprise of exactly nobody, ends up nominating President Pendleton for a second term; due to Vice-President Nicholson's ill health, her running mate is New Hampshire Congressman Trent Williams.

...and to the point.