We're celebrating Klordny Week, Superboy!

< you have forgotten something > </kosh>

early May
[Aberrant] While in Calcutta under NSI contract to Novelty Consulting, allegedly to investigate rumors of Teragen infiltration, Slider begins backtracking one of Novelty's middlemen and discovers that he has "orders to cooperate" with at least three elites, including DeVries' Joseph "Pursuer" Simms (known for a public rivalry with Pax). She follows their contact trails and finds they end up in Utopia offices. She learns the fringes of Project Proteus' activities (the experiments on the patients in Bahrain, the doping of adrenocilin with sterilizing drugs, funding of the very groups Utopia is supposed to stop in Kashmir) and, understandably, becomes convinced that she's discovered an "anti-nova" conspiracy. She goes to André Corbin with her suspicions, but he mostly dismisses them as ranting paranoid shite.

For the record, NSI is Nova Services International, the division of Utopia that handles the subcontracting of Utopian novas to outside firms.

At this point, Jennifer doesn't know the name "Project Proteus". All she knows is that people inside Utopia are not just within six degrees of Utopia's enemies, they're giving those enemies their marching orders. Although the novas who work for Proteus would scoff at the notion that they're working for a conspiracy to exterminate their own kind, I for one can't fault Jennifer for reaching the conclusion she did, and I openly scoff at cricharddavies for calling her "a deluded woman on the verge of accepting the Null Manifesto as part of her personal philosophy."

I've been shamefully lax in posting this.

July 5
[Aberrant] Conservative Tehran mullah Ayatollah Sa'ati is openly assassinated by novas declaring themselves "members of the Teragen." T2M superdiplomat Ichiko "Geisha" Iko persuades the imams not to declare jihad against all novas. Count Orzaiz and other known Teragen spokesnovas disavow the assassins, claiming that the Teragen neither is an organized institution nor has any single agenda. (In fact, [Divis] Mal sends [Jeremiah] Scripture, along with Arab Terats K'toub, Noor and Wah'esh, to uncover the killers and make them examples for anyone who would take the name of the Teragen in vain.) Nonetheless, Project Utopia and the UN take greater pains to monitor known or suspected Terats.

The main thing I have to add to this is that, in early transcriptions of this segment, I referred to the dead mullah as "Ruhollah Sa'ati" because I thought "Ayatollah" was a title that had only ever been held by the late Ruhollah Khomeini. Also, I include the next bit now because Aberrant: Teragen doesn't really give a sense of how long it takes.

Eventually, Scripture and his colleagues encounter Tarik ibn Mahmoud and his "Companions [of Allah]." Ibn'Mahmoud hands over the corpses of Sa'ati's two killers and puts the Companions' network of cells and contacts at the One Race's service. Through Giuseppe "Sloppy Joe" Benatti, the Teragen has proof to support Bounty's allegations regarding Utopia's secret agenda.

Benatti had the sort of eruption that Project Utopia would prefer not to have Joe Sixpack hear about, ( and the sort so disgusting that I leave it to you to commit to reading about it. )

Utopia offered him a (nonexistent) cure for his condition, got him on a plane to Bahrain, and quietly marked him for euthanasia on arrival. His writeup calls it "good luck" that the transport pilot defected. Since it means he's still alive and thus has a shot at being cured, he probably agrees. If they'd told him "Look, there's no current hope for you, but if you let us study your remains, there might be hope for some other poor SOB", he might have agreed to that. Since Æon doesn't think like that in the Nova Age, we'll never know.

Secrets facing exposure. (Includes material reprinted from Aberrant: Project Utopia.)

2004
[Aberrant] "The NovaWatcher" posts an inside look at the Bahrain facility to the "NovaWatch" OpSite.

Or, at least, fragments of an inside look, put together from "confidental UN documents obtained by this opsite" and "[i]nformation smuggled out to this site by informants we dare not name", get onto "The OpSite of Skeptical Inquiry into All Things Nova". The NovaWatcher states that the Bahrain lab isn't really a Rashoud facility. After all, proper Rashoud facilities like the one in New York

are for testing new novas, helping them learn about their powers (and of course, letting PU learn about their powers too) and recruiting new novas into PU. The facility in Bahrain is [...] intended to test, not new novas, but older novas who are experiencing "high levels of quantum buildup" — whatever that means. [link added by present editor] It doesn't sound very healthy.

And the 'Watcher is worried that

any novas, which the UN or PU get upset about, for whatever reason, might just wind up here for "testing." The sort of testing performed in windowless labs deep underground where no one can hear the screams.

Hugh has probably seen this page; he keeps an eye on NovaWatch, to see if they know anything they shouldn't, or anything that might help Æon. He'd like to be able to reassure them, but that would mean explaining about taint. He thinks the world is ready for that knowledge, but Æon and Utopia disagree, so he bites his tongue and bows to their judgment. For now.