We're celebrating Klordny Week, Superboy!

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.

Still in the Inspiration Age. (Maybe I need an Adventure Era icon. I wish I could borrow md_donighal's for one of my own posts.) If this entry looks familiar, it should; it was up for a couple've minutes yesterday, because I forgot I was only there to get the hotlinks.

1922
[Adventure!] The New York Times runs an article on Professor Irving Klass' "neocaloric fluid".

The original "caloric fluid" was theorized by Benjamin Franklin as the medium that carried electricity and heat. Klass' neocaloric functioned much the same way — invisible to the naked eye, but capable of carrying enough heat that only a few drops poured onto a steel bar would start the bar melting.

Klass said, "A single truck could carry enough neocaloric to power a city for a day." But he also warned that even a few ounces, if spilled, would be enough to destroy a city block.

It could have short-circuited (puncrime) rural electrification, except that nobody seemed capable of duplicating Klass' work, and respectable scientists like Dr. Emerson Ralston of Empire State University dismissed him as a crank.

The clipping of this article in the Adventure! rulebook has annotations in Michael Donighal's handwriting: Mixed state of wave/particle PA energy? Pity Klass died 1923. Accident? Murder?

It's rare that I have to lead off one of these with a correction, and (as etherlad, at least, will have noticed) rarer still that I make the correction obvious.

1924
[Adventure!] In the aftermath of the previous night's battle with the stalwart mesmerist Fulminatore, Primoris wishes he understood better the mechanism by which the human body receives telluric energy and uses it to become Inspired.

He's understandably convinced that the Hammersmith Incident was the key; in his judgment, claims of such powers prior to 1922 have been unreliable. Fulminatore, for instance, "claimed to be a son of Jove" and to have had his powers (which a later age would classify as electrokinetic) from birth; Donighal dismissed that claim as a delusion, the result of the mesmerist's new powers unhinging his mind.

But many people had become Inspired who'd never been anywhere near Atlas Cross, before or since the Telluric Engine's self-destruction. "It cannot be an evolutionary mechanism....While the pseudoaetheric waves may have an effect on evolution, such an effect cannot be expressed in those already alive, only in those to be born."

But the tools available to science of the day gave him some clues. His cells, under a microscope, didn't look quite like the cells of the unInspired. The concept of "mutants" was only about 20 years old, but Michael Donighal seized on it as applying to him and those like him. He only wished he could study, or even glimpse, the structure of his chromosomes.

Or some stalwart's chromosomes, at least. Regrettably, he knew it would make his Æon colleagues suspicious if he tried to collect tissue samples. (He regretted that Fulminatore had had to be made to self-destruct, as such a sample would have been invaluable.) For the time being, he'd have to study the only posthuman specimen he knew he could trust. (One wonders if the X-ray he considered getting would have shown a small cluster of mutated neurons between his frontal lobes.)

1956
[Aberrant] Mark Anthony Green, American Eagle presidential candidate in 2008, born in Baltimore, MD.

In 2004, he's serving his second term as a US Senator from Maryland; his challenger in the 2002 election claimed he used "Nixonian" legal harassment and espionage against her campaign. Before his Senate term, he spent two years as Director of Competition and Regulation Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which sounds like a relative of real-world think-tank the American Enterprise Institute, a chief promoter of PNAC I subsequently discovered exists in OTL as a separate arm of the right-wing noise machine, alongside such other wholly-owned subsidiaries Fox News, the Moonie Washington Times, the Scaife newspapers and the Republican Party). Sometime before that, during his college years, he interned with the Institute for Historical Review (a group of Holocaust revisionists deniers).

BENWAY: "Balderdash, my boy... We're scientists... Pure scientists. Disinterested research and damned be him who cries 'Hold, too much!' Such people are no better than party poops."
— William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

1919
[Adventure!] The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department discovers that a number of kidnapped youths have been held in a bunker in the mountains and subjected to bizarre experiments (later linked to the Rational Experimentation Group).

The "Rational" Experimentation Group was (is?) only rational in the sense so (too) many people believe, that the rational and the moral are natural enemies rather than natural allies. I think this comes from the same semantic confusion that led Ken Hamm, of the creation "science" group Answers in Genesis, to ask on a PBS special, "If I can't trust what the Bible says about geology and biology, how can I trust what it says about morality?" (Yes, I know, I sound like an Objectivist. I happen to think Alissa Rosenbaum Ayn Rand got a lot of things right. A lot of Objectivists go too far in the other direction, deciding that anything she was right about, she was completely right about, and thus that it's the religious, not the irreligious, who can't be truly moral. But enough of that.)

( Science, pure science. )