United States - September 2025
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Our Report on the Node Report
From Popular Science Monthly, September 2025 special digital second issue
By now everyone on earth can identify a node, they are the floating shapes of light that appeared this past summer and have stood suspended in the air, unchanging save for a gentle shifting of the light they cast, ever since. Various disasters on the date they appeared have been suggested as the cause for their appearance, ranging from a fire in an Ohio shopping plaza to the collapse of a major ice shelf in the arctic. However, aside from being able to point at one and say “that’s a node” most of us still don’t know what a node actually is. Therefore we bring you this special (digital) second issue of Popular Science Monthly this month in order to share our editorial report on the United States of America Joint Department Node Task Force’s September 1 “Node Report.” That government document was full of dense technical jargon and newly coined terms without definitions and context, so we here at PSM have taken it as our journalistic duty to sift through the one hundred and twenty-seven page document and explain the key takeaways in clearer terms.
First and foremost, this quote from the introduction to the Report by Head Researcher Dr. Arnold Drof, “The clearest thing we have learned over the past months is that we know virtually nothing about these “nodes,” all of the discoveries delineated in the following one hundred and twenty-seven pages amount to a drop of water in the Atlantic. We have learned a great deal about what the nodes can do, but we still do not have the faintest clue what they are, where they came from, or how they even exist at all. The mysteries of these things will likely elude mankind until the end of time.” In the first section of the Report, “Everything Not Yet Known,” what Dr. Drof said is made quite clear. After months of research there is no progress toward answers as to where the nodes came from, what they are made of, or how they even exist. They are not made of any known physical element, and in fact can not be touched or interacted with in any physical or chemical manner. The only physical stimulus they respond to at all is light. All of the discoveries made by the Task Force and published in the Node Report stem from this fact - all one hundred twenty-seven pages boil down to different ways the nodes react to light.
In the second section, “Parallels With Quantum Physics,” the report covers how the researchers finally made a breakthrough when they tried firing photons at the nodes to see if they would react like quantum particles. Even in the clinical writing of the report it is clear they were throwing rocks at the wind at this point. Luckily, the photon cannons worked, a stutter in the constant pulsation of the node’s light was detected after being hit with a particle. After more throwing rocks at the wind but now with greater purpose, the researchers determined that using photon sequences to synchronize the light cycle of multiple nodes linked them in a way.
The Report goes on to explain the concept of “Arrayment” in the section “Superior and Artificial Arrayment.” First, the “Superior Array” is the hypothetical connection between all nodes. The researchers determined that in addition to the continuous shifting of all nodes’ light, all nodes also emit a faint magnetic field which also changes continuously. Though the light sequences can be altered through the aforementioned photon cannon method, the researchers were unable to alter the magnetic field of any node. The pattern of the magnetic field is identical and synchronous between all observed nodes, regardless of whether the light sequence is synchronized. Based on the discoveries related to “Artificial Arrayment” which will be elaborated on next, the team established the concept of the Superior Array, which hypothetically allows nodes to “communicate” with all the other nodes in the world.
“Artificial Arrayment” is a much more concrete discovery, in which the photon cannon synchronization process is used on two or more nodes at once, establishing a connection between multiple nodes. In quantum physics, altering the state of any quantum entangled particle will simultaneously change the state of all particles entangled with it. In a very similar manner, using an outside stimulus to affect an Artificially Arrayed node will cause the other nodes in the same Array to be affected in an inverse way. For example, projecting an image into one node will result in an arrayed node projecting the image outward. Different kinds of nodes apparently operate differently when arrayed together, and respond differently to conceptually different kinds of light stimulus. These differences are the basis of the next section of the Report.
The longest section of the entire Report, “Node Classification” outlines the differences between every kind of node observed by the Task Force researchers. The process of giving an arrayed node some kind of light-based stimulus and observing the response of a connected node is referred to as “Node Transfer” and it was determined that different kinds of nodes (distinguishable by distinct visual forms) are better suited to transfer different types of things. In what is probably the most science-fiction part of the reality of the nodes, these so-called “aptitudes” of different nodes are based on the conceptual content of things being transferred. Most content is transferred by encoding some piece of traditional media (an audio file, for example) as a sequence of photons, which are then blasted into a node, and can then be received from an arrayed node and decoded back to the original format. When aptitudes come into play is where things get a little mystical sounding: certain nodes have an aptitude for transferring content with a strong emotional element, meaning they could transfer a love letter with high fidelity, but if given a dissertation on the pythagorean theorem, a significant loss in informational quality would occur during transfer. Even more unbelievable is the fact that certain nodes have such strong aptitudes for certain content that the informational quality can be increased during transfer.
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One of the researchers, a Dr. Elizabeth Schrieb, came up with a naming system for the different types or “classes” of nodes. Apparently a fan of the nineties’ Japanese animated series Neon Genesis Evangelion, she suggested naming the nodes after Judeo-Christian angels after the first aptitude determined by the team was that of a node shaped like a blue octahedron, strikingly similar to the appearance of the angel Ramiel in NGE. Apparently the other researchers in the Task Force were on board with the idea, as the official classifications of different node types are all names of angels from the bible and various apocryphal texts. Dozens of pages detail the aptitudes of over thirty kinds of node as well as how those aptitudes were discerned, but for the purposes of this article we have narrowed down the most important classes for our average reader to be aware of:
Ramiel-class nodes have an aptitude for “visible light transfer,” which is the formal term for photo or (silent) video transmission. Rather than being encoded as a photon sequence, images can be projected directly into a Ramiel node and will be emitted from an arrayed Ramiel node with high fidelity and no external projection equipment. Ramiel nodes also have an additive aptitude, if stereoscopic three-dimensional video footage is projected into one Ramiel node, an arrayed Ramiel can project a visibly three-dimensional rendition of the footage, not unlike a hologram from Star Wars.
Yeqon-class nodes have an aptitude for “human-related content transfer,” which is a broad subject including everything from The Canterbury Tales to episodes of I Love Lucy, as well as any information regarding human history. Any input of this nature (encoded as a photon sequence and decoded after transfer) will retain its level of informational quality through transfer, but interestingly the transfer from one Yeqon node to another is not instantaneous as with most other node classes.
Jophiel-class nodes have an aptitude for “literary content transfer,” meaning encoded photon sequences containing written literature are transferred with high fidelity between them. Emotionally-charged content such as love poems or hate mail see a slight increase in fidelity in that the core emotion of the transferred content is instilled in the recipient at the output node.
Perhaps the most intriguing node class are the Armaros-class nodes, with an aptitude for “arrayed node transfer.” By arraying two Armaros nodes and then adding another node to their array, the non-Armaros node will be moved instantaneously to the location exactly centered between the two Armaros nodes. The location chosen for the Node Task Force headquarters had a high concentration of nodes to begin with, but after discovering the ability to move nodes, many more were triangulated to the abandoned shopping mall outside of Columbus.
Something not covered in the official Node Report but which was a common theme across our supplemental interviews with members of the Task Force is the culture at the Task Force research laboratories. At the behest of the government officials overseeing the Task Force, there has been a consistent disregard for sound scientific procedure to the point of risking safety and calling into question the ethicality of much of the work done by the Task Force. The general consensus among the American scientific community since the publication of the Report seems to be that the risks were worth it for the amount of knowledge gained in such a short span of time since the appearance of the nodes. The consensus among the global community as a whole is very different, however. European science journals and even traditional news media have published articles condemning the entire Task Force undertaking as another American imperialist power-grab, trying to monopolize any power potentially associated with the nodes and potentially risking the safety of the planet in the process with such reckless experimentation being done with things we understand so little about. Considering the involvement of the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security in the Task Force, there certainly may be some merit to these claims.
For now, government researchers will continue to explore the mysteries of these strange forms that now occupy our world, but before long we expect to see consumer uses for the various node aptitudes being developed. The personal opinion of the editorial team here at Popular Science is that Node Transfers are going to be the next internet, and getting in on that market will be a modern gold rush.
That concludes this special digital issue, please send your questions about the node report to be answered in the October issue’s “Letters to the Editor” section.
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