UNSA - Spring 2063
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Sara Jorn was an active member of node hobbyist forums for as long as she could use the internet. Ever since she was an infant she was fascinated by the glowing forms that permeated every corner of the world, and her fascination only grew with the knowledge that the nodes had only been around for about twenty years before her birth, and that very little was still actually known about them. The nodes had appeared in 2025, and within a few years access to them was highly restricted and regulated by the former American government. Even after the revolution that Sara’s parents lived through, the United New States government left many of the restrictions in place for “safety reasons.” Sara thought that was a load of horseshit and the government currently in power in her country was not actually so much different than that which was in power before the revolution, but that was a different matter. In any case, the UNSA restrictions were not generally well-enforced, so people who liked to tinker with the nodes were relatively safe to congregate in online communities and discuss their findings and experiences.
Through the node hobbyist forums, Sara came across the “Ramiel Journal,” a document that was supposedly written by one of the early node researchers back during the “node genesis,” when the nodes first appeared on earth. The Journal contained accounts of experiments in which the author connected her mind directly to a Ramiel-class node, which supposedly gave her visions of the past and future. The Journal had a cult-like following in some corners of the forums Sara frequented, but it seemed like the people who were really deep into it had some secret forums of their own, because the main forums only held whispers of activity based on the document. Sara never felt compelled to get in with that crowd, but she was interested in the Journal itself, and had spent a lot of time cross-referencing its content with other nodal research material made public by the UNSA Senate-Sanctioned Activities Transparency Act, which requires all government documents not containing sensitive information to be made publicly searchable and accessible. She became known on the forums (under her screen name, Jornskal) as an expert on the Journal, and more broadly on the early work of the old Node Task Force, which had been the United States’ precursor to the National Nodal Array Administration eventually instituted in the UNSA.
In the early months of 2063, Sara began receiving messages about a certain conference that was held between the NNAA Research Laboratories leadership and leadership from the Internal Defense Agency’s Nodal Security Commission. Conferences such as this were required by a Senate action from several years back called the Inter-Agency Node Accords, which essentially makes any government agency doing node-related work have to do so in tandem with the NNAA. The reason so many people were asking Sara about this particular conference was twofold: the conference would not be open to public observation (not even the press), and the publicly stated subject matter was the arrangement of an experiment, the reference material list for which included the Ramiel Journal. Based on the other items on the reference list, Sara was able to somewhat confidently hypothesize that the experiment would involve attempts to physically manifest something related to the Journal, using the nodes.
After the conference concluded, the minutes of the formal discussions were published per the Transparency Act, but much of the specifics were classified and thus redacted from the public record. Even still, Sara was able to all but confirm her initial hypothesis. She relayed her conclusions to the various people in her direct messages, and from there the info made the rounds on the hobbyist forums. The messages about the conference and the experiment outlined there stopped for a while, until the release of an official report sent from the NNAA to the IDA Nodal Security Commission, who had called for the conference and the experiment in the first place.
The report, with subject line “Reconstitution of the Nodal Dust Origin,” was also heavily redacted in the public record, but the original, full-length document was leaked to the Independent Press, which published it widely in print and online. Sara was inundated with messages on every social platform she used, asking her what the report meant. She had read it herself by this point, and on a first look, she barely understood any of it. Much of the terminology was not previously used in any of the publicly available research documents, despite the usage sounding authoritative, as though these terms were decades old. Sara decided to post an annotated version of the report, interjecting context so that even a novice amateur researcher could understand the entire document. Based on the sheer amount of messages she was getting and how widely the report had been published, she had a feeling that there would be a lot more than the usual initiated crowd looking to her pages for answers.
Sara reposted the entire report on a few of the forums she was on, with her annotations interjected directly in the body of the text:
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OFFICIAL REPORT
FROM NNAA Research Laboratories, ℅ Dr Arnold Drof, Head of Research
TO IDA Nodal Security Commission, ℅ Gen. Garfield Severance
ON THE MATTER OF Reconstitution of the Nodal Dust Origin
The “Nodal Dust Origin” is a rarely referenced concept, it is a term for the hypothetical concept of a source point for the particles, so-called “Nodal Dust,” that give nodes a visible form, which are not identifiable as any known element, or even as physical matter at all. “Reconstitution” of this hypothetical source point would imply a secondary hypothesis that the “Nodal Dust Origin” is some larger whole that the “Nodal Dust” particles broke away from, and the belief that the Dust could be reconstructed into its supposed original form.
REPORT FOLLOWS
The Research Team has concluded the experiment outlined at our conference per the Senate Inter-Agency Node Accords. The two departments involved in this report are required to hold public conferences about things like this. The research, being based largely in unscientific speculation and conjecture, was largely inconclusive. However, some key discoveries have been made:
Regarding the possibility of verifying the psychological transmission of visions described in the so-called “Ramiel Journal” dubiously attributed to my former colleague Dr Elizabeth Schrieb: There’s a bit to unpack in that sentence: The Ramiel Journal is a publicly available document created during the earliest days of node research in 2025. The Journal was supposedly created by a NASA researcher, Dr. Elizabeth Schrieb, who was removed from her research team on the basis of being its creator. The Journal includes fanatical ravings conflating religious and spiritual themes with the research Schrieb and others were doing at the time. Dr Arnold Drof, who is the author of this report, was the head of that research team, though it was his superior who fired Schrieb. The visions described were transmitted to the author of the Journal via a Ramiel-class node that has been present in this facility since the node genesis, and through array-dating methodology we have determined that the closest Ramiel-class node present at the time of the genesis is now located in a certain condemned shopping plaza in Gary, Ohio. It is a fact from publicly available memorandums that Dr Schrieb connected her mind directly to nodes to conduct an early version of the process we now commonly use to send high fidelity video instantaneously around the world, however according to the Journal, this gave her various visions of the past and future of the nodes and humankind. The Ramiel node she used is located in the National Nodal Array Administration headquarters near Columbus, Ohio, and has apparently always been in that location, and was not moved there using node repositioning transfers. The NNAA used a complex process to determine that back in 2025, the closest node of the same type was (and still is) located in a shopping center a few miles away. Much of the plaza burned down following an electrical fire in a Laserquest, which killed one employee - Agatha Jones. It is feasible that the Ramiel node in Gary could have recorded a visual imprint of the purported genesis incident and transmitted it to its nearest same-class neighbor. There is still no solid evidence that nodes possess any sort of memory banking capability (aside from certain classes with that specific aptitude), so there is no explanation for how the receiving node would be able to retain that imprint until the point at which it was transmitted to the author. Here’s where things get really crazy: The name Agatha appears in the Ramiel Journal, and according to the Journal, the author had a vision of this girl being engulfed in flames and the nodes appearing from the smoke. Apparently, this Agatha was a real person who actually died in a fire at approximately the same time as the nodes first appeared. This report says that it is possible a node in the shopping center could have transferred a visual feed of the event to another node of the same type nearby, but there is no evidence to explain how it could have stored that visual feed to then show it to the author of the Journal months later.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Regarding the verification of the purported “genesis incident” described in the Journal: The Universal Superior Array which all nodes possess an inherent connection to transmits a continuous feed between all nodes. This transmission was observed early on in the original node research conducted nearly forty years ago, but what is actually being transmitted between the nodes is unknown. It manifests visually as a shift in the light cast by the node forms, which shifts in a continuous pattern that repeats every forty-two hours. Unlike most varieties of human-induced node transfer, the Superior Array transmission is delayed slightly by geographical distance, so the transmission has a quantifiable directional quality, showing an origin point in Gary, Ohio. Assuming the transmission began at the time of the genesis, it is feasible that an event resulting in the node genesis may have taken place at that location. The Superior Array is elementary school science class stuff for kids now, but as a refresher: all of the nodes on earth are interconnected in a way we don’t fully understand. We can observe that something is being continuously transferred between all of them, but we don’t know what or why. Unlike the instantaneous transfers humans use the nodes for, the Superior Array transfers information with a time delay based on distance. By observing the direction of the transfer around the globe, we can tell that the cycle starts in approximately the same location as where Agatha died.
Regarding the possibility of reconstituting the “nodal dust” (the material which gives nodes a physical form) into a superior original form: There is no way of establishing what the original form of the “dust” was, but it is possible that the Superior Array transmission sequence is related to it, and by putting the sequence through an Artificial Array transfer process like the developing hard-light object transfer method, the physical form of the dust’s origin might be ascertained. In other words, if we put the incomprehensible string we don’t remotely understand through an experimental process derived from nuclear fission and fusion theory, there is a chance it might make us a hologram of Agatha Jones, however the risks of attempting such a thing are incalculable. Reiterating my point back at the top, we don’t know what the nodal dust is at all, let alone what it was. Apparently the IDA wanted the NNAA to try to reveal the original form of the nodal dust. The “Superior Array transmission sequence” seems to be some kind of quantifiable data string that the NNAA has recorded from the Superior Array, in other words it is the piece of information the nodes are constantly sending each other, but it is presumably meaningless to humans. There is currently a process under development that would allow people to transfer certain kinds of physical objects using nodes, but the process uses nuclear energy science, so the potential danger is extremely high. The IDA apparently wants the NNAA to put the “transmission sequence” as the input for a process similar to that and hope that it makes the “nodal dust origin” appear, however the likelihood of that working is far outweighed by the dangers of the process involved.
If experimentation is to continue, per the Accords we must first present a joint report and proposal to the Senate Committee on Nodal Science and Security. When one of the involved agencies in a collaboration like this raises concerns, the work is put on hold and a hearing is held with the senate to determine if they will be directed to continue or stop the work being done. My opinion as an academic is that we should stop here. Further experimentation could be putting the entire world at an unknown level of risk, and the discoveries that stand to be made from it are extraneous to our material and useful understanding of the nodes. Dr. Drof believes the risks are insurmountable, and that the entire idea of the Nodal Dust Origin is irrelevant to any useful node science anyway. In short, pursuing the spectres of that accursed Journal any further is simply not worth it.
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Sara didn’t address it in her forum post, but the last sentence of the report gave her a sort of chill. Dr. Arnold Drof, the world’s original expert on the nodes, who has been doing node research work for nearly forty years, letting his emotions out in the conclusion of a formal government document? It made her feel some kind of dark way about the future. She had gathered previously that Dr. Drof disapproved of the Journal and believed that Dr. Elizabeth Schrieb was not actually the author, it was simply used to defrock her when she attempted to whistleblow on the old United States Department of Defense; however, she did not expect it to be something that haunted him. He used the word “spectres” for god’s sake!
Sara decided to log off the forums for a while after she posted her annotations, and she tried to focus on something other than nodes for a while, but she couldn’t shake the background sense of dread that Dr. Drof’s words had left her with.