MKSheppard wrote:"...that all foreign embassies immediately implement local Blitzschlag fields to prevent a reoccurence of this tragic incident. The Bragulan government has been most helpful in this aspect."
Umerian Embassy to the Shepistani Republic
Day After President Sheppard's Speech
Being one of Shepistan's neighbors, there was no question of the Technocracy's need to maintain an embassy on Montgomery. However, this embassy had to be maintained in the face of the ultraviolent local color, which made for a rather unusual posting from the point of view of Umerian diplomats.
The original Umerian embassy had been accidentally vaporized by a malfunctioning defense missile during the Amplitur War, when a stray NIKE-HERACULES directed by a mind-controlled SHEPRAD defense operator had run out of fuel and crashed ballistically into the building. The Shepistanis had subsequently presented the drooling mindpuppeted vegetable once known as said missileer as evidence, which the Umerians had accepted- especially since they were at the time doing a booming business selling discount plutonium to Shepistan. The War forced the Sheppoes to burn through their massive stockpiles of nukes with unusual speed, after all, and Amplitur saboteurs' had made a painful dent in their own nukefactory facilities.
It was a measure of how desperate the war had been, for at no other time before or since had Shepistan ever been less than fully self-sufficient for its own nuking needs.
After the war, the Umerians rebuilt the embassy in an atmosphere of growing anti-esper paranoia among the Shepistanis. Knowing this, they had gone well out of their way to design the facility as a fortress against psychic intrusion: not so much to defend themselves, as to reassure the twitchy and heavily armed Sheppoes around them.
In particular, the embassy grounds were englobulated by null field projectors built into the embassy's basement. These psi-denial devices were passive in nature, but of great power, and they blocked psychic vibrations along a full thirty octaves of the psychic spectrum, going far beyond the highest and lowest bands used by any esper ever known to man.
The null field projectors were so hard-driven that they even interacted slightly with normal thought, creating a vague sense of numbness. The field also slightly suppressed impulse-control within the zone of effect: intelligence was untouched, but the subjects' restraint decreased markedly.
Normally this would place them beyond the parameters recommended by the Ministry of Welfare, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had successfully applied for an exemption. They had argued that the effects were temporary and (in this case) helpful in permitting the embassy staff to fully understand the Shepistani national mindset.
Of course, there was a cost. Those who were normally mentally stable outside the Umerian Embassy tended to be a touch... uncontrolled. Slightly insane, perhaps, but what truly sympathetic person isn't at least a little bit mad? Those who were normally slightly insane tended to become fixated and prone to wild fits of uncontrolled behavior, typically deranged laughter and intense dedication to special projects.
And those who were truly insane were driven beyond insanity into that otherworldly territory found
beyond the other side of madness. They became... shroomsane.
It was in this psychological regime that Doctor Sivana spent most of his time these days, and it was in the height of shroomsanity that he greeted the Shepistani inspection team in the embassy lobby.
The Shepistanis had wheeled in a heavy cart, pushed by three men, featuring an emergency mobile Blitzschlag Field Generator. In addition, another team carried PKE devices to detect any unwanted psychic vibrations. The PKE units were tuned so carefully that they were even capable of picking up subtle
Feng Shui vibrations from inanimate objects, at least under ideal conditions. Any psykery, or residue of psyker witchcraft, they found in the Umerian embassy would be the subject of a powerful inquisition.
They were met in the lobby by a wrinkled little man with a great beak of a nose. From the look of his face, he was not so much a victim of natural aging as
unnatural aging, the effects of unknown and exotic chemical and physical processes on his internal structure. But he appeared to be active and in control of his faculties as he nodded at the Shepistani PSICOP team.
"Greetings. I am Doctor Thaddeus Sivana, SCIENCE! officer for the embassy, here to satisfy you that we are in full compliance with your new requirements... in our own way."
He led them into a room cluttered with various devices of unknown types. "This is my personal laboratory; I have cleared a space for the demonstration. My lovely assistant Andrea will help you connect your Blitzschlag Device into the high voltage power network; the rest of you would be advised to prepare your PKEs to detect Blitzschlag radiations."
Over the next several minutes, the electrical contacts were made. Standing well back, the Shepistanis and Umerians watched as Dr. Sivana threw the massive power switch.
The effects were... unusual. There was the normal "Wark! Wark!" of all Sheptronics on startup, of course, but the machine soon began straining and vibrating, then let out a dull whine, trying to pierce the impenetrable murk of the surrounding null field. The difficulty of the task was not unlike trying to shine a beam of light through molasses.
Even at full bigawatt-range power consumption, the device's field propagated no more than two meters from the emitter array.
The head of the Shepistani survey team waved his PKE around.
"Well, fuck. I still got nothing. You sure that thing is plugged in?"
Wordlessly, Dr. Sivana opened a cabinet and retrieved a bag of marshmallows. He then tossed one towards the device. On contact, it swiftly caught fire in a crackling electric arc and vaporized, leaving no traces but a thin fog of powdered carbon in the air and a smell of s'mores gone wrong. Then he let out a dry, patronizing chuckle.
"Heh. Heh. Heh. Yes, my friend, I believe it is. As you can see, even at the full output of one gigaschlag, the psychic interference projected by this device penetrates our own anti-psi defenses to only a modest degree. An organic brain, even one of the much-storied power output of the infamous Amplitur, would be still less effective. While it is remotely conceivable that an incredibly powerful biological telepath might achieve limited psychoactive effects while literally in contact with the subject, mind control over such long distance scales as 'the other side of the room' would require mentalic abilities that are nothing short of godlike. The idea of controlling a significant fraction of the staff would be... Heh. Heh. Laughable."
"What if, uh... ah-ha!" The Shepistani was operating at full-out paranoia now, an impressive sight if ever there was one. "What if one of the goddamn craboids grabbed one of your guys, piggybacked on him, and made him go into the generator room and blow it up?"
"What do you think robot minions are for? There are multiple layers of fully automated security systems around the primary generator, armed with sensors and death rays of my own design. There are equally automated cutouts engaging the secondary and tertiary backup generators for just such an emergency! I assure you, our psi-deflector shields will be quite operational should your Amplitur friends arrive. Heh. Heh. Heh." Again, Dr. Sivana let out that irritating, mocking chortle.
"You still gotta have a BFG running."
"Oh, we will, we will! Our own embedded cold-fusion generators are quite capable of handling the additional load, thanks to some... minor enhancements of my own design. It will be somewhat superfluous, much like running your space-heater and your air-conditioner at the same time, but what's a little unnecessary tritium burned between friends, eh?"
"Plus we gotta do PKE scans of the whole place."
"Our technical monitoring staff will be keeping eye out for bugs while you keep an eye out for crabs, of course, but in principle I see no reason why we cannot demonstrate that we have no esper threats to hide from you here..."
"And you gotta follow the import rules."
"Naturally, naturally! The ambassador has informed me that for the duration of the emergency, he is willing to comply with inspection of all shipments to establish that they do not contain inimical life forms, craboid or otherwise. He has also instructed me to mention that the Technocracy offers its assistance in training special craboid-sniffing PUPPERS to assist in this task..."
Having complied with the locals' insistent requirements, the Umerians proceeded to wheel the fully-powered BFG into a disused storage closet and forgot about it entirely. They had other problems...
Shroom Man 777 wrote:But with the Shepistani special request, the Bragulans gladly complied in installing a Blitzschlag Field Generator to their facility. A, as in singular.
Because, in an exercise of idle curiosity by the local IBGV agents on Montgommery, they took the single BFG, linked it to a PKE, and connected it to the
Druga-3 over-the-horizon (OTH) radar powered by a radio-ionic thermonuclear generator (RTG) - thus quadruplicating the combined effectiveness of the TLAs.
By connecting the BFG to the embassy's modest-sized communications antenna (which had the secondary use of cooking any mutant geese in the local aerospace), and combining everything from BFG fields to the transmissions of vacuum tube-powered radios OTH XYZ-band radars, and the gamma ray/x-ray arrays, microwave, miniwave and macrowave and maybe even tidal wave emissions and so on and such forth, the raw power of this frankenstinian electronic warfare array expanded at a
geometric rate.
The Bragulans chuckled and laughed boisterously as they began bouncing their transmissions off the electro-ionosphere, directing it over the horizon and shooting arc-beams of invisible cosmic radiation towards other peoples, places and events otherwise uncovered by the Shepistani BFG-grid. A few of the other embassies slow to comply with the Shepistani BFG implementation order were bombarded, such as the Solarian Embassy (if there was one on Montgommery), and those who did not cower in shielded bunkers but instead foolishly wandered around in the open would come to know the effect of what would, in later days, come to be known as the
Bragulan Brainpecker. Those fancy shmancy posthumanoids with cybernetics, particularly in their brains, with classy and expensive branded consumer organics and iBrains and such began to experience nausea and vomiting, dizziness and disorientation, vertigo, and severely painful headaches...
In the end, the Shepistani Intelligence Service somehow managed to classify the Bragulan activities and their Druga-3 super-system, keeping it a secret whilst the mass mayhem they caused somehow came out to Shepistan's advantage. Quietly, the SIS began installing reflectors on several innocuous government buildings, reflectors that would deliberately redirect the Druga-3's copious emissions towards disliked things, such as flocks of birds (whose internal biological compasses would get screwed up when exposed to the invisible beams, causing them to fly into windows and die - or, sometimes, go berserk and attack people in flocks!), or oceans (causing whales to inexplicably beach themselves), and even other people's embassies.
Umerian Embassy to the Shepistani Republic
The Day After The Day After The Day After President Sheppard's Speech
Claude Lefebvre of the French Empire had been in the Umerian embassy on Shepistan because of a tricky paperwork problem faced by his export business when the Embassy Incident blew. Shepistani
gendarmes had raided the Centralist Embassy, causing massive destruction, and claiming that the Centralists had harbored one of the powerfully psychic Amplitur.
Claude himself did not know what to think. On the one hand, he found the Centrality more than a little disturbing and hostile, somewhat reminiscent of the Prussian League. On the other, it became increasingly plain the longer he stayed in Shepistan that the locals despised all things French, for reasons he did not entirely understand. But in fine Gallic tradition, he shrugged and carried on, regardless of what they thought. Business was business, after all.
Today, when he arrived the Umerian embassy seemed... disturbed. Among other things, there was a great deal of cursing, and many people working in the common areas who he did not normally see. He had dealt with many of their mid-ranking officials for quite some time now, and thus had a good working relationship with them. When he found one of the members of the Ministry of Finance staff otherwise unoccupied in the cafeteria, he sat down to ask a few questions. The Umerian sat up with a start when he saw the Frenchman across from him.
"Whuh- oh, hi Claude!"
"Is it just me, or is everyone troubled lately? Are you worried that the Shepistanis will attack this embassy too?"
"Hmmm. Not really; we passed their inspection tour easily enough. You know how much we turn up the null field here. It gives us much the same degree of security, just through a different technique."
"I suppose you're right." Claude winced and rubbed his scalp; he was told that you got used to the strange feelings created by the hyper-boosted null field bathing the embassy, but it always disconcerted him a little when he noticed it was there. It was like being a little bit drunk, perhaps?
"What's bugging me is that I can't take my hovercar off the embassy grounds: I have to do all my work over the landlines. Everyone else has the same problem."
"Why?"
"Some kind of e-war bombardment. It keeps frying high end electronics, even low-end electronics. A few people who took their flying cars off the embassy grounds when it hit had malfunctions..."
"Ah, yes. I have heard the news too. Spots all over the planet; no one really knows why. There have been reports of a repetitive tapping noise- no, too powerful to be called that..."
"Yeah. We've got a few people on staff with cybernetics or implants; it's hell on them whenever they're off the embassy grounds and this thing fires up."
"But inside the embassy they are safe?"
"Seems like. We've got the SCIENCE! officer working on it."
Hmm. Claude had to admit he was curious. Perhaps these Umerians would be able to tell him more about what was going on? He himself was more than a little concerned about the sporadic transmissions; if one of them struck the warehouses where his own goods were stored, he could be ruined. As yet there seemed no real danger of this, but whatever the threat was, it bombarded civilian areas and foreign embassies seemingly at will. If there was a defense against it, it was no doubt worth some of his time to find out.
To his surprise, Claude had little trouble obtaining access to Dr. Sivana's personal laboratory. As he approached the door, he heard a shout of "Come in, come in!" from inside. A little old man pulled his head from the interior of some large, awkward-looking device he'd been working on.
"Who are you? Never mind. It doesn't matter. Take this hydro-spanner and tighten those bolts- in opposite pairs, mind you; I need a good seal!" There was something in the man's voice that demanded obedience; Claude did so.
A few paces away, another man with a battered face seemed to have been similarly conscripted, working on the far end of the unknown apparatus- though from his lab coat, perhaps the poor fellow worked for the professor all the time. Continuing to work on the bolts without being entirely sure why, he turned his head. "What is going on?"
"We're working on an analyzer to examine those e-war bursts: we call it the Brainpecker. When we get the pan-frequency detectors working, we'll hook it up to a standard antenna-onna-stick and poke it outside next time they hit us. We should at least be able to get patterns and vector from that."
"I see. By the way, my name is Claude."
"Call me... Igor."
There was a spark and a hint of ozone from over where Dr. Sivana was working, but it settled soon enough as the senior Umerian shouted: "Nothing to worry about! I'm all right!"
Igor continued. "Me and Andrea are Dr. Sivana's min- er, students. You?"
"I am just an interested bystander, as it were. What do you know about this 'Brainpecker?'
"Well, the interference damages electronics, suggesting some kind of electromagnetic attack, possibly with minor exotic components. But it also seems to come to a screeching halt when it hits the edge of the embassy null field. That suggests some kind of esper component. That's why we're going to need to modify our antennas, you understand."
So it is the null field that grants protection? Interesting.
The work continued. Dr. Sivana, Igor, Andrea, and now Claude labored mightily to prepare the apparatus: the vacuum chambers, the turbopumps, the electronics, optronics, spintronics, and positronics. Claude was amazed at how fast everyone seemed to be working; even so it was hours before they were ready. And yet he could not compel himself to leave- he was caught up in something larger than himself, some spark of genius at work here...
Finally, one of the embassy security troopers came rushing down the stairs to the lab. She was panting.
"Doctor Sivana! It's starting again!"
"Very well. Claude, Igor, engage the antigravity pallet and bring the main unit along. Andrea, carry the 'scope! To the roof!"
As they emerged, Claude saw something at once beautiful and disturbing: a manmade (alien-made?) aurora. A spherical surface about a hundred meters across, enveloping the embassy grounds, glowed with faint iridescent light, of every imaginable color of the rainbow, and a number that could not be imagined without the aid of powerful drugs.
Dr. Sivana tapped his chin. "Ah, yes. Magnetopsychodynamic ectoplasma discharges. Fascinating. If only I had the proper capture equipment..."
Igor called out "Sir, shall I extend the antenna-onna-stick?"
"Yes! GO!" Claude heard a mechanical rattle as a long telescoping pole with a grid of metal and plastic mesh on the end rose, the heavy piece of equipment they'd assembled attached to it at the base.
Andrea, monitoring the readings on an oscilloscope, called to the doctor as she frantically disconnected wires and inserted an adaptor "Readings are off the scale! Getting a bigger scale!"
"Excellent! Carry on!"
After some minutes, examining his readouts, Dr. Sivana nodded. "Good enough, good enough. Igor, retract the antenna-onna-stick! Andrea, power down the equipment! We have what we need here."
They retreated to the lab to confer, after some minutes' work on the equipment by the
minions graduate students. Dr. Sivana was first to speak.
"So the radiation seems to be coming from a point in deep space. Andrea, have your telescopic scans revealed anything along that vector?"
"No, doctor, they haven't. Nothing in visual, IR, or UV on the thirty-centimeter rig, and I haven't tried to turn on the radio detectors with the Brainpecker out there."
Claude leaned over to Igor. "Is the telescope standard gear for your embassies? I had not heard of such a thing in France."
"Oh, no. This is just Andrea's hobbyist rig, you see."
Meanwhile, Dr. Sivana was musing quietly, stroking his chin.
"Hmm. If we see nothing in that direction, then the radiation..."
Claude, caught up in the moment, was quite surprised to hear himself saying "then it must be bouncing to us from somewhere else!"
"Heh. Heh. Heh. Elementary, my dear Francophone, elementary. Now we need only calculate from where..."
Private Laboratory of Dr. Sivana, SCIENCE! Officer for the Shepistani Embassy
Some Hours Later
"So the results then, are conclusive. What we are seeing is a transmitter sited in the region corresponding to the Bragulan Embassy, with many of the typical signatures of Bragulan technology: excessive radiation emissions, high voltage thermionics... hooked up to a Blitzschlag Field Generator. These radiations form a beam which can be reflected off the ionosphere to distant targets all over the planet."
Claude sniffed. "How rude of them."
"Indeed. I am reminded of a petty difficulty once faced by my mentor, Guy de Hatfield."
"I thought you said your mentor was Dr. Murderstein?"
"Oh yes, yes. You see, Doctor Ulrich von Murderstein was my tutor in the ways of SCIENCE! But there were things he could not teach me, lessons he himself had not mastered. And thus, I was forced to go elsewhere, to study under the famed Guy de Hatfield, to master the ways of... dickery."
(Stick figure by Randall Munroe, here used purely as illustration-of-concept)
Claude did not follow most of Dr. Sivana's explanation, but he thought he grasped the basics.
"So, Doctor, your plan is to take this offensive source of radiations and deliver a
riposté tuned to disable it?"
"Hmm. Laughably imprecise, but as good as a non-mathematical description can be expected to be, I suppose. Beyond that, having done so, I intend to deliver a counterattack- not harmful or dangerous, but aimed more at psychological warfare than at anything else. To discourage them from being so indiscriminate in their activity, you see."
"Hmm. Appropriate, I suppose."
"Appropriate... and amusing. Yess... heh. Heh. HEH.
HA. BWAAA-HA-HA-HA-HAAA! Igor, fetch the atomic disintegrators! Andrea, the plasma phase inversion tubes! For SCIENCE!"
Bragulan Consulate, Capital Wasteland, Montgomery, Shepistan
The Next Morning
Blargag Brewski looked around the control room at his fellows. "So, comrades, who shall we scramble next?" The Bragtech specialists at the embassy had never had it so good as these last few days. With the addition of the three-letter BFG to their existing passive-aggressive sensors, they had shifted their equipment by three letters too: into
massive-aggressive sensors, with which they held the humans of Montgomery in terror... with the full cooperation of the Shepistani government! No one would dare to stop them now...
No answer. He would have to think of something himself. "Hmms. It has been some hours since we last brainpecked the Umerians." The Bragulan senior technican glanced at a Mang in Black from the Shepistani Intelligence Service. The SIS man said nothing for a moment, then adjusted his sunglasses.
"I am not here. I know nothing of the so-called 'Bragulan Brainpecker.' The SIS knows nothing of the 'Bragulan Brainpecker.' The SIS does not think the Umerians are a bunch of dirty long-haired librul scientists who need to be taken down a peg. The SIS does not think the Umerian embassy needs to be brainpecked."
"I see, comrade MIB-sky. I see. Ho-ho-ho, you should have been born a Bragulan! Even with a puny human brain you can doublethink!" This led to a round of hearty approving laughter among the Bragulans. One of the technicians, feeling a bit excessive, gave the Shepistanimerican a hearty backslap that would normally have spinecrushed him, but the MIB was an enhanced posthuman and thus rode out the blow in good cheer.
"Very well, we shall brainpeck the Umerians! Align the antenna! Fire up the BFG!"
For a few seconds, everything was fine in the control room. Then they heard an ominous hum...
"Sir! Look at the voltage displays!"
The pen and paper recorder was going very wobbly... not good.
"Check the vacuum tubes! Quickly!"
Junior Cub Scout Technicians with shopping carts full of spare tubes darted between the massive tube banks of the antenna farm, a gigantic building-sized complex. Gatling tube autoloaders were all very well for the Imperial Navy, but here they needed more finesse... hence the cub scouts, whose small size helped them to go and find out what was wrong with the apparatus.
"Cub Scouts report no hardware malfunctions, sir! It must be coming at us from outside, some kind of cascading resonance!" Briefly he considered trying to improvise some kind of anti-mass spectrometer, but that would not work. The ominous hum was growing louder... SHITS! Someone must have spotted their electronic warfare and decided to retaliate with passive-aggressive systems of their own. Not good! Blargag looked over at the MIB.
"Someone is ECMing us back! Do you know anything about this?"
"No, I don't. The Shepistani Republic has authorized no such attack."
"When you say you don't know, do you mean you don't know, or you
do know? We need to know! Now!"
"This is a "I really don't know" I don't know."
Is that true, or does he actually know and just know that he doesn't want us to know that he knows... no! There was no time for doublethinking, for the ominous hum was getting even louder!
"Sir, the ominous hum is getting even louder! Voltage approaching critical breakdown!"
"SHITS! Get the cub scouts out of there, there's nothing they can do!" The operators transferred their orders through the installation's mighty loudspeakers and klaxons, as the cub scouts scurried for safety. Not a moment too soon, either, for mere seconds after the last Junior Technicians scrambled into their protective little minibomb-shelters, the first vacuum tubes blew out. Showers of broken glass and electrical arcs began jumping across the tube racks, blowing apart even
more tubes.
Soon, the failures had claimed countless thousands of the tubes... the Bragulan Brainpecker was off the air for now, its tubes overloaded and destroyed by a reflected phase-inverted version of their own powerful signals. Replacements could be had, but it would take many bear-hours of loyal Cub Scout labor.
Nor was that the worst of it. For soon, from the installation's loudspeakers, came the most horrible music: Umerian psywar broadcasts!
"Dale a tu cuerpo alegria Macarena
Que tu cuerpo es pa darle alegria y cosa buena!
Dale a tu cuerpo alegria Macarena
Heeeeeey Macarena!"
The Bragulans felt... strangely compelled, by some kind of sinister pan-species force. At first they wondered if it was some craboid psyker attack, but it could not be, for they were protected by their psi-disrupting ushankas and psi-detecting killbots! Even so, though, it commanded them! Slowly but surely, they felt the urge to...
dance!
It was so un-Byzonic! He was not sure what he was doing, as there was no word for "dancing" in Bragulan Newspeak, but he knew it was wrong.
Must... resist... RAAAAGH! There was only one answer, one way to break the spell. As always, the solution lay in Byzon's Little Green Book:
"There are very few human problems that cannot be solved through a suitable application of high explosives"
"RAAAAGH!" Blargag drew his personal sidearm, a Liberator pistol he had kept with him for years, because of its sentimental value and his fond memories of Lower Middle School. He raised the pistol, and...
BLAM! BLAM!
His bullets found the control room loudspeakers. The horrible music, it stopped!
The technicians stopped their accursed prancing and arm-waving and stood as if dazed at the horror, Blargag rallied them. "You! Shut off the power! And get rifles! Shoot out the speakers down in the tube banks; we must silence these broadcasts! Then tell the Cub Technicians it is safe to come out. We will begin repairs at once..."
SHITS! The damage was all reparable, but their schedule had been set back badly.
Perhaps engaging in electronic warfare with the Umerians so carelessly had been hasty. Theirs was a nation of technocraticoes and mad scienticians- perhaps a formidable foe on the field of electronic warfare...