The Stream Read online

  'I don't think I've ever heard that about Raj having a full Tap ahead of the Flood before. Thanks, that's a really useful bit of background to get me started today. I really appreciate it.' I said.

  'Ah yes, I don't think that part of the story is fully in the public record. I dug it out of the restricted archive when I was researching my report' he said. 'I know Geraldine's given you access to the restricted section, so there's no problem you using the information.'

  You know that do you? That's interesting. I wonder how? I guess Lictors like to know all that's going on in case it's of benefit to their Decemvir.

  'Thanks again,' I said. 'Right, I need to go and get some more coffee, then I'll be ready to get going.'

  'White coffee for Kofi Albus?' he said.

  'I've not heard that before,' I said, smiling to take the edge off my retort. I hoped he didn't see it was through gritted teeth. Kofi actually means I was born on a Friday, nothing to do with coffee. At least his Latin is good enough. I'm sure he means well though, he's clearly trying to fit in around here and is making an effort. I just wish he'd go away right now.

  'Anyway, catch you later,' he said, turning to leave.

  'Thanks again', I said as he departed. That's a relief.

  That was a useful conversation though and skimming through Damon's report, it looks like it would save me some time. That's probably enough ante-diluvian history to put me in good shape to attack the main Flood report. It's funny to think that even back then, the Stream had fostered a craze for logging all aspects of a life into personal pools of data. As an extension of old style social media, pools were openly shared and discussed. Us historians slightly sarcastically reckon that this was a contributory factor in the stagnation of many established economies, with a large proportion of the population making a living recording, publishing and commenting on each other, but not actually doing anything of worth. Well the logging for posterity and self-reference still happens obviously, but thank goodness the need to comment and take offence at others seems to have died out. I'm one of the more fastidious loggers of course, probably due to my historical background. If only Julius Caesar had kept a diary that survived, historical research into him would be so much easier. Maybe one day someone will find my mutterings of use. Yes I know, delusions of grandeur.

  On that note, I'm going to concentrate on my research today and keep logging to a minimum unless I get bored. I think it's going to be a long one though. Sigh.

  Report: The Flood - 4th Sextilis 227PD

  FEOS: Discussion document for Geraldine Mander's eyes only.

  Executive Summary

  There's definitely something to worry about here too. The basics of the Flood are the same as we all know. There are definite oddities in the pattern of non-accidental deaths on Flood Day though that shows some correlation with the current pattern of HOME deaths. More surprisingly, there's something odd about Raj Tamboli's death on Flood Day. There's lots to discuss here before I feel confident in putting my full worries in writing.

  Flood Day

  In order to provide the same level of Stream experience for all, Raj Tamboli created multiple research projects within Tethys working on small aspects of the overall problem. In his suicide note he claimed that only he knew of the big picture, and nobody else in the company knew his grand plan, or should be held accountable for it.

  The final solution was a nanovirus and worldwide delivery mechanism that would, within one day, change the world. Over a fifteen year period this was secretly developed, tested and prepared for deployment. In typical fashion, Raj was one of the earliest test subjects, and once he experienced the full glory of total immersion in the Stream, he was even more determined to make this available to everyone. The political chaos that was engulfing the world and spiralling out of control gave added impetus to his determination to try something radical.

  After a person was infected with the nanovirus, it built a biological Tap within the brain over a two to three hour period, benignly integrating itself into all the primary sensory regions. With the Tap, all would have instant access to full sensory immersion in the Stream, with no further implants or external devices required.

  Raj knew he would never get approval to make this available any sensible timeframe given the perilous state of the world at the time, so he took it into his own hands. During routine maintenance of the Stream's balloon and drone fleet, each was upgraded to include a nanovirus delivery mechanism, which could be remotely triggered. Eventually all the pieces were in place, ready to be flooded onto an unsuspecting world. Flood Day.

  Raj however had made one major miscalculation in the testing of the nanovirus. To maintain secrecy, testing on human subjects was fairly limited and in controlled environments. All results were similar however; within two to three hours the Tap was established and usable, with the recipient suffering from a headache during the process. The worst symptoms observed were equivalent to a bad migraine which cleared up soon after. In order to ease the confusion when a person's Tap came online, Raj left a personal message waiting for everyone explaining what had happened, and why he'd done it. The tone of the message, self-congratulating on how he'd rescued humanity and given everyone the chance of sharing in a new world, was received with bemusement and anger as people viewed it while surrounded by death and destruction.

  The nanovirus had been propagated slightly ahead of Flood Day to ensure it had time to spread throughout the population as fully as possible. It lay quiescent, waiting for the trigger signal to be propagated via the Stream. For most people there was no warning or signs of the change in anyone else, the change happened around the same time for everyone, whether awake or asleep.

  Admittedly the vast majority of people had a similar experience to the test subjects, a headache often accompanied by mild nausea. For others though, the headache was crippling with many falling into unconsciousness. Some people suffered from forms of sensory overload; hallucinations, blindness, acute auditory sensitivity, deafness, the variations were endless. Many never awoke from unconsciousness and stayed in comas for years, assuming they were treated in time. Others just died instantly, with no warning other the start of a nagging headache - I'll come back to these later as this group is most interesting from the HOME perspective.

  Most deaths though occurred due to accidents caused by those who were struck helpless by the change. Even though autopilots and navigation systems controlled much traffic, there was still a huge amount of manually controlled vehicles that suddenly had no-one in control. Panic set in, crowds unknowingly trampled many to death. I'll not dwell on this, but it's easy to underestimate the different ways people died that day, and more in the chaos of the days thereafter. Exact figures weren't possible to obtain given the confusion at the time, but the total death toll was estimated to be around fifty million.

  Raj Tamboli, whose smug face greeted everyone on Flood Day telling them how clever he was to change their lives for the better, had within hours become the greatest mass murderer in history. The hunt was on to find him.

  Unexplained Deaths

  Given the trauma of Flood Day, it took a while before it became clear that many deaths weren't down to accidents, but were unexplained from any overt physical cause. It's always been assumed to be down to the Tap growth not working as planned, causing brain death. That's probably the case, but from the information I can find the deaths look pretty identical to HOME deaths. It's hard to be sure, information was understandably sketchy from those turbulent days, with most people being buried or cremated en masse.

  However it gave me enough data to work with, and I took the approach of looking at deaths of leading practitioners in the fields we had concerns about. I also did the same for Chemistry and Biology as control groups, and concentrated only on unexplained deaths and not those that were recorded as being due to obvious other factors. I may have missed some here where people were in accidents purely as they'd already died from HOME-like symptoms, but I had to start somewhere.
>
  As we expected, there's nothing to be found that's outside the realms of statistical probability for chemistry and biology. The same was true for astronomy. Physics was borderline; it seemed a little higher, but if it was an isolated blip I would have ignored it. Then I checked neuroscience, and everything changed. Over eighty percent of the leading practitioners in the field died from unexplained causes on Flood Day. I widened my search to other neurologists to check my findings, but the figure never dropped below seventy five percent. Those in the field of AI showed pretty similar death rates to neurology. Stream programming sat around fifty percent, whereas those lucky guys in Stream maintenance got away lightly, merely being decimated. I'm sure there are patterns in other fields also, but I think this is enough evidence to say that this is not just paranoia.

  Unless there was some biological determinism which attracted people with a predilection for HOME to those fields, it looks as if groups of people were deliberately targeted to die on Flood Day. Extrapolating forward to today, it's not a big leap of faith to say the same is true of HOME deaths now. Someone or something really is out to get them.

  Raj Tamboli's Death

  It took a few weeks after Flood Day for Raj Tamboli to be traced. Of course he had a secret hidden lab from which he'd planned, co-ordinated and triggered Flood Day.

  What wasn't expect though was to find his dead body, along with his grand opus, now known as the Raj Doctrines. He'd left what's been described as the longest suicide note in history. It was a long and detailed log of all the projects he'd run separately which he personally integrated into the grand scheme that was triggered on Flood Day. He strained to make sure it was clear that no-one else in Tethys knew of his plans, which of course didn't stop years of investigation and persecution. He also outlined why he had done it - not just to open up full, rich access to the Stream, but also his despair at what was happening in the world. The rise of fascism, intolerance, isolation and small scale wars seemed to him to be precursor to a larger scale world conflict, and he hoped that Flood Day would be a unifying influence that could shake the world out of its downward spiral. In the latter of course he has proved to be correct, but the cost of it was far greater than he ever imagined. He detailed his thoughts on how he thought the world had to realign to survive in the postdiluvian times, and as hated as he was in those early days, eventually these did indeed form the basis of the world we know today. Raj is the biggest contradiction of all - a philanthropist, a visionary, a campaigner for equal rights, who was directly responsible for more deaths than anyone in history.

  Tagged on the end of his treatise was a hastily written addendum, an outpouring of shock and grief at his naivety and miscalculations of the deaths on Flood Day. Clearly he knew there might be casualties, but he considered them an undesired but necessary sacrifice in order to prevent even great conflicts to come. However what happened was orders of magnitude worse than he was expecting, and he was finding it hard to live with the guilt. That was the last message he left to the world, which lay shattered around him.

  Now this is the odd part - how did Raj die? His notes gave a clear clue to his mental state, so it would be no surprise that he committed suicide. However I've search high and low in the records, and there's no indication how he died. No sign of physical injury, no sign of poisoning, nothing. He was just dead. There were so many unexplained deaths at the time that no further detailed investigation took place. They were just glad he was dead, and there was no need to worry about what to do with him; who would put him to trial and all the worldwide legal complications that would arise. There's various opinions that his death was due to a similar cause to all the other HOME-like deaths on Flood Day, but that makes no sense. He already had a biological Tap, so it wasn't a problem that happened while that was establishing itself. It sounds much more like the modern day HOME deaths from people who have been happily using their Tap for all their lives before succumbing to sudden failure. The timing though sounds very coincidental, and convenient.

  Open Questions

  Who, or what, is causing these apparently targeted HOME deaths now?

  Who, or what, caused similar deaths to occur on Flood Day?

  Why are these professional groups being targeted?

  Why are a wider range of professions at risk now? Are there others we haven't spotted yet?

  Did Raj really commit suicide? Was he actually killed by who or whatever is responsible for these other deaths?

  Addendum

  While writing the above open questions, I had a scary thought looking back at the open questions from my HOME report. There's one that I haven't really covered:

  'Why isn't there any research into HOME these days, and why hasn't this scale of death been spotted before?'

  It strikes me that the loss of experts on Flood Day and from HOME deaths now are exactly the type of people who might have looked into this. Also it's related fields that seem to struggle to get adequate funding for research these days. I haven't researched this to get any data yet, I just thought I'd record my worries as it came to mind.

  Coincidence? You decide.

  Pool: Kofi Albus - 7th Sextilis 227PD

  It was a much quieter walk into the office today, no distractions, no bumping into Damon Gates. All nice and routine, which means I can skip onto the important things today without too much trivial padding. Other than this introduction.

  'Right,' said Geraldine as we settled into our usual place. 'In a short time you've taken my vague suspicions and turned them into something way bigger and more worrying. I'm not sure whether I should thank you or not.'

  'It's my pleasure,' I replied not meaning a word of it.

  'I've studied all your backup data and couldn't really fault your conclusions. There are a few leaps of faith, and it wouldn't stand up in court yet, but I'm convinced there's something very serious happening. There's some agency that's causing deaths at an increasing rate, and somehow this goes back over a hundred years to Flood Day. The more I think about it, the more it's clear that until we get some clue as to what this agency might be, we need to keep it between the two of us. We don't want to raise any suspicions unnecessarily until we know who we can trust,' said Geraldine. 'So where do we go from here?'

  I paused, and then said, 'Could it be the Safirans? They seem to be the Confluvium's bête noire at the moment. We may only have known about them for a short while, but could they have been monitoring us for much longer?'

  'I really doubt it. I can't say I fully understand them, but I've spent longer in the company of the Safirans than anyone. I'm not fully convinced their current motivations are necessarily benign, but I never got any impression that their contact with us goes any further back than the first ghost sightings. Back when the Flood happened, before we had interstellar travel, I can't see why they would have been interested in us. If they were interested in their own self-preservation, they'd have been better stopping the Flood from happening in the first place,' replied Geraldine.

  'However I think you might be right that there's a link to the Safiran situation. Their apparent hostility to the Confluvium means we should always bear them in mind, although there's a lot more to them that's currently in the public domain. I'll go over some of the details at another time, but trust me - I'm pretty sure that they won't have a bearing on what happened during the Flood. However I did spot one additional correlation in the data you provided.'

  'What did I miss?' I wondered, feeling slightly annoyed. I'm a stickler for trying to spot every nuance of a situation myself so that I'm not caught out.

  'The death rate for astronomers and physicists only started to rise around the first time that the Safiran ghosts started to be noticed. There may not be a direct causation here, but it's suspicious,' replied Geraldine.

  'For now though, I'm more interested in what happened to Raj. There's an implication here that someone else knew of his Flood Day plans, and had prepared for what would happen next. If that's true, it can't be the same person now
more than a hundred years later. It must be a larger group or organisation that's been controlling things from behind the scenes.'

  'You mean…the Illuminati?' I said sarcastically, trying to cover my racing thoughts at what Geraldine had spotted. That sounded to me like the Safirans were in the spotlight for this, but Geraldine seemed convinced otherwise. I wondered why, but it sounded like that was for another time.

  'Thanks, that helped,' Geraldine replied, ramping up the sarcasm. 'But yes I agree, we're sounding like the worst kind of conspiracy theorists right now, just as it seemed they'd all died out. We should always strive to remain sceptical about all our suspicions, but equally we need to make sure we're not being complacent. If there is an external agency at work here, it's critical we uncover it. After all, as someone once said, "Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny."' I'll look up where that came from later.

  'If we're going to be investigating a shadowy unknown agency, we ought to call it something. A code word that sounds harmless, but can't be mistaken between us,' I said.

  'Good idea. Let me think,' she said pausing. 'Well if it is the root of all our problems with the Stream, but Source already has a meaning, how about Fount?' she asked.