![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve11Main Post and Chapter Index
**
Lab Record: 03 August 1969
Response perception: location
Blocking variables: electromagnetic fields
Confounding mapped vectors: aural, visual, tactile
Total Observations: 150
Exploratory Analysis:
ANOVA:
Correlation coefficient: 0.08
SMM Feedback: No relationship of stimulus to measured sensory response
Notes: Acquisitions finally approved for the variable field generator. SMM confounded signals were correlated against strength and distance of EM fields using this electromagnetic source at various positions relative to the subject's orientation, in an attempt to construct a manual baseline for any EM sensitivity in the unmapped perceptions. This tests the working hypothesis that the subject's ability to locate certain objects and to distinguish human movement without sight or hearing is based upon sensing differentials and fluctuations in EM fields.
A weak relationship to electrostatic charge of the EM field is explained by tactile confounding at close range. However, the SMM device found no sensory channels whose differentials correlated with the manual EM baseline at larger distances, indicating that the subject could not distinguish any differences in position, charge or flux of the test field. The subject continues to show perception of location uncorrelated with any other measured stimulus, and the SMM device still has found no model or control mechanism for this ability.
Ability to distinguish location of humans and movement could be due partially to vibrational cues, although there is some dulling of afferent neurons as an effect of the touch-telepathy mitigation: minor but measurable decreased awareness of hot/cold, sharp/blunt, most likely also resulting in a slight dampening of sense of source location or direction of vibrations. Another confounding factor could be increasing awareness of surroundings and routines in the laboratory, cells, and corridors. However the subject was also able to identify a new element in the environment (AF consultant Doctor Sarah Hamilton: see cell surveillance at 02 Aug 1969 0935 hours) and somehow discern female features (?).
Could this perception be linked to a new kind of empathic ability? Doctor Ogden and Doctor Hamilton seem to think so. I am not convinced. Empathic perception in this subject seems tightly coupled to the long-range channeling ability that has been suppressed nearly since device implantation. Ghost receptors resonating along typical empathic channels (120 to 135) display more regularity than most empathic senses I've seen, and generally appear as secondary indicators of confounding across other more prominent receptive senses. Something empathic by way of interpretation, but grounded more strongly in physical constraints?
-H.D.
Sunrise washed out the blue sky behind the northeastern hills, turning pink cirrus clouds into bright silver streaks in the high atmosphere. Far below, River climbed a metal access ladder, her breath misting in the morning air. She wasn't cleared to visit the airfield control tower, but several soldiers had pointed her here, to the roof of Building 18--or "Red Square Terrace" as it was known among the ranks--to get a look around. The two-story building was constructed as a pipe housing and pumping facility for the water tower, located half-way up the steep hills of the base's western perimeter. Beyond the ladder, the concrete rooftop was bare except for a scattering of white plastic lawn chairs and a few flimsy tables set with ashtrays still waterlogged from the thunderstorms the night before. The only thing it had going for it was the view.
"Thumb your nose at the Russians when they take your picture," a lanky private had instructed her, arcing the path of an invisible satellite overhead with a finger. "Show them what a good time you're having in this desert resort."
A good time. River swallowed a mirthless laugh, refusing to let forty-eight hours of sleeplessness turn her frustration into giddiness. She pulled an elastic band from a pocket in her camouflage BDU trousers and corralled her hair into a bun, taking stock of the situation beneath the open sky.
She had held out hope for Plan A--get to the Doctor, hope he could feel enough of the psychic switch to recognize and trigger it--through mid-afternoon of her first day. Even as her mind raced to develop contingency plans after the morning's blitz of information, she couldn't ignore the fact that the Doctor was generally good at undermining neural devices, no matter what the readouts said. The examination room wasn't ideal, but it would be defensible for the few seconds they would have to wait for the TARDIS to materialize. So she shadowed the scientists during their afternoon laboratory session for an opportunity to get close enough for a telepathic transfer.
She spent two hours in that cramped observation room before getting her chance. Two hours watching the Doctor endure test after tedious test gauging his sensory response to everything from tones to temperature differentials. Strapped to the upright examination chair, forced awake from a persistent signal through the SMM machinery, he kept his expression guarded throughout; sometimes he would furrow his brow or smile grimly to himself but never for long, and if his eyes started wandering he closed them and resolutely re-focused his concentration on whatever tune he was humming, the mouthed words gaining sound and substance. He hid pain well; he always could when he wanted to. But River could see his hands flinch against the wrist restraints every time the device at the back of his neck was fed new information.
The worst part was knowing that through it all, he could feel her presence only a few feet away. He barely trusted her in these early days; what must he think of her now, she had wondered?
When Major Ogden finally asked for her assistance re-setting a baseline, she was so defensively disassociated from her own senses that she nearly didn't acknowledge him at all. As it was, she responded by rote with an empty affirmative, and pushed her way numbly through the connecting door leading into the examination room.
The guards were positioned outside the main door in the corridor, so River and the Doctor were as close to isolated as they could come. He was singing a soft string of nonsense tiredly to himself as she approached, that meandered around a familiar tune. "Her name was Magill, she called herself Lil, But everyone knew her as--". He stopped when she pretended to check the strap holding his head in place and discreetly brushed her finger in a clockwise circle across his temple. It was a polite request he'd taught her ages ago, widely understood among touch-telepaths as "Can I come in?" All she felt in return was the blunt warmth of skin on skin.
"Shuttered like a shop on Christmas," the Doctor sighed aloud, then screwed his eyes shut tight when River quickly pulled her fingers away in alarm, flicking her gaze to the observation window to gauge any reaction. "Don't worry, sweetie!" he announced into the room. "They'll tell you, I talk to everybody, don't I? They keep track of it, of course, but for all their records I don't think they're very good listeners."
"No need to be concerned about the vocalizations," Duvall's voice came over the grainy intercom. "We know which channels they show up on and can factor them out. We just need the orientation reading for tomorrow's location tests. Reset to one-hundred thirty five degrees."
Trying to quell her shaking hands, River dutifully repositioned the chair, leaning the Doctor slowly back forty-five degrees from his upright position. As she started moving him, the device at his neck started to whine.
"I'll just bet," he said through quick breaths, "they use some ostentatious technical term like 'verbalize' in their reports. Especially the one in charge, no not the one with the rank--the other one, the real one in charge, the short one. He seems the type for it, doesn't he? Oh sweetie, what's your game with them? What's a nice girl like you doing amongst the rabble? Ah--"
He was talking too fast and slurring his speech, pain and exhaustion sapping his concentration. River tried to touch his temple again, to establish any kind of connection to him but he obviously couldn't feel it telepathically, and the psychic switch didn't budge. His words cut off as the machine reached a crescendo. She chanced a look at the observation room and when she saw both scientists engrossed in the data pad readouts for whatever information this obscene exercise could possibly be giving them, she abandoned any attempt at psychic transfer and just squeezed his hand, hoping the fleeting contact could somehow help them both get through this. His cold fingers were tense and unyielding in her grip.
"Orientation baseline established." This time it was Ogden on the comm. "Thanks for the help."
The device shut down with an impassive beep and the Doctor inhaled a sharp gasp of breath, then huffed out a relieved sigh. Three seconds later his breathing had stabilized to a semblance of calm, and he was drumming his fingers in a slow beat against the chair, murmuring nearly tunelessly again. River only caught a few words as she retreated back to the observation room--"That is you can't, you know, tune in but it's all right. That is, I think it's not too bad--" Then she politely excused herself, spent a quiet half hour shaking in her quarters, and hashed out the details of Plan B: release the hold of that horror on the back of his neck to the point where the Doctor could feel either River's telepathic contact or that from the TARDIS, and revert to Plan A.
The data pad was kept at the security desk and could only be checked out to one of the N.R.O. scientists. River could nick it easily enough, she figured, but the briefings she had read were short on technical details for working it in reverse. She would have to learn more from one of the experts.
"Out of the question," had been Duvall's response the following day. He didn't bother looking up from the readouts spread across the two folding tables comprising the makeshift workspace in the records room. River exchanged a glance with Major Ogden, who pressed the issue.
"It's a sound theory," he supplied. "We only logged empathic readings from the subject for the first hour of calibration, before we knew what to look for in the confounding variables. We can relax the SMM isolation back to normal channels to get more data. If the main unmapped component is empathic we should be able to establish an active baseline and--"
"I thought we had agreed the confounding on those channels wasn't empathic," Duvall interrupted.
Ogden nervously steepled his fingers. "I've been relating my theory to Doctor Hamilton, and she thinks it's worth pursuing."
"Do you really want to put everything else on hold for that?" Duvall flipped open his spiral bound notebook and reached for a pen. "The filaments branched eighty-three times in order to reach isolation. We've never had a subject go higher than twenty before. Even at three hours per layer for extraction we're looking at four days before any measurable activity can get through on those channels. Why don't we try some more traditional tests first?"
"Four days," River echoed. She didn't have four days.
"At three hours per layer," Duvall reiterated. "Any faster than that and you know we're looking at severe neurological damage. I'd really like to keep this subject intact"--his eyes traveled back to the readouts and he marked three spots with red ink before capping his pen and looking pointedly at Major Ogden--"and not waste Van Statten Industries' valuable time."
Plan B, River had decided then, needed to be re-evaluated.
Sunlight crept across Red Square Terrace and River focused her attention outward again, looking over corrugated hangar rooftops to the designed geometric chaos of criss-crossing airstrip runways at the base's eastern perimeter. Coarse scrubland stretched for nearly ten miles past the runways across a natural basin to the steeper foothills, where even the parallel tire-track suggestions of roads disappeared, except for one. A single narrow pass, its tamped gravel tracks sure to be patrolled, wound up from the basin's northeastern corner through nearly the steepest section of hills to the open desert of the next valley.
To the north, past the helipad and the neat rows of airfield logistic vehicles, the desolate dry lake bed that gave Groom Lake its name sat like a pocked scar on the landscape. The runways crossing Groom Lake's six square miles were used for test flights; they were more ephemeral than the eastern airstrip, defined in the packed pale dirt only by straight lines of running lights set between outposts of modular trailers and vehicles. A road skirted the western edge of the lake bed, nestled between it and a narrow corridor of outlying buildings in the shadow of the water tower. That road spun north ten miles, River knew, before ending at a dry riverbed that angled northwest through rough desert terrain for another twenty miles before intersecting the highway.
It was forty miles in a straight shot to the TARDIS along the northeastern pass; it was double that to go northwest and avoid a sure blockade at the narrow bottleneck. In ten daily escape attempts prior to his vicious sensory blindfolding, the Doctor had made it past the initial base perimeter to the scrubland only once, where he'd been caught by vehicular patrols.
A stiff breeze whipped up over the rooftop, toppling one of the lawn chairs with a clatter. River took a deep breath and stood her ground, hands clenching to fists at her side. Already this morning, the duty guard at the N.R.O. checkpoint had mentioned some kind of glitch in her clearance records. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was routine.
Plan C was to run for it.
**
Interlude I | Part 4
**
Lab Record: 03 August 1969
Response perception: location
Blocking variables: electromagnetic fields
Confounding mapped vectors: aural, visual, tactile
Total Observations: 150
Exploratory Analysis:
| Variable | Estimate | StdErr | T | Pr(>|t|) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intercept | 12.450 | 4.050 | 3.074 | 0.003 |
| distance (m) | 0.132 | 0.233 | 0.567 | 0.572 |
| flux (T) | -4.431 | 3.764 | -1.178 | 0.241 |
| charge (C) | 6.350 | 3.890 | 1.632 | 0.105 |
ANOVA:
| Source | DF | SS | MS | F | Pr(> f) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Regression | 3 | 1038.4 | 346.1 | 0.954 | 0.595 |
| Residual Error | 146 | 79982.2 | 547.8 | ||
| Total | 149 | 81020.6 |
Correlation coefficient: 0.08
SMM Feedback: No relationship of stimulus to measured sensory response
Notes: Acquisitions finally approved for the variable field generator. SMM confounded signals were correlated against strength and distance of EM fields using this electromagnetic source at various positions relative to the subject's orientation, in an attempt to construct a manual baseline for any EM sensitivity in the unmapped perceptions. This tests the working hypothesis that the subject's ability to locate certain objects and to distinguish human movement without sight or hearing is based upon sensing differentials and fluctuations in EM fields.
A weak relationship to electrostatic charge of the EM field is explained by tactile confounding at close range. However, the SMM device found no sensory channels whose differentials correlated with the manual EM baseline at larger distances, indicating that the subject could not distinguish any differences in position, charge or flux of the test field. The subject continues to show perception of location uncorrelated with any other measured stimulus, and the SMM device still has found no model or control mechanism for this ability.
Ability to distinguish location of humans and movement could be due partially to vibrational cues, although there is some dulling of afferent neurons as an effect of the touch-telepathy mitigation: minor but measurable decreased awareness of hot/cold, sharp/blunt, most likely also resulting in a slight dampening of sense of source location or direction of vibrations. Another confounding factor could be increasing awareness of surroundings and routines in the laboratory, cells, and corridors. However the subject was also able to identify a new element in the environment (AF consultant Doctor Sarah Hamilton: see cell surveillance at 02 Aug 1969 0935 hours) and somehow discern female features (?).
Could this perception be linked to a new kind of empathic ability? Doctor Ogden and Doctor Hamilton seem to think so. I am not convinced. Empathic perception in this subject seems tightly coupled to the long-range channeling ability that has been suppressed nearly since device implantation. Ghost receptors resonating along typical empathic channels (120 to 135) display more regularity than most empathic senses I've seen, and generally appear as secondary indicators of confounding across other more prominent receptive senses. Something empathic by way of interpretation, but grounded more strongly in physical constraints?
-H.D.
Sunrise washed out the blue sky behind the northeastern hills, turning pink cirrus clouds into bright silver streaks in the high atmosphere. Far below, River climbed a metal access ladder, her breath misting in the morning air. She wasn't cleared to visit the airfield control tower, but several soldiers had pointed her here, to the roof of Building 18--or "Red Square Terrace" as it was known among the ranks--to get a look around. The two-story building was constructed as a pipe housing and pumping facility for the water tower, located half-way up the steep hills of the base's western perimeter. Beyond the ladder, the concrete rooftop was bare except for a scattering of white plastic lawn chairs and a few flimsy tables set with ashtrays still waterlogged from the thunderstorms the night before. The only thing it had going for it was the view.
"Thumb your nose at the Russians when they take your picture," a lanky private had instructed her, arcing the path of an invisible satellite overhead with a finger. "Show them what a good time you're having in this desert resort."
A good time. River swallowed a mirthless laugh, refusing to let forty-eight hours of sleeplessness turn her frustration into giddiness. She pulled an elastic band from a pocket in her camouflage BDU trousers and corralled her hair into a bun, taking stock of the situation beneath the open sky.
She had held out hope for Plan A--get to the Doctor, hope he could feel enough of the psychic switch to recognize and trigger it--through mid-afternoon of her first day. Even as her mind raced to develop contingency plans after the morning's blitz of information, she couldn't ignore the fact that the Doctor was generally good at undermining neural devices, no matter what the readouts said. The examination room wasn't ideal, but it would be defensible for the few seconds they would have to wait for the TARDIS to materialize. So she shadowed the scientists during their afternoon laboratory session for an opportunity to get close enough for a telepathic transfer.
She spent two hours in that cramped observation room before getting her chance. Two hours watching the Doctor endure test after tedious test gauging his sensory response to everything from tones to temperature differentials. Strapped to the upright examination chair, forced awake from a persistent signal through the SMM machinery, he kept his expression guarded throughout; sometimes he would furrow his brow or smile grimly to himself but never for long, and if his eyes started wandering he closed them and resolutely re-focused his concentration on whatever tune he was humming, the mouthed words gaining sound and substance. He hid pain well; he always could when he wanted to. But River could see his hands flinch against the wrist restraints every time the device at the back of his neck was fed new information.
The worst part was knowing that through it all, he could feel her presence only a few feet away. He barely trusted her in these early days; what must he think of her now, she had wondered?
When Major Ogden finally asked for her assistance re-setting a baseline, she was so defensively disassociated from her own senses that she nearly didn't acknowledge him at all. As it was, she responded by rote with an empty affirmative, and pushed her way numbly through the connecting door leading into the examination room.
The guards were positioned outside the main door in the corridor, so River and the Doctor were as close to isolated as they could come. He was singing a soft string of nonsense tiredly to himself as she approached, that meandered around a familiar tune. "Her name was Magill, she called herself Lil, But everyone knew her as--". He stopped when she pretended to check the strap holding his head in place and discreetly brushed her finger in a clockwise circle across his temple. It was a polite request he'd taught her ages ago, widely understood among touch-telepaths as "Can I come in?" All she felt in return was the blunt warmth of skin on skin.
"Shuttered like a shop on Christmas," the Doctor sighed aloud, then screwed his eyes shut tight when River quickly pulled her fingers away in alarm, flicking her gaze to the observation window to gauge any reaction. "Don't worry, sweetie!" he announced into the room. "They'll tell you, I talk to everybody, don't I? They keep track of it, of course, but for all their records I don't think they're very good listeners."
"No need to be concerned about the vocalizations," Duvall's voice came over the grainy intercom. "We know which channels they show up on and can factor them out. We just need the orientation reading for tomorrow's location tests. Reset to one-hundred thirty five degrees."
Trying to quell her shaking hands, River dutifully repositioned the chair, leaning the Doctor slowly back forty-five degrees from his upright position. As she started moving him, the device at his neck started to whine.
"I'll just bet," he said through quick breaths, "they use some ostentatious technical term like 'verbalize' in their reports. Especially the one in charge, no not the one with the rank--the other one, the real one in charge, the short one. He seems the type for it, doesn't he? Oh sweetie, what's your game with them? What's a nice girl like you doing amongst the rabble? Ah--"
He was talking too fast and slurring his speech, pain and exhaustion sapping his concentration. River tried to touch his temple again, to establish any kind of connection to him but he obviously couldn't feel it telepathically, and the psychic switch didn't budge. His words cut off as the machine reached a crescendo. She chanced a look at the observation room and when she saw both scientists engrossed in the data pad readouts for whatever information this obscene exercise could possibly be giving them, she abandoned any attempt at psychic transfer and just squeezed his hand, hoping the fleeting contact could somehow help them both get through this. His cold fingers were tense and unyielding in her grip.
"Orientation baseline established." This time it was Ogden on the comm. "Thanks for the help."
The device shut down with an impassive beep and the Doctor inhaled a sharp gasp of breath, then huffed out a relieved sigh. Three seconds later his breathing had stabilized to a semblance of calm, and he was drumming his fingers in a slow beat against the chair, murmuring nearly tunelessly again. River only caught a few words as she retreated back to the observation room--"That is you can't, you know, tune in but it's all right. That is, I think it's not too bad--" Then she politely excused herself, spent a quiet half hour shaking in her quarters, and hashed out the details of Plan B: release the hold of that horror on the back of his neck to the point where the Doctor could feel either River's telepathic contact or that from the TARDIS, and revert to Plan A.
The data pad was kept at the security desk and could only be checked out to one of the N.R.O. scientists. River could nick it easily enough, she figured, but the briefings she had read were short on technical details for working it in reverse. She would have to learn more from one of the experts.
"Out of the question," had been Duvall's response the following day. He didn't bother looking up from the readouts spread across the two folding tables comprising the makeshift workspace in the records room. River exchanged a glance with Major Ogden, who pressed the issue.
"It's a sound theory," he supplied. "We only logged empathic readings from the subject for the first hour of calibration, before we knew what to look for in the confounding variables. We can relax the SMM isolation back to normal channels to get more data. If the main unmapped component is empathic we should be able to establish an active baseline and--"
"I thought we had agreed the confounding on those channels wasn't empathic," Duvall interrupted.
Ogden nervously steepled his fingers. "I've been relating my theory to Doctor Hamilton, and she thinks it's worth pursuing."
"Do you really want to put everything else on hold for that?" Duvall flipped open his spiral bound notebook and reached for a pen. "The filaments branched eighty-three times in order to reach isolation. We've never had a subject go higher than twenty before. Even at three hours per layer for extraction we're looking at four days before any measurable activity can get through on those channels. Why don't we try some more traditional tests first?"
"Four days," River echoed. She didn't have four days.
"At three hours per layer," Duvall reiterated. "Any faster than that and you know we're looking at severe neurological damage. I'd really like to keep this subject intact"--his eyes traveled back to the readouts and he marked three spots with red ink before capping his pen and looking pointedly at Major Ogden--"and not waste Van Statten Industries' valuable time."
Plan B, River had decided then, needed to be re-evaluated.
Sunlight crept across Red Square Terrace and River focused her attention outward again, looking over corrugated hangar rooftops to the designed geometric chaos of criss-crossing airstrip runways at the base's eastern perimeter. Coarse scrubland stretched for nearly ten miles past the runways across a natural basin to the steeper foothills, where even the parallel tire-track suggestions of roads disappeared, except for one. A single narrow pass, its tamped gravel tracks sure to be patrolled, wound up from the basin's northeastern corner through nearly the steepest section of hills to the open desert of the next valley.
To the north, past the helipad and the neat rows of airfield logistic vehicles, the desolate dry lake bed that gave Groom Lake its name sat like a pocked scar on the landscape. The runways crossing Groom Lake's six square miles were used for test flights; they were more ephemeral than the eastern airstrip, defined in the packed pale dirt only by straight lines of running lights set between outposts of modular trailers and vehicles. A road skirted the western edge of the lake bed, nestled between it and a narrow corridor of outlying buildings in the shadow of the water tower. That road spun north ten miles, River knew, before ending at a dry riverbed that angled northwest through rough desert terrain for another twenty miles before intersecting the highway.
It was forty miles in a straight shot to the TARDIS along the northeastern pass; it was double that to go northwest and avoid a sure blockade at the narrow bottleneck. In ten daily escape attempts prior to his vicious sensory blindfolding, the Doctor had made it past the initial base perimeter to the scrubland only once, where he'd been caught by vehicular patrols.
A stiff breeze whipped up over the rooftop, toppling one of the lawn chairs with a clatter. River took a deep breath and stood her ground, hands clenching to fists at her side. Already this morning, the duty guard at the N.R.O. checkpoint had mentioned some kind of glitch in her clearance records. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was routine.
Plan C was to run for it.
**
Interlude I | Part 4
no subject
Date: 2015-10-11 10:16 pm (UTC)You are excellent at creating and maintaining a level of paranoia and fear. This makes for an impressively dystopian read!
no subject
Date: 2015-10-12 06:21 pm (UTC)