Welcome to Incels.is - Involuntary Celibate Forum

Welcome! This is a forum for involuntary celibates: people who lack a significant other. Are you lonely and wish you had someone in your life? You're not alone! Join our forum and talk to people just like you.

Story Real Gender Studies 201 - Antarctica Chapter 1

K9Otaku

K9Otaku

Wizard
★★★★
Joined
Sep 30, 2019
Posts
4,365
I had already talked about this book in a previous thread. Now I am going to post it here chapter by chapter, with a commentary.

Chapter 1 (part 1) – Discovery

On July 17th 2022, I was on night shift duty at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station ARA monitoring room. ARA stands for “Askaryan Radio Array”, the unimaginative name of yet another Neutrino detection experiment undertaken by a consortium of mostly American universities. More on this later. The ARA monitoring room is not actually a room. It is just an area inside a fairly large Science lab section of the Amundsen-Scott main building. There, RAs (Research Assistants), like myself, sit in front of a bank of computer monitors, day and night, waiting for something to go wrong with the ARA gear, a set of 37 radio-wave detectors sunk into pits drilled into the South Pole ice crust two kilometers apart from each other over an area as large as downtown San-Francisco. That night, something had indeed gone wrong. At 2:28 am., on one of the screens, a row had turned bright red, indicating that one of the Digitization Daughter Boards (DTD) was no longer responding to SNMP requests and probably needed to be swapped. Faced with the prospect of a lonely snowmobile ride in the dead of night, I did what people do in such circumstances: I yawned, cracked all my fingers one by one, finished my mug of cold coffee, and got onto my feet.

Grabbing a spare DTD from the tech bench, I headed for the main exit airlock, donned my heavy arctic clothing and opened the outside door. The cold was fierce; wind chill at about minus 50 degrees centigrade. The weather was calm. Any hint of a storm and I would have been spared the trip into the cold arctic night. But no. No wind. I had no excuse not to go. The equipment rack with the faulty board was about 8 kilometers away; A 15 minutes snowmobile ride. After driving for a while, I was in total darkness. The lights of the Amundsen-Scott base were no longer visible behind me and the sky was cloudy; there was no Moon nor stars. The powerful headlights of the snowmobile were digging a tunnel into the darkness ahead of me, showing the perfectly straight track leading to the ARA-B-12 equipment cabinet, my destination.

Trying not to fall asleep during this most monotonous of rides, I kept moving my head from side to side to avoid letting my gaze become fixated on the track ahead. Suddenly, however, it felt as if I had indeed fallen asleep and was dreaming. The rush of air in my face was no longer cold; so much so that I started to feel hot under my heavy anorak. I released the throttle, half expecting to wake up buried in the snow beside the track under the upturned snowmobile. But no, I was not asleep. My machine slowed down gently to a stop and I hopped off, inhaling the warm surrounding air in puzzlement. The temperature must have been 15°C or so and I was getting sweaty. Having removed my overcoat and gloves, I was standing there in the light hoodie I had been wearing a few moments ago inside the building. I did not feel cold at all ! Surprisingly, the snow on the track did not seem to be melting. It felt as cold as usual to the touch; well below freezing.

It was then that I noticed the light. It looked like sunrise in the distance although of course it could not be sunrise, given the season, and it was not even in the right direction. Leaving the snowmobile behind on the track, I started walking towards the lit sky up a gentle slope. As I moved forward, everything slowly began to look as if the sun was indeed rising. But there was no sun. The snow around me just looked as it would have under a dim early morning sunlight. Turning back, I was startled when I realized that I could make out the snowmobile in the distance, although I had left it behind me in complete darkness, just a few moments ago. Rushing towards it, I suddenly found myself in the dark once more. Was it night again ? The snowmobile had become invisible. Turning around and looking up the slope, I saw the lit sky again. I ran towards it until I reached the same point as before and turned around. There it was. The snowmobile was clearly visible, sitting on the track 500 meters or so away from where I was standing. I started walking backwards, keeping the snowmobile in sight and my back to the light. As I did, the whole landscape in front of me was becoming more and more brightly lit. Soon enough, it looked as if I was standing in broad daylight. The snowmobile, now about 1 kilometer away, was perfectly visible and so was the track and every feature of the snowy and empty landscape. But it did not look as if the sun was shining either. Everything was bathed in the soft gray light of a cloudy day.

For the third time, I turned around and this is when I really got scared. I felt my face turn hot and my scalp creep as Adrenalin rushed through my veins. Before me, in a shallow depression extending as far as the eye could see, were buildings; rows after rows of buildings, neatly aligned along a grid of compacted snow tracks. But this was impossible ! I was not even 10 kilometers away from Amundsen-Scott, one of the most isolated places on Earth. Sobral, an Argentinian base, was over 1000 kilometers away and it was the closest installation to the South Pole station. As I looked more intently at the buildings, I noticed that they looked quite old fashioned. Many of them were Quonset huts, these semi-circular hangar-like structures used by the US military during World War II. Others looked like these standardized elongated low-slung bungalows that Seabees and Army engineers had built all over the world in the 1940s and 50s to house US personnel on overseas bases. All of them looked in perfect condition; almost brand new. I was looking at a full-fledged post World-War II US military base located right here at the South pole ! But there never was such a base. Amundsen-Scott was first established in 1956 and back then it was just a few Jamseway huts (arctic hardened versions of the Quonset hut) and a flagpole; not a nicely laid out permanent base like what I was now looking at.

As I walked towards the nearest building, my head was spinning with ideas of time-travel and inter-dimensional portals. However, unlike in movies, these ideas were not exciting. They were just scary. Was I going to be stuck here ? Was I going to die ? The first building I reached appeared empty, the door locked. As I walked further on the track that ran alongside it, I passed a number of Quonset Huts and what looked like a Liquefied gas tank. Then I reached a group of interconnected bungalow-like structures built on stilts 5 of 6 feet off the packed snow ground. They looked like they might be some sort of office. As I looked up the wooden staircase leading up to the front door, I froze as I saw the door open.


This is only the first part of Chapter 1 - The rest will be posted later on in this thread.

Previous RGS threads:
 
Good writing!
 
Pretty interesting. Let us see what comes next
 
Chapter 1 (part 2)

A man appeared, quite tall, a tad below 6 feet perhaps, sporting a shaggy red beard and wearing a light gray sweater and dark cargo pants. A wide grin shone through his beard. He looked more than a little nervous and awkward despite an obvious desire to look self-assured. “Hi. I was warned you would come. Your name is Aaron Cora, right ?”. His English was easily understandable, although marked by a thick Scandinavian accent. “My name is Finn. I am from the Troll station”. “But Troll is more than 2000 kilometers away from here !”, I blurted out. Troll station is one of Norway’s permanent Antarctic installations but whether he had come from there or not was certainly one of the least strange aspects of the whole situation. How on earth did he know my name, in the first place ? I briefly thought of asking him about that but he spoke before I could: “It is quite unclear where here is, he said. Come inside, I will tell you what I can about this place”.

I climbed the creaky wooden staircase and entered the building after Finn. Inside, it indeed looked like an office: four heavy steel desks, a few wooden swivel chairs, several large steel filing cabinets, all 1940s style like the buildings themselves. Everything looked as if it had been installed recently. There was even a faint smell of fresh paint. On one of the desks, a dozen dark gray binders were stacked in three piles. Another one was open, showing its contents of typewritten sheets of paper. Finn sat at the desk. I pulled a chair and sat in front of him. After a few seconds of silence, I asked:

— ME: How come the snow does not melt with this temperature ?.

— FINN: That I don’t know. What I do know is that this place is called “Station Philadelphia”, or at least, this is one of its names. According to the documents in these binders, it was created as a joint CIA-Atomic Energy Commission-Naval Intelligence facility in November 1946, as a follow-up to Operation Highjump, the US Navy’s post-War Antarctic expedition. Its location is unclear but it does not appear to have been built at the South pole, or near Troll for that matter. More probably, it was located closer to where McMurdo (the US main Antarctic supply base) is now, probably on the Ross ice shelf. It was not meant to last very long; probably no more than five years.

— ME: But where is it now ?

— FINN: No Idea. I am not even sure this is the original Station Philadelphia. According to the documents, the station, or what remained of it, was dismantled in 1958. The place we are at now appears to be some sort of replica.

— ME: Like a Museum exhibit ?

— FINN: Something like that, yes, except it was not set up by humans.

— ME: What ?! Are you talking about aliens now ?

It felt like a let-down. Aliens ! What a tired cliché, I thought. The tone of my voice must have given away the feeling I just had because Finn looked visibly embarrassed.

- FINN: I do not think the word “Aliens” is the right word exactly. At least, no mention of little green men appears in these documents, or anything of that kind. But the purpose of Station Philadelphia is said to have been the study of a technological device of non-human origin. This is the phrase these documents use; "non-human". Given how unreal this place looks, the brand new stuff, the temperature, etc. I think the term is appropriate. It seems indeed that some kind of Non-Human agency is at play here; Don’t you agree ?

— ME: “Yes, certainly”, I said sheepishly.

I felt guilty for having been such a snob about the idea of Aliens. After all, who was I to judge this whole thing as if it were a Hollywood script ? Only a few minutes ago, I had been scared out of my wits by the strangeness of it all. However, talking to another human being, and especially someone like Finn, obviously an early-career bottom feeder scientist like myself, had returned my brain to a sense of normalcy. I was starting to enjoy myself, actually. All this surely beats swapping an electronics board in some stupid ARA rack. I asked:

— ME: What kind of technological device are the documents talking about ?

— FINN: It was apparently a means to access the past. Not time travel exactly, but more like a remote-controlled camera and microphone which enabled people to witness and hear scenes from the past. The documents refer to the technology involved as "quantum archaeology", implying that it was somehow able to pick-up the remains of wave functions long after they have collapsed, in order to recover the traces of past events at the particulate level. This is why the AEC was involved. Many Manhattan Project people were sent here to try and understand the physics involved. Apparently they did not make much headway. In any case, understanding the device was not the main goal. Using it to fathom the roots of current events was. The cold war was on and the stakes were high. Some of the top people at the CIA and the White House figured that by having a greater insight into the past one might have an advantage in steering a course for the future. There was still something we might call a ruling class in those days and the core of its members’ education was still the classics, the humanities. As a result, the leading lights at station Philadelphia were not physicists but historians, philosophers, archaeologists ...

I must admit I was somewhat disappointed. The humanities had never been quite my thing and, although I am now ashamed to remember it, back then the idea of 1940s Harvard professors and Cambridge dons discussing history and philosophy evoked only boredom. Thus, I felt the urge to steer the conversation back to more immediate concerns.

— ME: Are we stuck here ?

— FINN: No, not at all, we can leave this place whenever we want. This is my third visit to station Philadelphia.

— ME: How long do you stay when you come here ?

— FINN: This time, about a month. On my first two visits, around a week each time.

— ME: But how do you explain your absences at Troll ?

— FINN: I do not have to. When we are here, time is stopped outside. When we leave, we reach the outside world barely a few seconds after we left it. And when we come back, it is the same. Time is stopped here, as far as we are concerned, when we are outside.

— ME: This is convenient, no doubt. But don’t you think this is a little too easy as well ? Are you sure we are not dreaming or, I don’t know, being used as guinea pigs in some mindfuck experiment ?

Finn glanced at me with a sad look on his face. He was clearly disappointed by my reaction.

— FINN: This is possible, of course, he replied after a few seconds of silence, but, so far, everything has been consistent when I come here. This place apparently obeys rules that are different from those we are used to but there are indeed rules and they appear to be consistent over time. The light is always as you see it outside. There is no night. The temperature does not change and yet the snow does not melt. There is this discontinuity in time that I just described. However, apart from that, everything works the same way here as in the outside world. Objects fall when you drop them. When you put something in a certain location, it stays there. And so on. This place does not seem less real than what we are used to.

— ME: What are you talking about ? All this sounds pretty unreal to me !

— FINN: Well, what does the word ‘real’ mean, anyway ?

Then, it was Finn’s turn to change the subject.

— FINN: Are you hungry ? he asked. We have been talking for quite some time and given the hour at which you arrived, it must be morning by now, at your clock. Care for some breakfast ?

— ME: Sure, I replied. Did you bring food from Troll ?

— FINN: No. There is plenty here. The building next door is a kind of mess hall. At the back, there is a pantry with abundant food stores in perfect condition. There is even an industrial fridge with fresh food; eggs, sausages, whole chicken ready to be roasted, and vegetables too. Whenever I take something from this fridge, it gets replenished when I leave. Upon my return, it is fully stocked again.

— ME: OK, let’s go enjoy the magic breakfast.

Finn got up and looked at me sideways. I felt bad for uttering this cheap joke. After all, this place was impressive, to say the least. Why did I feel the need to poop on it with my lame witticisms ? Of course, I could not answer this question, back then. But I was soon to discover the reason and indeed to learn more about such things than I cared to.

The breakfast was fantastic. Finn prepared eggs and bacon together with smörgås, a type of Norwegian cold-cut open sandwiches. The coffee was not bad either. While I was enjoying the food, Finn disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a folder he put on the mess-hall table next to my plate. It contained the following document:


DRUMBEAT_OSS_Memo_1.png
DRUMBEAT_OSS_Memo_2.png
 
It is the classic "Nazi in Antarctica" plot. Okay ...
 
Volcel if you read this shit
 
brain is too fried to read all that shit. :feelsautistic:
 
Chapter 1 (part 2)

A man appeared, quite tall, a tad below 6 feet perhaps, sporting a shaggy red beard and wearing a light gray sweater and dark cargo pants. A wide grin shone through his beard. He looked more than a little nervous and awkward despite an obvious desire to look self-assured. “Hi. I was warned you would come. Your name is Aaron Cora, right ?”. His English was easily understandable, although marked by a thick Scandinavian accent. “My name is Finn. I am from the Troll station”. “But Troll is more than 2000 kilometers away from here !”, I blurted out. Troll station is one of Norway’s permanent Antarctic installations but whether he had come from there or not was certainly one of the least strange aspects of the whole situation. How on earth did he know my name, in the first place ? I briefly thought of asking him about that but he spoke before I could: “It is quite unclear where here is, he said. Come inside, I will tell you what I can about this place”.

I climbed the creaky wooden staircase and entered the building after Finn. Inside, it indeed looked like an office: four heavy steel desks, a few wooden swivel chairs, several large steel filing cabinets, all 1940s style like the buildings themselves. Everything looked as if it had been installed recently. There was even a faint smell of fresh paint. On one of the desks, a dozen dark gray binders were stacked in three piles. Another one was open, showing its contents of typewritten sheets of paper. Finn sat at the desk. I pulled a chair and sat in front of him. After a few seconds of silence, I asked:

— ME: How come the snow does not melt with this temperature ?.

— FINN: That I don’t know. What I do know is that this place is called “Station Philadelphia”, or at least, this is one of its names. According to the documents in these binders, it was created as a joint CIA-Atomic Energy Commission-Naval Intelligence facility in November 1946, as a follow-up to Operation Highjump, the US Navy’s post-War Antarctic expedition. Its location is unclear but it does not appear to have been built at the South pole, or near Troll for that matter. More probably, it was located closer to where McMurdo (the US main Antarctic supply base) is now, probably on the Ross ice shelf. It was not meant to last very long; probably no more than five years.

— ME: But where is it now ?

— FINN: No Idea. I am not even sure this is the original Station Philadelphia. According to the documents, the station, or what remained of it, was dismantled in 1958. The place we are at now appears to be some sort of replica.

— ME: Like a Museum exhibit ?

— FINN: Something like that, yes, except it was not set up by humans.

— ME: What ?! Are you talking about aliens now ?

It felt like a let-down. Aliens ! What a tired cliché, I thought. The tone of my voice must have given away the feeling I just had because Finn looked visibly embarrassed.

- FINN: I do not think the word “Aliens” is the right word exactly. At least, no mention of little green men appears in these documents, or anything of that kind. But the purpose of Station Philadelphia is said to have been the study of a technological device of non-human origin. This is the phrase these documents use; "non-human". Given how unreal this place looks, the brand new stuff, the temperature, etc. I think the term is appropriate. It seems indeed that some kind of Non-Human agency is at play here; Don’t you agree ?

— ME: “Yes, certainly”, I said sheepishly.

I felt guilty for having been such a snob about the idea of Aliens. After all, who was I to judge this whole thing as if it were a Hollywood script ? Only a few minutes ago, I had been scared out of my wits by the strangeness of it all. However, talking to another human being, and especially someone like Finn, obviously an early-career bottom feeder scientist like myself, had returned my brain to a sense of normalcy. I was starting to enjoy myself, actually. All this surely beats swapping an electronics board in some stupid ARA rack. I asked:

— ME: What kind of technological device are the documents talking about ?

— FINN: It was apparently a means to access the past. Not time travel exactly, but more like a remote-controlled camera and microphone which enabled people to witness and hear scenes from the past. The documents refer to the technology involved as "quantum archaeology", implying that it was somehow able to pick-up the remains of wave functions long after they have collapsed, in order to recover the traces of past events at the particulate level. This is why the AEC was involved. Many Manhattan Project people were sent here to try and understand the physics involved. Apparently they did not make much headway. In any case, understanding the device was not the main goal. Using it to fathom the roots of current events was. The cold war was on and the stakes were high. Some of the top people at the CIA and the White House figured that by having a greater insight into the past one might have an advantage in steering a course for the future. There was still something we might call a ruling class in those days and the core of its members’ education was still the classics, the humanities. As a result, the leading lights at station Philadelphia were not physicists but historians, philosophers, archaeologists ...

I must admit I was somewhat disappointed. The humanities had never been quite my thing and, although I am now ashamed to remember it, back then the idea of 1940s Harvard professors and Cambridge dons discussing history and philosophy evoked only boredom. Thus, I felt the urge to steer the conversation back to more immediate concerns.

— ME: Are we stuck here ?

— FINN: No, not at all, we can leave this place whenever we want. This is my third visit to station Philadelphia.

— ME: How long do you stay when you come here ?

— FINN: This time, about a month. On my first two visits, around a week each time.

— ME: But how do you explain your absences at Troll ?

— FINN: I do not have to. When we are here, time is stopped outside. When we leave, we reach the outside world barely a few seconds after we left it. And when we come back, it is the same. Time is stopped here, as far as we are concerned, when we are outside.

— ME: This is convenient, no doubt. But don’t you think this is a little too easy as well ? Are you sure we are not dreaming or, I don’t know, being used as guinea pigs in some mindfuck experiment ?

Finn glanced at me with a sad look on his face. He was clearly disappointed by my reaction.

— FINN: This is possible, of course, he replied after a few seconds of silence, but, so far, everything has been consistent when I come here. This place apparently obeys rules that are different from those we are used to but there are indeed rules and they appear to be consistent over time. The light is always as you see it outside. There is no night. The temperature does not change and yet the snow does not melt. There is this discontinuity in time that I just described. However, apart from that, everything works the same way here as in the outside world. Objects fall when you drop them. When you put something in a certain location, it stays there. And so on. This place does not seem less real than what we are used to.

— ME: What are you talking about ? All this sounds pretty unreal to me !

— FINN: Well, what does the word ‘real’ mean, anyway ?

Then, it was Finn’s turn to change the subject.

— FINN: Are you hungry ? he asked. We have been talking for quite some time and given the hour at which you arrived, it must be morning by now, at your clock. Care for some breakfast ?

— ME: Sure, I replied. Did you bring food from Troll ?

— FINN: No. There is plenty here. The building next door is a kind of mess hall. At the back, there is a pantry with abundant food stores in perfect condition. There is even an industrial fridge with fresh food; eggs, sausages, whole chicken ready to be roasted, and vegetables too. Whenever I take something from this fridge, it gets replenished when I leave. Upon my return, it is fully stocked again.

— ME: OK, let’s go enjoy the magic breakfast.

Finn got up and looked at me sideways. I felt bad for uttering this cheap joke. After all, this place was impressive, to say the least. Why did I feel the need to poop on it with my lame witticisms ? Of course, I could not answer this question, back then. But I was soon to discover the reason and indeed to learn more about such things than I cared to.

The breakfast was fantastic. Finn prepared eggs and bacon together with smörgås, a type of Norwegian cold-cut open sandwiches. The coffee was not bad either. While I was enjoying the food, Finn disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a folder he put on the mess-hall table next to my plate. It contained the following document:


DRUMBEAT_OSS_Memo_1.png
DRUMBEAT_OSS_Memo_2.png
Oh. Remember reading some of this before. Are there some new additions to the text?
Chapter 1 (part 2)

A man appeared, quite tall, a tad below 6 feet perhaps, sporting a shaggy red beard and wearing a light gray sweater and dark cargo pants. A wide grin shone through his beard. He looked more than a little nervous and awkward despite an obvious desire to look self-assured. “Hi. I was warned you would come. Your name is Aaron Cora, right ?”. His English was easily understandable, although marked by a thick Scandinavian accent. “My name is Finn. I am from the Troll station”. “But Troll is more than 2000 kilometers away from here !”, I blurted out. Troll station is one of Norway’s permanent Antarctic installations but whether he had come from there or not was certainly one of the least strange aspects of the whole situation. How on earth did he know my name, in the first place ? I briefly thought of asking him about that but he spoke before I could: “It is quite unclear where here is, he said. Come inside, I will tell you what I can about this place”.

I climbed the creaky wooden staircase and entered the building after Finn. Inside, it indeed looked like an office: four heavy steel desks, a few wooden swivel chairs, several large steel filing cabinets, all 1940s style like the buildings themselves. Everything looked as if it had been installed recently. There was even a faint smell of fresh paint. On one of the desks, a dozen dark gray binders were stacked in three piles. Another one was open, showing its contents of typewritten sheets of paper. Finn sat at the desk. I pulled a chair and sat in front of him. After a few seconds of silence, I asked:

— ME: How come the snow does not melt with this temperature ?.

— FINN: That I don’t know. What I do know is that this place is called “Station Philadelphia”, or at least, this is one of its names. According to the documents in these binders, it was created as a joint CIA-Atomic Energy Commission-Naval Intelligence facility in November 1946, as a follow-up to Operation Highjump, the US Navy’s post-War Antarctic expedition. Its location is unclear but it does not appear to have been built at the South pole, or near Troll for that matter. More probably, it was located closer to where McMurdo (the US main Antarctic supply base) is now, probably on the Ross ice shelf. It was not meant to last very long; probably no more than five years.

— ME: But where is it now ?

— FINN: No Idea. I am not even sure this is the original Station Philadelphia. According to the documents, the station, or what remained of it, was dismantled in 1958. The place we are at now appears to be some sort of replica.

— ME: Like a Museum exhibit ?

— FINN: Something like that, yes, except it was not set up by humans.

— ME: What ?! Are you talking about aliens now ?

It felt like a let-down. Aliens ! What a tired cliché, I thought. The tone of my voice must have given away the feeling I just had because Finn looked visibly embarrassed.

- FINN: I do not think the word “Aliens” is the right word exactly. At least, no mention of little green men appears in these documents, or anything of that kind. But the purpose of Station Philadelphia is said to have been the study of a technological device of non-human origin. This is the phrase these documents use; "non-human". Given how unreal this place looks, the brand new stuff, the temperature, etc. I think the term is appropriate. It seems indeed that some kind of Non-Human agency is at play here; Don’t you agree ?

— ME: “Yes, certainly”, I said sheepishly.

I felt guilty for having been such a snob about the idea of Aliens. After all, who was I to judge this whole thing as if it were a Hollywood script ? Only a few minutes ago, I had been scared out of my wits by the strangeness of it all. However, talking to another human being, and especially someone like Finn, obviously an early-career bottom feeder scientist like myself, had returned my brain to a sense of normalcy. I was starting to enjoy myself, actually. All this surely beats swapping an electronics board in some stupid ARA rack. I asked:

— ME: What kind of technological device are the documents talking about ?

— FINN: It was apparently a means to access the past. Not time travel exactly, but more like a remote-controlled camera and microphone which enabled people to witness and hear scenes from the past. The documents refer to the technology involved as "quantum archaeology", implying that it was somehow able to pick-up the remains of wave functions long after they have collapsed, in order to recover the traces of past events at the particulate level. This is why the AEC was involved. Many Manhattan Project people were sent here to try and understand the physics involved. Apparently they did not make much headway. In any case, understanding the device was not the main goal. Using it to fathom the roots of current events was. The cold war was on and the stakes were high. Some of the top people at the CIA and the White House figured that by having a greater insight into the past one might have an advantage in steering a course for the future. There was still something we might call a ruling class in those days and the core of its members’ education was still the classics, the humanities. As a result, the leading lights at station Philadelphia were not physicists but historians, philosophers, archaeologists ...

I must admit I was somewhat disappointed. The humanities had never been quite my thing and, although I am now ashamed to remember it, back then the idea of 1940s Harvard professors and Cambridge dons discussing history and philosophy evoked only boredom. Thus, I felt the urge to steer the conversation back to more immediate concerns.

— ME: Are we stuck here ?

— FINN: No, not at all, we can leave this place whenever we want. This is my third visit to station Philadelphia.

— ME: How long do you stay when you come here ?

— FINN: This time, about a month. On my first two visits, around a week each time.

— ME: But how do you explain your absences at Troll ?

— FINN: I do not have to. When we are here, time is stopped outside. When we leave, we reach the outside world barely a few seconds after we left it. And when we come back, it is the same. Time is stopped here, as far as we are concerned, when we are outside.

— ME: This is convenient, no doubt. But don’t you think this is a little too easy as well ? Are you sure we are not dreaming or, I don’t know, being used as guinea pigs in some mindfuck experiment ?

Finn glanced at me with a sad look on his face. He was clearly disappointed by my reaction.

— FINN: This is possible, of course, he replied after a few seconds of silence, but, so far, everything has been consistent when I come here. This place apparently obeys rules that are different from those we are used to but there are indeed rules and they appear to be consistent over time. The light is always as you see it outside. There is no night. The temperature does not change and yet the snow does not melt. There is this discontinuity in time that I just described. However, apart from that, everything works the same way here as in the outside world. Objects fall when you drop them. When you put something in a certain location, it stays there. And so on. This place does not seem less real than what we are used to.

— ME: What are you talking about ? All this sounds pretty unreal to me !

— FINN: Well, what does the word ‘real’ mean, anyway ?

Then, it was Finn’s turn to change the subject.

— FINN: Are you hungry ? he asked. We have been talking for quite some time and given the hour at which you arrived, it must be morning by now, at your clock. Care for some breakfast ?

— ME: Sure, I replied. Did you bring food from Troll ?

— FINN: No. There is plenty here. The building next door is a kind of mess hall. At the back, there is a pantry with abundant food stores in perfect condition. There is even an industrial fridge with fresh food; eggs, sausages, whole chicken ready to be roasted, and vegetables too. Whenever I take something from this fridge, it gets replenished when I leave. Upon my return, it is fully stocked again.

— ME: OK, let’s go enjoy the magic breakfast.

Finn got up and looked at me sideways. I felt bad for uttering this cheap joke. After all, this place was impressive, to say the least. Why did I feel the need to poop on it with my lame witticisms ? Of course, I could not answer this question, back then. But I was soon to discover the reason and indeed to learn more about such things than I cared to.

The breakfast was fantastic. Finn prepared eggs and bacon together with smörgås, a type of Norwegian cold-cut open sandwiches. The coffee was not bad either. While I was enjoying the food, Finn disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a folder he put on the mess-hall table next to my plate. It contained the following document:


DRUMBEAT_OSS_Memo_1.png
DRUMBEAT_OSS_Memo_2.png
Oh. Remember reading some of this before. Are there any new additions to the text? Will read some to refresh my memory.

Volcel if you read this shit
Why is that brobro?
 
Last edited:
Chapter 1 (part 3)

— ME: So it is the German U-Boat that brought this device to Antarctica, right ?

— FINN: No, the Germans discovered it there. How they knew its location is not explained. The Ahnenerbe was an SS-funded research outfit that mostly performed zany "investigations" of occult stuff. Apparently, in this case, they had turned up something genuine. The British captureed the U-Boat and brought its crew back to the UK. But the device was not moved, apparently. It stayed in Antarctica where the German expedition had found it. The Philadelphia station was subsequently built around it.

— ME: What is "Bletchley Park" ?

— FINN: It was the code-breaking arm of the British intelligence apparatus during the War. A number of mathematicians, including Alan Turing, had been hired in 1939 to crack the code of the German Enigma machine. They were quite sucessful, throughout the war.

— ME: Why was the U-Boat crew interrogated there ?

— FINN: I don't know. Probably because the whole thing looked like something that needed deciphering, I guess. Also, Bletchley Park was one of the most highly secured places in the UK at the time.

— ME: So, the initial lead for all this came from the Brits, eh ? And before them the Germans ...

— FINN: It was like this for pretty much everything in that period. The British had invented Radar, the jet engine, the Enigma code-breaking techniques, and they were the first to tackle the Atomic Bomb development. World War II saw a huge technology transfer from the UK to the US.

— ME: What happened after that memo ? What did this ‘MOCKINGBIRD committee’ decide to do ?

Finn explained that, apparently, ‘MOCKINGBIRD’ was just a cover name for an informal group of advisers to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. It included James Conant, the president of Harvard University, Vannevar Bush, who had overseen the setting up of the Manhattan Project and extensively interacted with the British Tizard Mission, William Donovan, the head of OSS (predecessor of the CIA) and maybe Bernard Baruch, a close confidante of Roosevelt. Meetings took place in the Oval Office. The decision to create a base in Antarctica was taken quite quickly after the DRUMBEAT report was received, probably in June or July 1945.

Apparently, Conant had argued forcefully for the inclusion into the Philadelphia project of most of the British team which had started to analyze the Ahnenerbe material. He insisted they should be treated on an equal footing with the OSS (later CIA), Manhattan project (later AEC) and Naval Intelligence contingents. The cover for the setting-up of station Philadelphia was to be Operation HIGHJUMP, a major fleet exercise cum scientific expedition to Antarctica which was to take place in early 1946. Eventually, HIGHJUMP was delayed by a few months due to the tying up of US Navy assets for the repatriation of GIs from Europe and the Pacific. As a result, the construction of station Philadelphia started in August of 1946. Its first phase was completed in October and it started operating the following month.

In the material read by Finn so far, there was no description of the device used. Apparently, a few months had been required to master its operation, although the details of how this learning process took place were not given either. After the initial discovery phase, time spent using the device was allocated to various “experiments”, conducted by different sections of the Philadelphia team. Each experiment was then documented in a series of reports. As one would expect, time allocation was a contentious issue and it crystallized the opposing points of view held by the various team members about what the objectives of the project should be. From the start, there was a sharp opposition between what Alan Turing called the “Boffins” and the “Sleuths” in his personal logbook. The “Sleuths” were officers from MI6, OSS and US Naval Intelligence. Their focus was on the recent past which, they felt, would yield valuable intelligence, notably on how the leadership of the USSR functioned. Also, a determined faction among them advocated for the digging up of embarrassing personal stories about members of the Soviet Politburo, with the intent to plant these tales as apparent anonymous reports to the NKVD/KGB. The goal was to increase the paranoia of the Soviet leadership and induce them to turn on each other. Naturally, this kind of idea infuriated the “Boffins”, the members of the Philadelphia team hailing from Academia, who could not fathom how anyone could dream of using the device for anything but solving the most fundamental problems of humanity. Fortunately, there were arbiters between the two groups: James Conant, Vannevar Bush and John Cockroft, who had replaced Henry Tizard as the main scientific liaison between the US and UK governments. These, A. Turing called “the adults”, in his logbook.

After a number of heated meetings held in early 1947, the “adults” managed to broker a compromise between the “Boffins” and the “Sleuths”. Overall, the “Sleuths” would get 60% of the total device time, with the “tabloids”, another of Turing's nicknames, getting 20% within that figure. The “Boffins”, for their part, had to do with 40%, but with a mandate that left them a lot of leeway: “Determine why the Communist ideology enjoys such high prestige and appeal within Western Culture”. The wording of the objective given to the “Boffins” was a master stroke on the part of the “adults”. On the face of it, this was a vindication of the Boffin’s yearning for something “fundamental”. But it was also a jab at the arrogance of Boffin culture. As a matter of fact, many of them actually did hold Communism, or at least its underlying philosophy, in high regard. This was well known and was a constant bone of contention with the sleuths when it came to security clearance matters and the like. Whith this compromise settlement, Conant, Bush and Cockroft, despite their own Boffin pedigree, had displayed Solomon-like wisdom and impartiality. They had managed to dampen the potentially excessive self-confidence of their peers, by attracting everyone’s attention to a potential flaw in their ethos, while directing their energies towards something that even the sleuths considered actually useful.

I looked at my watch and realized Finn and I had been talking for a whole day. After I had finished my breakfast, we had walked back to the office where Finn had been showing documents to me and explaining their contents for 10 hours straight. He was obviously completely absorbed in all this and I was starting to share his fascination. However, for the moment, I mostly felt exhaustion fall on me like a ton of bricks. After a quick bite at the mess hall, Finn led me to a dormitory building where the windows were closed with heavy curtains blocking the invariably bright outside light. I crashed onto one of the beds and fell asleep within a few seconds.


This is the end of Chapter 1. The following ones will be published here in separate threads
 
Any comments? tbh, the story has not begun yet. This is only the initial framing device
Gripping and exciting. i read the book you posted.
 
When will you post the next chapter?
 
I like the 40s atmosphere; especially the buildings. There are still plenty of bungalows like that in Korea, near US military bases.
 
I think that the only way to find out what really happened in our history would be to have remote controlled camera and device like in the story. Think of all the thinfs we could learn and see.
 
I think that the only way to find out what really happened in our history would be to have remote controlled camera and device like in the story. Think of all the thinfs we could learn and see.
Sure. But we actually know quite a great deal about the past already. The device in the text is just a framing technique to present insight that can be gained just by looking at the historical data we do have at our disposal
 

Similar threads

sinclair_silence
Replies
13
Views
298
Efiliste
Efiliste
realblackcel02
Replies
26
Views
810
JudeoBiden
JudeoBiden
RegularManlet
Replies
36
Views
857
idiot_cel
idiot_cel
RealSchizo
Replies
17
Views
507
RealSchizo
RealSchizo
worthlessloser26
Replies
20
Views
575
Linesnap99
L

Users who are viewing this thread

shape1
shape2
shape3
shape4
shape5
shape6
Back
Top