Information: Dark Matter Volume 1

Chapter 7

Not surprisingly Grumpy came back with hits on the search she was running for Spaceboy. That was the way reality worked. Do something real and it left breadcrumbs. Put enough hackers on it and they could find them. Maybe find everything. Certainly, in this case they had enough to make her believe there was probably something out there. Critical for her search, there were regular reports of spacers saying they heard and saw things in transit that approximated the energy-being hypothesis. Also, lots of other stuff. Plus, enough fringe stuff to fill volumes. Her first job was to sort the realistic and the semi-realistic from the wild and improbable. That was not an easy task when the subject was this strange. This was going to take work. She started setting up her algorithms.

Hours later she had organized the material enough that she could start going through it. She started with the material she had categorized as either realistic or semi-realistic based on what she knew about Spaceboy's alien infestation. From those reports, she quickly concluded something was out there. Across known space there were folk who thought they were conversing with not quite invisible people. Others merely felt things. Some saw things that were like ghosts. Nothing indicated hard evidence, but she'd worked data long enough to be able to suspect a coherent pattern. Single cases meant nothing, but there were a lot of them in multiple languages with multiple locations. The total number appeared to be high. And the consistency was weak, but not absent. Stories seemed to intuitively fit together. It was enough to indicate that something happened out there that was consistent with the presence of an energy type of being.

However, the associated scientific analysis did not give her confidence in the reports. Quite the opposite. The scientific conclusions were space fatigue, space experience psychosis, augmentation psychosis(!), socially inherited illusions, or all of the above. There was even a committee report requesting a special category in the DSM-IX, the standard reference work for psychological disorders. It didn't add up to anything, but it indicated a real issue of some sort. Were spacers seeing Theo's people? Or something else? Or both? Or maybe they were merely psychologically distressed? Very hard to say. But it could be Theo's people.

She thought about it, especially the scientific stuff. The research was clearly not a formal cover-up. There were real reports and real research by real scholars. However, as she thought about it: If you wanted to hide something it was even better. It was the type of stigmatizing approach that would lead to self-policing. Given the psychosis designation only the truly crazy would ever admit to seeing anything. Thoughtful folk would keep it to themselves. That meant there were a lot more incidents out there and probably the most accurate were the least represented. What did that suggest? What kind of incident was most likely to be under-reported? Things that suggested organized intelligence? She didn't know—couldn't tell. Absences were the hardest to track. However, there was enough evidence of something to make her almost certain this was more than just the human imagination.

That led to thoughts about how she might refine her search. Would it be possible to get first-hand accounts? She was used to secondary sources, but would it be possible to get people to come forward? Real people, not crazies? What would it take to do that? Could she find a current researcher? Or what would happen if she put up a note on a board the spacers frequented, assuming there was one? Colin would know about that. Should she ask him? He'd probably know if the reports were reliable. So, talking to him was required before proceeding with that line of inquiry.

Another pattern nagged at her. It seemed that some sections of space had more reported experiences than others. She suspected an astro-graphic profiler could tell her if there was a pattern in the reports. But on her own she didn't know enough about space to understand the distribution: did it correlate to actual event distributions or merely to most travelled routes? If there were more spacers in some places than in others, as she surmised there must be, were the reports merely indicative of random perception, or did they indicate that some parts of space were denser with the presence of these beings that triggered the reports? This could give her a headache. Would someone have done that research? What would it look like? Where would it be located?