Animal Theater

Theoretical Substances

Field Report No. 187101045

CNP Field Agent for Culture and Education No. 562, Fredrick Dermont, Northeast Division.

Reporting To:

CNP Senior Officer of Community Stability and Improvement Initiatives, No. 072, Betty Lamont Cress, Northeast Division.

Any persons other than the above reading this report is committing a federal crime punishable by life in prison or death.

May God bless these United States of America!

As per our discussion I will keep the tone of this report informal, this should in no way be taken as a sign of disrespect to you, your office, or the party. Also I would like to apologize for my writing skills, they have atrophied since my school years. I fully understand the need to keep this report off of the Pick system though, so I guess written reports are the safest alternative.

I arrived in Pittsburgh three days after a fire had destroyed much of the city's south side. The fire was preceded by a severe cholera outbreak leading to widespread speculation that party health officials had set the blaze. For this reason the university sent an armored car and two militiamen to meet me at the airport. If word got out that I was a party official, security could be an issue.

The city itself is a god-forsaken hole of filth, but when you cross into the university district, you enter a bubble of stability. The biotech money flooding the coffers of UPMC have overflown into the surrounding community, and there seems to be a militiaman on every corner. You have to pass through two checkpoints to enter the university district, and my escorts informed me that there are attempted attacks on a weekly basis.

Carnegie Mellon University is at the forefront of biotech, nanotech, and quantum computing technology. The military application wing of the university is doing the research and development necessary to keep us one step ahead of the shit-eating traitors of the western states. CMU developed the first generation of nanotech cloud and was instrumental in weaponizing the technology.

Doctor Rajash O'Mara, the professor whose work I was there to assess, does not work in the military applications wing of the university. In fact the board of the university think so highly of his research that they let him create his own department, the Department of Theoretical Substances. Despite its name, this department deals mainly in CRITs which are a good deal more than theoretical.

CRITs, or critters as the department personnel refer to them, are very real, and in my opinion very dangerous. The acronym stands for Consciousness Reflective Inter-dimensional Tendrils. They were first discovered as a mathematical anomaly by Dr. O'Mara, who published his findings in 2037. Most of the academic world dismissed the paper, but no one was able to disprove it. The consensus was that it was too vague to be disproven, but it turned out to be correct. The original paper published by Dr. O'Mara is attached, god bless you if you can make head or tail of it, you're smarter than I am.

The testing of his theories has progressed unimpeded for the past four years. Dr. O'Mara himself is a very difficult person to talk to, especially on the subject of his work, but his senior research assistant, Dr. Richard Denarsick, is quite good at explaining things in layman's terms. My discussions with Dr. Denarsick are the chief reference for the information I intend to lay out in this report.

The debriefing I got at the Maryland office indicated that the department had created CRITs in a lab experiment of some kind, but Dr. Denarsick described the process in quite different terms. According to him the critters exist in a hidden plane of time and all they had to do was create the circumstances necessary for the critters to enter our present. They didn't create the CRITs, they opened the door and waited for the CRITs to come through.