Shadow People
27 Oct 2021Iridium Nova
I recently paid a visit to Kit Fowler, the infamous conspiracy theorist. He might be a bit nutty, but he's a wizard with guns and armor. Anyway, while working on some of my gear, he started going on about The Club's latest doomsday project. According to him, INRA is still in full operation, thanks to The Club, and has recently released some kind of bioweapon on the bubble. This bioweapon is supposed to infect certain individuals and remains dormant and undetectable until the victim dies, either to the virus or other causes, at which point it contaminates their environment. But it gets better: the virus is also transdimensional, so it won't be confined to a suit if someone is in an unbreathable environment. It also gives the infected the ability to walk though walls, though they don't know they have the ability and won't know how to activate it. They only discover the ability if they are told about it and then try to do it, or if they are under great stress, it can activate out of panic.Sometimes I wonder where he gets this stuff. I asked him how he found out about it and he came back with his usual reply: weeks of digging through newsfeeds, private communications, data files, and forum discussions with other theorists. Apparently there is some buzz around a series of photos which have been "proven" to be untampered. These photos, which are incredibly blurry and look like they were made using ancient technology, show what appears to be various human bodies partially intersecting solid objects, like walls, floors, and tables.
Sometimes I feel sorry for the guy. He's clearly seen some horrific stuff, but now he sees doomsday plots and apocalyptic events where there's only just the usual run of the mill human drama that has existed for thousands of years. A psychologist would have a field day with him, if he didn't think they were all government spies trying to undermine him.
Kit and I get along pretty well these days, probably because I don't challenge his theories anymore. In my line of work, I frequently come into contact with the real conspiracies going on across the human domain. You'd think a guy like Kit would like to know what's really going on, but he never believed me. He's convinced that, even though I've seen the truth, it's only the part of the truth my employer wants me to see, which is somehow less than what he sees. This is only because my experiences tend to contradict his own information. It's funny though, because in some ways he's right. The governments very much are hiding things from people, and there are indeed conspiracies going on all around us. There are even doomsday plots. But the reality of it all is that these are still very much human schemes, and subject to human flaws, and never turn out the way the conspiracy theorists think they should. In the end, people, even powerful people, don't want to destroy civilization. They're too busy being angry at each other, or trying to one-up the guy next door, or looking for their next fix, or trying to cheat the wealthy out of their money. Sure, there's people with grand plans out there, who can see past the petty limitations most humans are leashed by, but those people burn bright and short and die young. Doomsday plots have a hard time finding enough support to get big enough to threaten anything, and humans are too addicted to vice to want to threaten civilization as a whole.
The truth is out there, but the truth is just that humanity is petty, selfish, and vindictive. But that's too simple for these people, so they choose to believe in something bigger, so that the thing that burned them doesn't seem so small and weak.