NationStates Jolt Archive

OOC: All below is secret IC. OOC Comments on my activities quite welcome, and I suppose attempts at corporate espionage would be possible, though not likely to succeed.

IC:
A flash of light...

The man awoke groggily, slowly noting the room around him. A hospital? He heard the buzz of a bonesaw through the blur of anasthetics. A pressure on the top of his skull, muttered voices from some unknown source, then...

Blackness.

A week later

The mans eyes slowly opened. His head hurt, and he couldn't feel parts of the right side of his body. Looking around, he saw a nurse sitting in a chair, reading a book. A Feast for Crows... The nurse looked up at him, and smiled.

"Ah, our patient is finally awake. I'll grab the doc, shall I?"

The man muzzily nodded as the nurse walked out of the room. A few minutes later, the nurse returned, along with a woman in a labcoat, carrying a computer.

"Ah, you're awake. Good, we can begin, assuming you're feeling well?"

The man confusedly nodded his assent, and the doctor unfolded the laptop, placing it on the mans lap. The screen was black, with a single button saying "begin" in the center.

"This is to test your memory post surgery. Now, if you'd please click the button and watch the presentation?"

Curious, the man clicked the on-screen button, and images began to flash before his eyes. He tried to hang onto them, but soon began to lose track of what he had viewed. Shortly, the presentation was over.

"Very well, let's move on to the next portion. Could you please repeat the images in the order they appeared?"

"Erm, a rabbit, a... a mouse? Um... I'm sorry, but I'm not sure."

Frowning, the doctor turned to the nurse.

"Looks like this one was a failure, too. Ah well, call PRA, tell 'em that so far, no success. Course, it's only been a couple months, make sure they give us an extension. As for the patient, do a follow-up later this week, but otherwise, just return him. He should be mostly functional. Well, I'll see you next patient."

The nurse nodded, and the last thing the man saw as the nurse turned the knob raising his anesthetic again was the doctor, whistling as she walked out the door.

*tag* Hmmm... I'm very intrigued!

"Ah, Mr. Director, good to see you. I almost thought that you weren't coming."

The Director of Creative Weapons sat down at the table across from Dr. Tobias, grabbing a roll as he did.

"Hey, wouldn't miss it for the world, babe. Your research is quite interesting to the higher-ups at PRA, including me. Heck, even the Regent is tickled pink. If you're successful... well, it'll be the biggest breakthrough in human biology since Hippocrates. You'll be famous! You'll never need look for funding again!"

The doctor grinned, twirling linguini on her fork.

"You don't have to worry, Director, I'll give you at least a little credit. After all, without your funding and your brain surgeons, I'd never have a shot at this. Anyway, success might be years away. We're running trial and error here, and haven't had any positive results yet. We know it's in the left hemisphere, but we don't know the exact location! Who knows, it could be months, or it could be decades."

"Yes, but you're forgetting, you're a genius. Hey, are you going to finish that?"

"I thought you came here to talk about the project, not to mooch my lunch?"

"Yeah, well, I do fund your experiments. Now, pass the canneloni!"

Pushing over the plate, she felt her cellphone go off. Shushing the Director, she answered it.

"Hello?... Yes? My god! I'll be there right away! Keep running tests, prep a full update on it as soon as I get there!"

Slamming the cellphone, she quickly plopped a fifty quetzale bill on the table and walked briskly for the door. The director, stunned, turned in his chair, and yelled at her as she left, spraying canneloni crumbs from his mouth as he spoke.

"Hey, where are you going? I just got here! And there's only two dishes on the table!"

"Gotta run, Director. We've made a breakthrough!"

He sat there quietly for a few seconds.

"Well I'll be damned.... hell, I'm not letting a good meal go to waste. Waiter, a glass of merlot please. No, make it champagne. I'm in the mood for celebrating."

*TAGGED*, it's a good read so far.

Dr. Tobias marched quickly through the checkpoints, her ID badge opening the doors and barricades to her almost instantly. Still not fast enough. The patient was there, and he was a success. Walking faster, she counted down the room numbers as she approached the lab. Finding the correct one, she walked in, and was stunned by what she saw.

The man was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, watching avidly as images flashed by at high speed, scribbling away at a note pad the entire time at an insane rate.

"HEY! Idiots! He's supposed to be writing after the display, not during it!"

The doctors and nurses in the room looked up, and smiled.

"Ma'am, this is after the display. He's writing what he saw an hour ago."

Tobias stared at the screen in shock. There were at least ten images a second, and the subject was writing at a slower speed than that. She watched as the subject tore of a sheet of paper, absent-mindedly handing it to the nurse standing next to him. The nurse walked over to a computer terminal, and started comparing answers.

"Well I'll be damned... So far, everything looks right. I think we found you a winner, boss. Minimal loss of motor skills, too. We'll operate on a few more, refine the area we need to excise, but we've done it! I can smell the Nobel now..."

The doctor pulled up a chair, sliding down as she watched the man writing in awe. Such a simple thing, but the speed... Gathering her wits, she pulled out her cell-phone, and dialed the Director.

"Hey, what's up, babe?"

"Archer, we did it. Call the Regent, tell him we did it! He's amazing! He's sitting in a lab now, and has been writing from memory for over an hour now! A thousand monkeys with a thousand type-writers. We just wrote Shakespear, Archer. All we need to do is finish the last line of Taming of the Shrew."

"Good lord... I'll call Quetzal, we'll throw a press conference. Get your ass down to HQ, Sam Tobias, get your ass down here now!"

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v652/blaesa/PRABanner.png

PALE RIDER NEWS

"Greetings from the Regency Plaza in downtown Arbite City. You join us now live as Regent-Elect Daniel Quetzal and his top researchers call a nearly unprecedented press conference. While other news networks were invited to this event, Pale Rider News gets you the best shots and scoops. Now, his Majesty, Daniel Quetzal."

To a chorus of applause, a young, white haired man takes the stage, wearing his trademark Japanese business suit, flanked by a pair of men, sharing the familial . Raising his hands, he quiets the roaring crowd.

"People of Otagia, members of the world's press. I come here today not to announce another success in my name, self indulgent though I might be. Today, I bring you one of the brightest researchers in Otagia today, the shining star of Pale Rider Arms' Creative Weapons Division, Doctor Samantha Tobias. With her aid, we have made leaps and bounds in the human condition over the last several years. With her aid, we have become the future!"

Cheering from the predominantly Otagian crowd drowns out any further words from the Regent for a moment, though he quickly quiets them again.

"Now, ladies and gentlemen. I am proud to introduce someone vastly my mental superior, a brilliant and beautiful young woman, Doctor Samantha Tobias!"

The applause are smaller than those the Regent garnered, but are still quite loud. The good doctor walks out, still dressed in her lab coat.

"Thank you, men and women of Otagia, ladies and gentlemen of the press. Since the dawn of time, humanity has been plagued by our memory. Imprecise, prone to failure, it has caused more knowledge to be lost than a million Vandals. For centuries, we have recorded our knowledge in books, and computers. Still, these records are incomplete, and are prone to destruction by fire, by bomb, by carelessness, by age. For ages, our flow of knowledge has followed the credo of "Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust." But no longer!

"I come here today to unveil our latest breakthrough. For thousands of years, there have been those known as Savants, those with the ability to learn at fantastic speeds, and never forget a single nugget of knowledge. Nearly all of these men were born like this, but a few blessed individuals gained this amazing ability through personal hardship, most notably sudden trauma to the head. Through months of research, we have been able to surgically excise a portion of a patient's brain, and thus grant them the blessing of eternal knowledge. No more will we forget and wilt away, but our legacies shall live on through eternity, carried by the minds of these Savants!"

While the crowd applauded once again, she let the information sink into the minds of her audience, letting them sort through the information. The Regent stepped back to the podium, again addressing the crowd, most notably the members of the press.

"I would now like to have a moment for citizens, members of the press, and anyone else in our audience to ask questions of Doctor Tobias. So, who wants to start?"

OOC: Y'all suck, you know that? :p

EDIT: This has been a proxy post by Otagia. A real post by him would have his name on it. Yeah...

OOC: I'll have to catch up on this today or tomorrow... then I'll make IC post if I can relate...

[A couple questions, if I might. Are PRA and the government of Otagia tied in any official manner? Are you up for an espionage RP? I'm not talking corporate espionage, I'm talking honest-to-God spies trying to find out more about this program.]

OOC: For all intents and purposes, the Otagian government and PRA are the same thing. The CEO of Pale Rider Arms traditionally is the Regent Elect of Otagia, mostly due to the buy-out of the Otagian government by PRA. The Regent is now elected by the stockholders of PRA, and the Quetzal family owns about 60% of the shares.

As for an espionage RP, feel free, although if you had sabotague in mind, I'd prefer you'd not blow too much up, and you sure as hell won't get to kill anyone important, most notably Dr. Tobias. I already have a few new developments underway with her.

[No sabotage, this will be information gathering only for... later action. For all the Imperium knows, all participants are volunteers, this would be a confirmation mission to give policy makers the information needed to make informed policies.]