A Lecture on Psionics, Part 2 - SCP Foundation

Are we finished? Yes? Good, then welcome back, ladies and gentlemen!

Now that we know about the basics of psionics, we can talk about units. In the case of psionic energy, that would be the "White", abbreviated as a small omega. A White is the minimum amount of psionic energy needed to telepathically carry a brief conversation over a distance of one meter, for example.

And if you would direct your attention to the item in my hand here, you can see a White Detector; a gauge of psionic fields and energy. This little gray box is one of the most used items in the psionics department, by far.

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A good question, "How does it work?"! But please, don't interrupt me.

So, as I told you before, psionic energy comes from information…

But is it only generated by the brain? Well, no, machines can create it too. Or, to be more precise, electronic memory, as in computers. Of course, the psionic matrices that emanate from them are much weaker and also somewhat oddly constructed, which is why many psions have trouble establishing stable contact with machines, or even being able to precisely locate their fields.

Anyway, the White Detector was invented by the Canadian doctor Charles White. Doctor White was born in 1832, studied electrodynamics at the University of Toronto, and was largely financially dependent on his wealthy brother-in-law, an entrepreneur, but only on the side. The important thing is that Dr. White was very interested in spiritualism and similar occult practices, and that he discovered his own telepathic powers in mid-1881. The doctor then began to experiment with these forces, and developed the White Detector in 1882. Or at least a prototype for it.

Doctor White's detector was really just a telegraph with a coiled cable that could feed a message into itself through a relay-based system. Normally, the detector only sent itself a constant SOS message.

The trick to getting a reading, however, was that a psion, Dr. White in this case, has mentally focused on the coiled cable, and thus inadvertently altered the transmission through psionics. This was of course very crude and by no means accurate, especially since a telegraph loop generates a microscopically weak field.

But, and this was important, the detector could still detect an anomaly in its message; logically not anything meaningful, it wasn't a new message in Morse code, at best it would be gibberish. However, from the magnitude of this deviation, the approximate field strength could be estimated.

White then began to further improve his detector, giving it the ability to reset itself automatically after a fluctuation, while simultaneously developing a measurement scale.

The "White" unit was born in the winter of 1883, with 100 ω being the psionic energy that Dr. White considered necessary for a conversation at a distance of 100 meters, and 1 ω as one hundredth of that. On a technical level the White is more precisely defined and calculable, but that's a bit beyond the scope of a fundamentals seminar like this one.

Doctor White then considered himself ready to share his findings with the world, and planned a presentation at the University of Toronto. A presentation that would have added psionic phenomena to the scientific consensus.

But, as you can probably imagine, that presentation never happened. We, the then still young Foundation, had been keeping a close eye on Dr. Whit, and since telepathic powers were considered anomalous, we detained him and confiscated his research.

What followed… well, was a less glorious part of Foundation history. You see, White's detector was revolutionary in that it could measure psychic phenomena; something that hadn't previously been possible. The only problem was that psions had to willfully target a detector for their their powers to be measured.

However, the Foundation already had a solution to this problem: A few years earlier we had come across a couple of notes on alchemical formulae, which described, amongst other things, an alloy that forced psychics to focus on it for a brief moment. In practice, this alloy initiated a psionic connection to its core, but at the time that was not known.

I think you understand where this is going: we combined this focusing alloy with White's detector, to create a way for us to quantify certain anomalous phenomena.

The applications were… well, not very pretty though. At that point in time, there was no method of dampening or disrupting psionic phenomena. What we did instead was break the concentration of psions. Using electrical shocks…

The system was called "Psionic Defense": Two diodes, one on each temple, connected to a strong battery and a White Detector - which at the time were about the size of a bedside table, by the way. When the detector measured a change in the local psionic fields, it triggered an electric shock. However, the problem was that some psions project fields without deeper content, for example when they imagine something strong or fall asleep.

Naturally, we also tested better methods at the time, such as drugs; but they never reached the efficiency of Psionic Defense, or came with unwanted side effects.

But what psionic defense enabled us to achieve was the mass containment of psions, particularly in the settlements of the Damned in North America, which could be disbanded.

Damned, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, are a demonic human subspecies that originated in southern Germany. All of them are telepaths and clairvoyants, and they also have claws.

In the years that followed not much changed in the field of psionics, except perhaps that we continued to improve the White Detector, particularly because psions noticed the measurement less often due to an improved focus. The invention of the vacuum tube also made its measurements more precise.

Unified Thaumatology, Memetic and Geas Technology and Demonics…

No, wait a minute, demons were discovered by Tesla in the 1870s… But back then, it was still mechanical…

Sorry, demons evolved.

But what I wanted to say was that some other parasciences have emerged in the meantime.

Psionics was therefore largely overshadowed for the next few years. Although Dr. White's findings eventually diffused out into anomalous society, little progress was made.

It actually took World War II, or more accurately, the Seventh Occult War, to revitalise this science. The Soviet government at the time wanted to raise their own abnormal forces, but viewed the British-German thaumatology of the time as too ideologically suspect. Also, there was a great opportunity for them to show the superiority of their socialist system by taking the lead in a parascience.

The GRU Division "P" was actually able to train a small number of psions and use them in combat. But what is much more relevant was their research: the Division developed many of the training and educational methods still used today, discovered the mode of action for clairvoyance, and created the basis for the use of psionics in paratechnology - also known as "psychotronics", which is what that "P" in their name is short for.

After the German surrender, however, the UNGOC was formed, which included most of the European Damned, who, as previously mentioned, are all psions, and the ICSUT, a university association for thaumatology. The two began to cooperate more closely shortly after, and many ICSUT universities began offering psionics as a major.

Of course, this lead to competition with the GRU-P, which was also engaged in a struggle with the USA's PENTAGRAM and UIU as a result of the Cold War. In fact, those two were less interested in using psionics, and more interested in countering them.

Anyway, while in 1952 the Soviets created the Psychotronic Amplifier, a device capable of amplifying psionic powers, in 1958 the Americans developed Psychic Isolation, an alchemical material capable of deflecting weak psionics on a very small scale - and in 1961 ICSUT Munich built the Psionic Dampener.

The last two inventions are particularly important: Psychic Isolators were the first means of preventing psionic connections. Unfortunately, however, they cannot block stronger psionic powers, but are suitable for temporarily protecting individual documents, or protecting buildings from accidental clairvoyance.

Psionic Dampeners, on the other hand, were probably the most important invention in psionics since the White Detector.

Dampeners are based on artificial psionic currents that connect to surrounding currents and overload them with extraneous data. I can't tell you the exact setup due to operational security, but dampeners contain some anomalous materials and a computer hooked up to a random number generator, among other things.

Psions under the influence of a dampener basically just get noise played into their minds. The only problem with dampers is that they simply can't do anything after a certain field strength; psions that are too strong can break dampeners.

Still, the Foundation introduced Dampener technology as quickly as possible, logically superseding Psionic Defense almost entirely.

However, during the '80s, Soviet leadership in psionics was completely overtaken as the Eurtec Freeport took off. In short, Eurtec is a pocket dimension and city, founded by the Servants of the Silicon Nornir, a member of the GOC, to allow companies to develop and research paratech in peace.

For example, the Servants provided the Psionic Disruptor, which has made Psionic Defense completely obsolete.

Disruptors, while very expensive and large, can also fend off stronger psions by actively connecting to the currents of psions and distorting them, i.e. by manipulating expansion, energy density, et cetera. Psions under the influence of disruptors are quite uncomfortable, as their minds are literally shaken whenever they attempt to transmit.

However, for security reasons, I also want to note that a trained psion can also outwit a disruptor. These machines reduce the general risk, they do not eliminate it.

But back to the history of psionics: the GRU-P eventually went down with the USSR, not only ending the paranormal arms race but also flooding the black market with their technology. A few years later, Prometheus Laboratories, the world's largest paratech corporation, went bankrupt, crashing the American para-economy.

And, well, that actually brings us to today. Don't get me wrong, there has been, and still is, more research into psionics, but these were the "basics", the thing you must know.

But to showcase modern developments, here is my White Detector:

The measurement is done on a microchip that sits in a wafer-thin metal capsule - the focus - and psions can hardly notice that they are being measured. The reading is automatically calculated from the data change and, well, it all fits in the palm of my hand.

But to continue with this lecture -

Please, one moment… I need… Wait a minute…

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