Minor Story Elements
[!warning]These story elements are uncommon knowledge within Celeste 7. Many are tightly-kept secrets and are presented here primarily for a breadth of writer knowledge.
Psionics
Only a tiny fraction of the population ever manifests latent psionic potential.
Scientists had long hypothesized that the average human mind was capable of more abilities than operating in three-dimensional space on five limited senses. Extraordinary individuals demonstrated skills that verged on the paranormal, assigned terms such as ESP, and inspired cultural fascinations with psychic abilities. The project, evolving from iterations attempted by Earth governments in the 20th century and private corporations into the 21st, began to take on a new direction under Dr. Gilbert Carrel, a French geneticist. On the lunar frontier of what would become Celeste 7, Carrel found funding for his research, but most importantly he found the freedom to conduct his project with impunity.
Sleeping Beauty Sequence
The results, after decades of research and trials, identified a subset of humans who could express these latent abilities given the right conditions. Many psionic abilities were discovered through painstaking trial and error, some of them new in the realm of paranormal research. Through different approaches and trials, the Sleeping Beauty Sequence won out as the simplest and least dangerous approach to activating these psionic abilities in sensitive individuals. Attempting to do so in adults or those deemed insensitive could result in severe emotional truama, mental degredation, and sometimes violence that threatened the clinical staff. By contrast, the Sleeping Beauty Sequence, or SBS, was best administered to children in infancy, who could be nurtured and taught to control their psionic abilities as they activated in childhood.
Lacking funding or oversight for more selective measures, Carrel’s team was able to ally themselves with the city’s hospital maternity wards instead. They would approach a new parent with the offer, sometimes a nominal payment, and a waiver. An SBS injection would be given to the child along with traditional vitamin shots, and for all but a small minority of infants, the results were harmless. These children would grow up with no lasting affects or impact from the experiment, other than a lump sum payment in their parent’s bank accounts.
For those sensitive children, 3 of 10 survived the SBS injection. These children would go on to express psionic abilities by the end of early childhood, typically from ages 4 to 6. These abilities were categorized first under clinical terms, but soon adopted nomenclature more friendly to the caretaker staff and the corporate patrons who were given annual pitches as the first generation of children grew up and learned to control their abilities:
Psionic Types
- Kinectics: Telekinetic, can move objects with their minds
- Ghostwriters: Inverted Telepathy, can manipulate the thoughts of others
- Readers: Clairvoyant, can see glimpses of the future
- Sparks: Electrokinesis, can manipulate magnetic and electric fields
- Trackers: Psychometry, can track people by touch and odor of their personal belongings
- Morphs: Illusions, can temporarily change an object’s appearance to others
- Scrubs: Memory Manipulation, can wipe or restore memories
- Nullers: Psi-Obfuscation, can cloak themselves and places around them from detection
- Patchers: Psychic Surgery, can heal or undo the healing of people
Timeline & Generations
2070s featured the first formulation of SBS, and its successes formed Generation 0.
By the 2090s, the next version of the formulation was in practical distribution, and its successes formed Generation 1.
As Gen 0 individuals grew up, their children stood a high chance of inheriting psionic abilities from their parents, forming Generation 2.
[timelines]##! 2050s
###! 2053
- Dr. Carrel sets up on Celeste 7
##! 2070s
###! 2070
- Generation 0 formulation ready
- SBS injections begin
###! 2074
- First SBS+ child identified, a Spark
[/timelines]