New Media

2026 December 23
Test Year 0, Day 110
Tau

The following extracts were originally published in the first full edition of The Tech to be published on Tau and the first to be released jointly by both Institutes. It was distributed by radio, limited printing, and crier.

The Outside Worlds

Astronomy
A dynamical simulation of the system confirms the Examiners’ statement concerning the pattern and timing of ice ages and is consistent with sediment cores and glacial moraines in the Gell-Man and Alvarez Mountains. Darin Meyers of MIT ran the simulation, incorporating all available masses and orbital information for the planets: “The next major ice-age will take place in roughly 3600 Earth years. There are small oscillations on shorter timescales, driven largely by solar variations rather than the orbital and obliquity effects I considered, but the climate should be stable for the next several centuries, provided we keep ourselves under control.”

Screamers Report
The Screamers have finished transmitting initial personal messages from all members of the population, and will now be working their way through the secondary message queue as part of their broadcasts. They caution that video files will not be transmitted. Still photographs and audio remain limited to one per person and one minute per person respectively, unless you can successfully appeal to a Screamer’s better nature.

No leakage signals from Earth have been detected yet. The military radar scanning schedules requested by MIT Screamer Laura Sturm put any detection at the limits of sensitivity, and may no longer be valid, but the Screamers say they will continue to observe Earth with everything they have.

Examiners Capable of Dismantling Star Clusters
The Four Physicists have released additional results from their analysis of the Examiners’ transportation of campus. They estimate that the transportation of both campuses and the outliers took a total of approximately ten to the fifteenth kilograms of positive and negative point masses (absolute value of mass on the latter), which is equivalent to a twenty-kilometer-wide chunk of normal density matter. Applied aggressively, this much negative matter is capable of gravitationally unbinding a hundred one-solar-mass stars over a decade. This is presumably only a small fraction of the Examiners’ infrastructure. This reporter is grateful for their restraint.

World News

Negotiations on Global Currency Continue – Got Change for a ‘Smoot’?
The ASCIT and Caltech GSC, as part of yesterday’s telecon with the Undergraduate Association and MIT GSC, have approved the creation of a global currency. In keeping with cogovernance, a central bank will be formed with offices at the old Bursars’ locations. Prices are to be relatively uncontrolled, but the Caltech IHC is expected to push for careful oversight of lodging, food, power, water, and health care. They released a statement warning against the dangers of establishing a completely free market in our situation, expressing particular concern regarding the seizure of Institute property by individuals. The government appears to recognize this concern, emphasizing that the currency will initially apply only to items beyond standard rationing or allocations, with wages being added to the compensation of centralized project workers. They have not set a timetable for further expansion. Use of the currency will of course determine its future.

Reactions to the announcement have been generally positive, with entrepreneurial inclinations obvious: no fewer than eight restaurants are planned, including a limited-hours Ratheskaller organized by Mannion Memorial. The fraternity-based economy of Boston Side has welcomed the currency, which will simplify inter-house transactions. Objections have centered mostly on the proposed name for the currency. The unit is to be divided into 100 “ears”. Quarters will remain legal tender, but you can expect to be asked for change for a smoot.

We have been informed that new housing, to be constructed under Harvard Bridge, will retail at 364.4 smoots plus one ear, for the first eight 130 square meter units.

Local News – MIT

MITSFS & Bananas
MITSFS has announced the first harvest from their banana palms, which are growing well now that they have been moved into the greenhouse in W16. Bananas have been given to various groups that the Society wishes to honor, with the number of bananas being determined by the standard determinant method.

Thanks to staff working long hours, the MITSFS Library is now “more ordered than in the past century” and the Society’s Skinner has decreed that a new issue of the Twilight Zine will be published when sufficient material is submitted and a suitable method of distribution is found. “Hand-illuminated manuscripts and stone tablets have both been vetoed.” As an incentive, contributors will be given first choice of the next banana harvest.
The Skinner also released the following statement:

When most science fiction authors are light years away, and we’re almost always too hosed to write, it’s much easier to manage the growth of our collection. Interested members should come check out the Library’s new digs under the Great Dome, in the old Barker Science Library reading room.

The Skinner is a little worried about testing the proposition that one couldn’t read all the books in the Library in a lifetime. If you’d happen to write some work of science fiction in your Copious Free Time, please submit it for inclusion in the forthcoming Twilight Zine! The Skinner is mourning the fact that she’ll probably never actually get to read the rumored Aeneid of Mars, so you’ll get bonus points if you can do a reasonable Nicholas Gray pastiche. The Skinner also would like more Charlie Stross, despite having all of the Merchant Princes series in Examiner-hardened copy.

Course Numbers
Course 12 will be split into several sub-courses to reflect increased specialization: geophysics and prospecting are to be separated from atmospheric forecasting and astronomical observations.

Local News – CIT

Decompression
On Earth, December 25 2026 will be in two days. We’ve all spent the last hundred and ten days working harder than most of us have ever worked before. Therefore, on the evening of Day 112, Decompression will take place on Beckmann Mall from 17:00 until it ends.

The Mannion Memorial Cooking Club, the Caltech Meat Club, Prufrock House, and the Brewing Club will provide food and drink. Roasted zard and pede and pisces sushi will be partially offset by vegetable dishes, grains, and dairy products. Entries for the salsa contests remain welcome.

Before the main event, a Pumpkin Drop will take place. The Dance Troupe and Oasis will lead dancing starting at 17:00. After sunset, entertainment will be provided by the Glee Club, Fluid Dynamics, the DJ Club, and the Rock Scientists. The Caltech Christian Fellowship has organized Christmas services and caroling.

The organizers thank those who have donated their tritium batteries to the cause of providing nighttime power. And just in case you’ve forgotten, Ditch Day is Tomorrow.

Hydroelectric Plant Nearing Completion
The first turbine for the hydroelectric plant, which will produce 500 kilowatts of electricity and therefore heating at night, has been installed and tested at low flow rates and under simulated loads. 60 Hz, 120 V power should be available from the south-side substation within the next ten days. The second turbine has been delayed slightly, and will not be installed until at least Day 125.

Feature Stories

BOC Ninjas

David Dorman is head of the BOC Ninjas, formerly the Blacker Ninja Division. The history of how he has become combination Security Chief, firefighter, emergency medical responder, and maintenance organizer, is strange even by our present standards, so we asked him to give his story in his own words, especially for our MIT audience.

You’ve seen us walking about campus, in the fields, even out at the iron mine. We do look a little strange, I guess, although I’d call it awesome: Blacker sweatshirts, black balaclavas, swords and knives, guns, lockpicks, hacked cell phones, our personal favorite improvised explosives. There have also been times when we have not been seen. Those who were running that still down in Lowest Hell: when you showed up and found it replaced by a six pack of actual beer, that was from us. Your moonshine was tainted with something nasty, and put three Moles in the Health Center.

I convened the Blacker Ninja Division on Day 14, after that wild zard got loose inside the Vatican Alley. It smashed its way into two rooms before we stopped it. Don’t ask me why Matt Wing had a bottle of something self-oxidizing within arm’s reach of his bed or how he got it into the zard’s mouth and lit it on fire or even who threw those three darts that were embedded in two of the legs. By the time I got there, it was trying very hard to leave through a window that was rather too small. A few sword strokes put it out of its misery.

Of course, we are no longer using the courtyard as an animal pen, but an organized watch, with unorthodox tactics, seemed in order, and so I found myself named Duke of the Ninja Division, with twenty enthusiastic and a larger number of lukewarm volunteers.

Now, several other groups set up watches – the patrollers of the Catalinas, the survey expeditions after seeing the first pede feeding, but somehow we began to acquire a reputation. On day 15, when Wonjin Lau was mauled, four ninjas were called to destroy the pede before anyone else got hurt. I’m still not sure why we decided to lure it into the Sloan tunnel entrance, or exactly how we managed that, but it did die in there.

Then came the assault by Douglas Werset. He’d fled, running out of Fleming with his face bruised and bleeding and a pistol in his hand, firing wild shots at the people who chased him, and had gotten at least an hour’s head start. I got a call on my phone, which the Screamers had hacked. The BOC chair wanted us to find him and bring him to trial. So I and the five best hunters in the group went after him. Two days we searched, on foot because you can’t track a man through forest and scrub unless you can examine the ground and have you ever tried to be stealthy in a car?

We weren’t sure if we’d find him alive or dead. We had orders to take him without injury, even though I wasn’t inclined to that courtesy. When we did find him, it was in a ravine on the far side of the hills. We’d shifted ourselves out for rest, so that three were always on the trail. He hadn’t made very good time, and in the nights his trail was a random jumping from one hiding spot to another. He must not have been asleep at any time until he passed out from exhaustion and lack of food and water. He’d scavenged some wheat berries as he ran through the fields and left some skin on the spines of an orangestem plant as he ripped out a piece, but that won’t keep you going for long. He’d dropped the gun when he’d fired his last shot at a burrozard and missed. We brought him back, bound, in a jeep.

I still don’t approve of the BOC’s decision to sentence him to time on the chain gang, with common food thieves and those two who polluted the emergency water supply. They did give him twelve Earth years, but that doesn’t lessen what he did to Jian. At least they recognized the need for enforcement: two ninjas are always watching the chain gang as they re-lay the septics for twelve hours a day and two more are watching them at night.

At that point, we started getting asked to do other types of tasks Security would have done before we were brought here. Picking locks to which the keys had been misplaced, breaking up fights by tossing in smoke bombs, obvious and subtle patrolling of campus. And then there are the tasks that someone had to do: sweeping the tunnels for insulworm infestations and burning them out, taking apart that still I mentioned, helping with the controlled burn of groundcover so the fields can be expanded.

The original twenty-some of us weren’t enough for all the work we were asked to do, but I had applications from many people and so by a month ago less than half of us were Moles, although I’d say the original Twenty are still the most active. Since much of what we do is under the jurisdiction of the BOC, we have submitted to its authority, subject to due process.

So, we are the BOC Ninjas. We will uphold the Honor Code, and do what we can to ensure the safety of the population. That may on occasion mean sneaking across the roofs of the North Houses late at night to make sure no dangerous organic chemistry is happening or breaking into rooms that have had the combinations changed or constructing a better insulworm trap or flying that insane ultralight a hundred klicks south to deliver compatible blood. Ai – you still owe me a pint for that one.

We do what must be done. You may see us or you may not.

David gave us this statement in our new office in Millikan. As he finished the last sentence, he ducked behind a partition. When we looked, he wasn’t there anymore. We checked at the front door, which said he had just left. We’re still not sure how he descended five stories in such a short time.

Climbing a Monolith Tree

Margarita Wolf was on the recent expedition to survey the Monolith Swamp, which included a two-day ascent of one of the trees.

The tree we chose isn’t the largest in the swamp, either in height or volume. It is simply the one closest to open water. We had to raft in to the base of the trunk and many of the trees have large thickets of accreted detritus at their bases. This tree is at the point where the main channel of the Potomac enters the swamp, and therefore is washed relatively clean. Laser sighting to the top of the tree told us it was 543 m from water level.

I know most of you have seen the pictures from our climb, but it is hard to appreciate the tree unless you are there. It becomes part of the landscape, like a mountain or a building, then every so often it hits you that this isn’t Taipei 101 or the Incheon Towers and that that monolith ten kilometers away isn’t the Burj Dubai. These things grew, until they make the sequoias look like dwarfs and each outweighs old Pando by a factor of at least a hundred. We counted fifteen thousand annual growth bands as we climbed, even though the bottom 150 meters were buttress and other late-growth, which had thrust through and disrupted the original surface. This tree is as old as homo sapiens, by some measures, and has weathered millennia of ice ages, when the swamp was frozen solid.

We started our climb at the base of one buttress. The buttresses grow out of the side of the tree after it reaches a certain height and then every year a new layer of growth is laid down, breaking through the photosynthetic bark at a front that runs up the length of the buttress. We used the knobs at the ends of these to hold the ropes. That is another thing un-nerving about the monoliths: they don’t have leaves or branches. There is just smooth, armor-hard, dark brownish bark, laid down every year from the growing bud. There are veins, channels for sap laden with antifreeze agents, buried beneath the surface. We tried deep-radar and acoustic sounding, enough to see that there is a water-rich core in the center of the tree, which must be what keeps it alive when the river into the swamp and the swamp itself are frozen. Don’t even ask about the root system: we think it ends at 200 m down, well below sea level, even during an ice age, but we aren’t sure.

You may well ask how we climbed past the top of the buttress, if there was nothing to hold on to on the bark itself and driving anchors in would have been like trying the same thing to a solid piece of granite. But the tree doesn’t have everything its own way. The trunk isn’t perfectly smooth, and small parasitic plants can occasionally gain enough of a hold to drive their own deep roots into the tree. Keep in mind that small is a relative term – some of these had grown as large as an oak tree back on Earth. Infection does strike the monoliths, and we’re nowhere near an understanding of their immune system, but there were things like galls in the bark, other locations where large holes had formed when the bark rotted and eroded away. You could have built a house in these caves etched out by biological warfare, if they weren’t filled with a few millennia of accumulated vegetable and animal matter, some of it alive. There is even a species of pede in there, which seems to make its habitat only in these havens in the trees. We don’t know how it reproduces or spreads from one tree to another, although it is vaguely like the aquatic pedes in the swamp below.

But all of these parasites worked to our advantage, giving us locations to attach ropes. And so up the four of us went, with hooks and cramp-ons and a lot of hanging by fingertip. It took us twelve hours of climbing to make it to the top of the tree, where we tied our tents as securely as we could. The top isn’t flat. The growing bud occupies the last forty vertical meters, layers of bark slowly unfurling and fusing with the sections beneath them. We were careful to avoid breaking anything. Some organisms don’t have that restraint: there is a constant struggle in the upper layers of the tree between the tree itself and invading parasites that would embed themselves deep within the trunk.

It was cold, sleeping there, and windy, but the view was incredible. Once again, the pictures don’t easily convey the reality. We had to begin our descent too soon, so that we’d be sure of getting down while removing all the ropes we’d strung. I’d be tempted to move to the trees, were it not for the problems commuting. The climbing is challenging, but the view is overwhelming. Maybe the Four Physicists will get us enough negative matter for a levitating car, so we can move easily among the monoliths without being destructive. You could fly a chopper through, if you didn’t mind risking the rotors.

Announcements

Screamer William Chamer, Avery House Residents, Summoned to BOC, CRC, & GSC Joint Session
A case has been opened by the BOC concerning allegations that William Chamer, head Screamer, and at least eight residents of Avery, including both undergrads and grads, have violated the Honor Code by “practicing medicine beyond their qualifications”. This is presumably due to the Avery group having taken up all medical duties at Caltech, in which they have shown remarkable skill, and Chamer assisting Venkat Sakhar’s organization of vitamin supplementation, insulin synthesis, and blood donors. The accusers have remained anonymous. Reactions to the case are confused, with surprise that this would be considered a matter for the BOC mixed with the widespread astonishment at the level of medical competence the accused have displayed, even given the surgical and medical equipment they were given by the Examiners. The Four Physicists have formally expressed their approval and confidence in Chamer, as have leading members of ASCIT and the Students Association.

At the request of Patrick Townsend, Avery RA, we will broadcast the proceedings live, on both our Caltech and MIT channels. Transcripts will be posted after the fact. The first hearing is scheduled for three days from now, at 10:00 CST (18:00 MST).

Humor & Entertainment

MIT: To celebrate the first potato harvest, a kilogram of sodium will be dumped into the New Charles at 12:00 tomorrow. Bring your favorite toppings.

Caltech: Oration of the Greco-Roman classics will continue in the Avery House courtyard every evening from 20:00 to 21:00.

In our print edition, we have provided a vintage XKCD comic: “NP-Complete”. Reminds me of having to choose what seeds I wanted from the Examiners. Not that I can complain, but I think I got too many lettuce seeds and not enough onions.

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