What is the pattern?

[keeneyed]

I can't tell if this forum is a joke. And with the power and network so unreliable, I don't know if I can reach anyone this way. But what else am I going to do, post fliers?

If you’re at UCSC you know how this all started. The students bombed their Winter finals. (It’s going to be clear I’m a faculty member, so I might as well come clean now.) I thought it was my fault, something about my teaching, and I thought the self-doubt was what was keeping me awake at first. Then I thought it was guilt about letting our dog get attacked. I got into fights with my wife, we were snarling at the kids at the dinner table, and the kids had bags under their eyes, too.

I went to the shelter, looking for her (our dog), and I found out something more was going on. All kinds of animals were in there, with huge gashes, missing limbs. They were stacked in cages in the hall. And the woman there whispered to me, these were the lucky ones. They’d had so many in who didn’t make it through the first night.

But the animals that were there. They were throwing themselves against the cages. Trying to get at each other, to hurt each other. Growling and hissing and howling. Tearing at the sutures of their surgeries by hurling themselves toward imagined victims they could never reach.

What had been a sanctuary when we adopted our dog had become bloody, vicious, a horrible place to be. After that, I made damn sure that my kids were never outside without me or my wife.

Our youngest said what was keeping her from sleeping was a “high sound.” I went all around the house with her, asking if different electronics, or the vents, or the dryer, or the bathroom fan was making the sound. She told me it came from outside. We told her that none of the rest of us could hear it. She said it wasn’t really a sound.

Then I got back from Spring Break and found out that everyone else’s students had also blown their finals. And I ate lunch with a couple faculty friends… they hadn’t been sleeping either.  

I thought maybe there’d be something in the newspaper. Or something from the university’s public information office. But nobody seemed to be saying anything. And that made me nervous about saying something.

None of that really got better, but I started to learn to live with it. Heck, it was kind of familiar. The kids were both horrible sleepers when they were babies. It was just like that kind of sleep deprivation again, just with no baby to try to sway back to sleep.

Over the next month, more started to go wrong, but I thought maybe it was just my tiredness, maybe a cold, at first. Had the A/C really gone crazy, or did I just have the chills? Was the internet really out more than usual? Was the cogen plant failing to kick in because the maintenance folks were as tired as I was?

I put out some feelers in my class, but no one would take the bait. Maybe they were afraid to say anything. Maybe they’re all super-tired zombies. Maybe they assumed that I, an authority figure, would be trawling for trouble makers.

But then one of my students (I won’t say who) came to my office hours and talked about other stuff. But she left behind a piece of paper with the name of this forum. And so I have to hope this is real, and not some joke or cryptozoology circle jerk, because I need some people to talk to, for as long as the network and power stay up.

Does anyone have more information about what’s going on? Does anyone have a sense of what could be tying this all together? I think, for some reason, that it should be connected.

We’re about to hit the end of school. Is this an infection that the students will be taking home to families and communities across the country? Is it already happening elsewhere, and we’re all just too sleepy and tired to let each other know? (I don’t think so. I watch the newscasts and they don’t have bags under their eyes. But maybe they’re using old recordings? Or makeup? Or post-production graphics?)

Laying my cards on the table: I think there’s a pattern here, and I think it’s *right here*. I think what’s happening to the buildings and grids has been happening longer than we realize. I think it’s been causing us to lose sleep, even when we can’t hear it’s non-sound. I suspect it’s even connected to what’s been happening to the animals. I have to find someone who can help me think this through, help me figure out how to figure out more.

[CatButt9313]

Hopefully this message gets through on the forum and the power isn't constantly cutting out. The thing has already invaded my lab twice now, and I'm not sure why. The second time it came, it shuffled around the room, sniffing at objects as if hoping to find something in there. The body was definitely shaped more like a lizard's, close to the ground, thin, with translucent fur and red ridges along its back. I didn't get a good look at its face.


For the sleep deprivation problem, I don't think it's an infection. I didn't notice any irregularities in the blood samples when I first obtained them, but I'm starting to see signs now of frequency disruption. It's a ridiculous level of cellular fatigue. From what I can see, the high-frequency signal that the cells can maintain fluctuates between the levels necessary to maintain the body.


It's not just contained to the cells. If you introduce the uncontaminated blood to the air long enough, it begins to show signs as well, after four days.

[keeneyed]

I don’t know if this will reach anyone. The students are coming back from summer break soon, and I’m so frightened for them, but I don’t think there is any way to get them to stop. They were mailed their instructions months ago. Very few will decide not to come, merely because their telephone queries aren’t answered, or because the university website keeps going offline.

I realize it sounds ridiculous, but I’m pretty sure we brought this upon ourselves. I can say more later, but I have reason to believe that research at this university is at the root of everything that is happening. I have done my own investigations over the summer, and I know others have as well. I sent my wife and children away, when I realized that the thing corrupting our sleep patterns was the same as that disrupting our electrical machinery. But I thought it had to be some interference from the outside. I didn’t imagine it could be our own quest for knowledge, the guiding light of our work here, that had plunged us into darkness.

I am writing now to see if there are others out there, who might help me think. Is there a way to keep the students away, when everyone else seems to think we’re just experiencing a few malfunctions or -- perhaps -- is part of whatever has brought this upon us? Is there perhaps a way to stop it in time? Are there any hints of what we might need to do to uncover the full truth?

I will be back to share some of what I have learned this horrible summer.

[Wotsit]

I’m glad that there are still people out there unaffected by that whatever that lizard thing is doing.  I agree that something has to be done.   Although CatButt (really?) has stated that they have repeatedly found the lizard sniffing around their lab, I figured that the creature does not have its lair in Engineering 2.  An acquaintance also has their lab in Engineering 2, and to my knowledge, they have not seen anything.  The creature must be attracted solely to something in CatButt’s lab.  I decided to check out Engineering 1 instead, since it is close by and could easily hide something like that lizard.  Sure enough, I was met with the stench of decay when I descended into the basement.  Unfortunately, I slipped up and alerted… something before I could investigate further.  It was too dark to see what it, but whatever it was, it was fast.  I barely escaped.  
I managed to find a floor plan of the basement when the website uptimes, unfortunately, this forum won’t let me upload the .pdf file with my marked areas of interest.  I can still link the original pdf.  From what we know, is there any way to stop this thing?

https://facilities.soe.ucsc.edu/sites/default/files/BaskinBasemntTotPlan.pdf

[Sponsored content]