In our timeline, the US Army's post-Vietnam interest in the paranormal lead to nothing more than a few "enhanced interrogation techniques" and a few crazy LSD-ridden vets.
In this world, the world was not so lucky.
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The US Army Psychic Observatory was the brainchild of Jim Channon, a Vietnam vet who was able to convince much of the Army's top brass of the value of research into paranormal and extranormal human abilities. He'd traveled through California in the mid-'70s, coming into contact with many of the weirder and more bizarre off-shoots of the New Age movement. Somewhere along the way, he'd glimpsed the edge of something enormous, something amazing, and with the resources of the US Army behind him, he believed he could use it to empower America to lead a new age of global peace.
The hippies who'd been striving to commune psychically with the children of the stars were an unfocused bunch, most of them more interested in the sex, drugs, and parties that consumed the California communes. The serious young army recruits Jim Channon brought into the USAPO were anything but unfocused, and they made rapid progress. At first, they made a few minor advances in the realm of clairvoyance and predictive cognition... but in 1981, a group of USAPO psychics lead by Channon pierced the interstellar void and made contact with a psychic entity from beyond our galaxy. Codenamed DAWNING EYE, the entity was friendly from the beginning, offering to share advanced technology and psychic techniques with the USAPO officers. Behind classified curtains, Channon and his staff learned a vast array of techniques from DAWNING EYE - remote viewing, telepathic communication, psychokinesis, direct neural suggestion, and other more obscure disciplines.
During the Nicaraguan operation, the USAPO were able to prove their worth. Providing advanced psychic intelligence on the movements of government troops and the inner thoughts and feelings of government and military leaders, USAPO operatives worked with the CIA to lead the Contras to overthrow the Sadinista government in 1982. Buoyed by their success, billions of dollars from the black budget were poured into the psychic research program. Jim Channon, however, fell out of favour in Pentagon politics, and was dismissed from command of new US Psychic Operations Command; afterwards, he drifted back into the Californian fringe community, becoming an important member of the Scientologist organisation. Under the new order, the Psychic Operations Command oversaw a swathe of black operations across the globe - from Columbia to Cambodia, USPOC operatives, or "Spocks", lead American forces to covert victory after covert victory. New means of warfare were being dreamed up, and without the assistance of DAWNING EYE, the fledgling Soviet psychic program could be no more than clever charlatans. In a defining victory, a covert Spock operation took out the senior Cuban leadership and ensured that the incoming administration welcomed American "advisors" with open arms.
The Second Cuban Crisis set the superpowers at the boiling point, as the Kremlin considered an all-out invasion of Western Europe in response. As the world drifted closer to nuclear annihilation, the US Psychic Command developed a new program under the guidance of DAWNING EYE - Operation MIND EATER, an immense psychic amplifier that would theoretically give the US Army the power to take direct psychic control of the entire Soviet strategic force, and prevent a Soviet nuclear strike. Deep in the New Mexico desert, the MIND EATER array took shape, powered by a seismic generator of alien design that drew power directly from the Mohovic discontinuity.
In reality, the "psychic amplifier" was a psychic gate, designed to allow DAWNING EYE to pull itself fully through onto Earth, rather than merely touch a few minds from galaxies away. Its goal was nothing less than the total subjugation of the human race. Having compromised the senior leadership of the American military, it had no difficult securing the resources needed to construct such a device. All it needed was for someone to turn the key, and the planet would be within its grasp. Its opportunity came in June, 1988, as Soviet tanks poured through the Fulda Gap into Western Europe, giving the USPOC-controlled shell that was once Ronald Reagan the impetus to activate MIND EATER. With the turn of a key, a surge of seismic energy rolled across the globe, destabilising the San Andreas fault, and setting whole continents quivering. The damage that resulted was immense, but it was far from the worst thing to happen.
As MIND EATER sprang into action, psychic energy pulsed across the Southwest and then around the world, shattering minds and reforming them into something entirely more alien. Ultimately, however, the device had failed to allow DAWNING EYE to fully traverse the interstellar void - miscalculations lead to its psyche being shattered into a billion fragments. The effect was instead to shove shards of an immense alien intelligence into human brains unsuited for the task.
MIND EATER varied in its intensity with distance from the gate. Within ten kilometres, every human brain was reduced to pulp as the neural surge destroyed their synapses. Within a hundred kilometres, perhaps half were reduced to pulp, a third became functional hosts to shards of DAWNING EYE, and the remainder survived the initial pulse with their psyche at least somewhat intact, if severely damaged. Within a thousand, only a quarter died, with the remainder evenly split between functional hosts and survivors. Across the globe as a whole, perhaps 10% of the population were killed instantly, 5% hosting shards of the DAWNING EYE entity, and another 20% suffered severe psychological damage.
Those who died instantly were at least spared the horrors of the aftermath. Hosts of DAWNING EYE shards, who would become known as Mindeaters after the weapon that created them, had their psyches replaced entirely by angry shards of a dead alien god. Roving bands of psychic sociopaths took to the streets, slaughtering with abandon. With their language centres destroyed, there was never hope for negotiation or bargaining. Worse yet, with prolonged exposure, they could replicate the effect that had created them, killing or converting all but the most strong-willed humans.
Across most of the world, the Mindeater outbreaks were relatively small, and eventually contained by local governments, though some African nations collapsed into total anarchy. In Europe, the pulse lead to a rapid ceasefire between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, with the Red Army pulling back to defend the motherland from packs of savage psychics. North America bore the brunt of DAWNING EYE's death cry. The western states were lost within weeks to the Mindeater onslaught due to sheer numbers. The solitary holdout was California, where, thanks to Jim Channon, most Scientologists had managed to survive the psychic onslaught untouched. Trained to high Thetan levels, the Scientologists were able to build a strong resistance to the gangs of Mindeaters that roamed the shattered ruins of LA and San Francisco.
Along the Eastern Seaboard, the shattered remnants of the United States drew together to battle the Mindeater onslaught. Armies of mass conscripts battled insane psychic warriors from New York to Atlanta. What remained of the USPOC developed a regime of psychoactive drugs that could improve the resistance of American minds to psychic control, which eventually tipped the balance east of the Mississippi and enabled the American remnant to regain basic control over the course of several years.
Though the Mindeater outbreak was eventually contained, the world was forever changed, and not for the last time. The death throes of DAWNING EYE had awakened the psionic potential of humanity, and cast an immense psychic beacon across the galaxy. More visitors would come following its trail...
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It's 2001, 13 years after the world went mad.
DAWNING EYE wasn't the last alien to touch Earth. Since MIND EATER, a few alien travelers have visited Earth. It turns out the quickest way to travel around the galaxy is by psychic warp. Most visitors have been more along the line of tourists or pilgrims than conquerers, with alien psychologies that render communication difficult. The most troubling arrivals are the spores of the organisms that have consumed most of Earth's tropical regions - non-sapient psychic super-kudzu that chokes out whole ecosystems in short years. Its ambient psionic field means most humans can't even bring themselves to damage it, although Fortress Singapore still survives within the Saigon organism thanks to powerful psychic defenders that keep the Straits of Malacca open to human shipping. When the spores touched down in Caracas in the late '90s, Brazil wasn't going to let itself suffer the way Africa and Southeast Asia had; they razed the entire Amazon rainforest to the ground instead.
In Europe, the geopolitical map shifted when a East German general decided he was the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler in the immediate aftermath of MIND EATER, and developed the psychic chutzpah to back it up. Hitler 2 is probably the most powerful human telepath alive, and certainly one of the more insane. The Fourth Reich is a nightmarish state of industrial death, but with an impossibly charismatic dictator; like North Korea run by Charles Mason, radical '60s decor with a side helping of famine and murder. Hitler 2 is held in check by the immense nuclear arsenals of the Soviet Union on one side and the European Defense League on the other, and an uneasy peace is holding at the moment.
The world has adapted to the rise of psychic warfare in a variety of ways. In the American and Canadian remnants, the American Psychiatric Association are empowered with the privileges of a police force, and administer a psychoactive drug regime that would make the Beatles choke to every citizen. It might reduce range of emotional and creative expression, but it seems a necessary evil in a region where Mindeater raids are still a threat. The EDL and most American allies take similar, if less drastic pharmaceutical steps, backed up by homegrown psi-ops forces. The Soviets take the cheaper approach of issuing lead-lined skullcaps to every soldier and important government official, which is surprisingly effective.
In fact, life in the Soviet Union these days is surprisingly pleasant, at least compared to parts of the world where your life is threatened by psychic weeds, telepathic dictators, mindeaters, or ecological collapse on a daily basis. Seismic generation technology based on stolen MIND EATER plans provides immense amounts of cheap, clean energy, while the Soviet occupation of the Middle East means plentiful oil as well. Consumer goods are finally returning to Moscow shops after years of wartime-level production, and the Soviet space program has become the first to manage psychic warp techniques.
The Middle East is a mess; Israel figured it might as well take all its enemies out if the balloon was going up, and is currently surrounded by razed atomic wastelands and total anarchy. Rumours abound that an alien prophet is travelling through the ruins of Mecca and Medina, speaking of Allah and Muhammed and raising a new army to retake Jerusalem. They're probably just rumours.
South Africa has preserved apartheid, if somewhat altered; a combination of "advanced neural pacification technology", a psychic puppet Mandela, and wartime conditions with the advancing Congo Organism keep the black population under control. Most of Africa that isn't under South African control or the Green Menace is totally anarchic, with psychic warlords and even the occasional Mindeater tribe running wild in the continent's interior.
After China's seizure of Taiwan and Korea after MIND EATER, Japan is feeling increasingly isolated. A fascist party has seized control of the Japanese Diet, while technology stolen from an alien warpship wreck has helped Japan increase its technological lead. With by a resurgent and isolated Japan on one side, and the expanding Saigon Organism on the other, the PRC is living through interesting times. An atomic-enhanced firebreak in the Brazilian model is hoped to slow the Organism's progress, but it continues to creep up through the South Japan Sea.
Lying only a few hundred miles from the heart of MIND EATER, the Dianetic Republic of California is a vigilant garrison state, still ruled by Jim Channon. It boasts the most psychically active population in the world, with the most advanced training techniques. Privileges and rights are based on one's Operating Thetan level, with humble OT1 citizens regarded suspiciously as weak-minded potential targets for Mindeater infestation and OT8 citizens being the social elite. Still, it's hard to argue with results, and Channon's welding together of the Scientologists and the Human Potential movement seems to offer a promising model to many for the future of the human race...
) and in space, where the Russians blow up the alien mothership with a Tsar Bomba.
