STATE COLLEGE, Jan 7 -- The Physics Department of Penn State, in conjunction with scientists from Rising Sun, the TL7 USSR, the Hive, Technomage refugees from the Technosphere Star Ship Daedalus, and others, released a series of connected papers today describing the Red Zone as "a paradoxical place where multiple histories are all true at once." According to the scientists in question, different parts of the Red Zone may experience different physical constraints or even different histories at a given time.
"Depending on when you interact with it, the Zone could a verdant garden of poisonous vegetation filled with primitive tribes or a dustbowl with tiny, hard-scrabble communities living on scavanged supplies," said Dr. Haslan Abu Hassan of Penn State Department of High-Energy Physics, formerly a member of the Universiti Sains Malaysia. "The disturbing thing is the inhabitants will remember and have evidence of years of completely contradictary histories."
Reports paint the Red Zone as, among other things, a fertile jungle filled with dinosaurs, a radioactive waste filled with pig-like mutants, or a place not unlike any other part of the Midwest. While readings generally give the thread a Tech Level of 6 on the Penn State Tech Level Scale, show a high Kellner ("magic") rating and display a high level of compatibility with Hypertech devices, some readings vary widely from those for extended periods of time, including one set of observations which consistently reported the Thread as TL5 with a Kellner rating of 1.2 for an entire month, during which time the observation team was "attacked constantly by giant ants."
"The Thread is in a constant state of flux, yet it was stabilized by the Technosphere," commented Bach-2389A24A, a Scientist-caste Hiver associated with Team B of the Joint Expeditionary Team, and an author of one of the papers. "This made it like an uncollapsed waveform, a cat that is both dead and alive at the same time. However, unlike that famous thought experiment, if you observe it at a given time, the cat may be alive, and if you observe it at another, the cat may be dead. The waveform returns to its pre-observational state once external observation stops."
"In one of our more striking experiments, we placed a sensor in the Zone and at different times we recieved data back from it that indicated it had been destroyed or damaged, and when we checked, it had been destroyed or damaged. But then, only a day later, it was completely whole again," said Dr. Gerry Santorino of the Penn State Department of Applied Physics.
"Given that the Red Zone, or Rad Zone, is part of the complex of Threads known loosely as the Post-Apocalyptic Midwest, at first we thought that the widely differing reports were just a matter of the unreliability of witness accounts," said Dr. Andrew Halloway, formerly of the Thread Physics department at Berkeley. "But our experiments show this not to be the case, or at least isn't as true as previously thought."
Upon reading a couple of the papers, Dr. David Hines of the Penn State Political Science Department noted: "It was previously thought that the reports of high radiation in this area where largely the result of a disinformation campaign by the so-called 'Jackalope Millitary Consulting Services.' If these reports are correct, it may be true that they did that, while it being simultaneously being true that it was the radioactive Hell reported by so many others."
The Red Zone consists of the northern part of the former American Midwest, and in addition to linking to other parts of the Midwest, has a gate to Feral Detroit and a gate which leads to the Empire of New York. The Red Zone is due to become the site of an upcoming deployment by JET Team A.
