global threat monitor
browsing event type: prophecy
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Prophecy 009:
An unidentified, precog-resistant event that is prophecied to occur in 2027 or later with high probability, killing most humans on Earth in a matter of days.
Global threat, highest priority.
Outlook for the Society is poor: the parahuman death rate is predicted to exceed 98%.
Information is scant: precogs who can provide useful information about events that far in the future, and who are not entirely blocked by the precog-resistant nature of the event, are vanishingly rare. The great majority of information comes from three cases.
Case 1. Deathclock.
Monaco, 1996. Harbinger is contacted by a local precog, Deathclock. He claims to see numbers floating above peoples' heads that tell him when people will die, precise to the millisecond. His only known limitations are that his own actions can change the numbers, and that he has a time limit - the numbers are too blurry to read if someone dies after 2027.
Deathclock claims to have a system to use his power to make 'infallible' plans. He captures criminals he considers 'blights on society', keeps them prisoner in his basement, and carries a remote control in his pocket that he can use to gas them to death with the press of a button. Each morning he writes down his plan for the next 24 hours, then resolves 'I'll follow this plan, and gas the prisoners at the first sign of trouble'. If the prisoners' death dates instantly change to a time within the next 24 hours, it means that his plan will lead to trouble and needs to be rewritten. He repeats the process until he has a plan that is guaranteed to avoid trouble.
He approaches us for help taking a vacation; his power only works with line of sight, so he lived in Monaco his entire life so he could keep an eye on his prisoners. In exchange for his services as a precog, we rent him a citizen whose power lets him use his system from anywhere in the world.
Deathclock returns from his vacation manic and highly disturbed. He reports that his power doesn't have a time limit at 2027, because he can see death dates as late as 2050. Instead, an unknown entity is blurring the numbers for more than eighty percent of the people who live past 2027, including every single person he had ever seen in Monaco. He is convinced that 2027 is a global extinction event that wipes out the human race without ending their lives - an act of God, rapturing the righteous to Heaven and sending sinners to Hell.
Deathclock claims that the numbers for his Society contact Harbinger are repeatedly blurring and unblurring as he speaks, suggesting that the Society is involved in the extinction event. Deathclock leaves the city and has never been seen again, by the Society or by any other organization whose records we have searched. Presumably he is using his power to escape attention.
Case 2. Mpanavotra.
Madagascar, 2006. We come into conflict with a precog warlord in Madagascar, Mpanavotra. His power is to detect whether people in his presence are going to die within the next two days. If they are, his power feeds him a continuous stream of visions of imaginary futures, in which he imagines his mind taking over the bodies of those people exactly two minutes before they are scheduled to die. He uses his power to be a general for his troops, detecting when they will be in danger and using the imaginary futures to figure out what actions his men need to take to save themselves.
During our operation against him, Mpanavotra has a second trigger event and goes mad. He reports that he is constantly perceiving hundreds of copies of his mind inserted into random people worldwide on the verge of their deaths, without any limit on how far in the future the deaths occur. Most distressingly, he reports that almost all of his copies are being killed at the same time by an event that is immume to his precognition. The details of the event are blocked from his perception, leaving the hundreds of copies of his mind trapped in a dreamlike state, feeling only an overwhelming sense of terror from desperately struggling against an inevitable force that kills them over and over again, everywhere in the world.
Mpanavotra is sent into a medically-induced coma and held in containment, in the hopes of one day being able to treat him and recover information about the world ending event.
Case 3. Dice.
Brockton Bay, USA, 2011. We recruit a precog, Dice, who is the first to predict the world ending event without going mad from the revelation. She can't see the event itself but she can see around it to tell us how our actions will affect the outcome. This gives us our first chance to prepare: to find a way to limit the damage, to improve our chances of survival.
Dice reports the following information: the event occurs sometime between 2027 and 2036...