Onriyu

I don't think you can ever be sure how the day is going to end. Even if you're in a nice house on the coast of Northern California when the sun rises over the hills, there's no guarantee that you're going to be there when the sun goes back down. This morning I was reading my copy of the Oakland Tribune, trying to focus on the news with some kind of odd buzzing in the back of my head. I never would have guessed what that meant, or that I would be here, in the SFPD headquarters this evening, telling you about the darkest secrets of my life, and the darkest depths of human nature. Funny how things turn out, isn't it? I suppose all men must one day face their demons, though, and I fear that I will soon be facing mine in Hell. There's not much I can tell you that you don't already know. I used to work for a software firm called Benji Computing, back in the 1990s. That didn't really do much for me, but it did get my foot in the doorway of Silicon Valley. When Benji tanked in March of 2001, I had enough cred to land myself a position working with a little start-up with a lot of potential named Tancata Systems. This is the part you want to hear about, right? I'm sure that you've already been told about all of the money the government poured into Tancate after they pitched their TSS network to DARPA in 2002. The TSS probably sounded like a good idea; a Telepathic Surveillance System which could monitor everything going on anywhere on Earth. No expensive satellites, no clandestine flights around the Arctic Circle. Just one computer, in Tancata's main office in San Francisco. The only problem with the TSS was that all it was was a good idea. We had no way to make it workable. Even though Tancata was able to monitor and prove the existence of Telepathic waves, we still weren't sure how to manipulate them or observe them on such an immesne scale. Contrary to the image often given to the public, the 'psychics' who bent spoons, used tarot cards, and read minds were universally either frauds or just people who believed that they could do something they couldn't. Actual telepathic ability was something subconscious, and something uncontrollable. If we could figure out how to get it under control, then we would be able to give DARPA their machine, and we'd all be set for life. If we couldn't, though, then we would almost definitely be accused of ripping off the federal government, and they'd take their funds back out of our skin. Our early attempts to make the TSS work were pretty harmless, but they weren't very effective. Andrew Thatcher was in charge of those. If you have him in custody, you might as well release him now; he was just a code monkey, trying to piece psychic wavelengths together out of C++ and Java. It didn't work, but no one got hurt because of it. We didn't make our progress or do anything particularly dangerous until our CEO, Marcus Pliny, replaced Thatcher with Dr. Jeanne Meracor. She was the person who proposed the bright idea that we needed to replace our computer banks with live, human 'processors'. I was initially opposed to that concept, but I eventually decided to give it my support. We got a few people together, and we performed tests on them to figure out how much Telepathic potential each of one of them had. Some of them were volunteers we took from off of the street; some of them were employees who worked at Tancata. We thought at first that intelligence contributed greatly to Telepathic potential, so we encouraged Tancata employees with Master's Degree or Doctorate level education to take our Parapsychological tests. It seemed strange when not one of them scored even slightly above average. Rather than intelligence, the most important deciders for Telepathic potential proved to be gender and ancestry. Out of the twenty seven people who tested in the ranges between 'Slightly Above Average' and 'High Telepathic Potential', twenty four were female. Way too high to be a coincidence. The three males all tested on the lower end of the spectrum, too, meaning that they were all out of the running for the later phase