2952-10-09 – Tales from the Service: The Incarnation Home Front 

Duncan here. I am back to Ashkelon after having conducted a few interviews. One of them, with Captain Samuel Bosch of the heavy cruiser Raymond Spruance (who needs no introduction in this space) you either have already seen by time of posting or will shortly see on the main vidcast program, so I will not discuss it here except to note that this embed team expected Bosch to ride out the rest of the war in a desk posting, and are pleasantly surprised to see him back in action commanding a Seventh Fleet capital warship. 

The interview relevant to today’s feed item is the one I did with Naval Intelligence lieutenant Kirsten Reid, lately come from investigating what was left of the Incarnation depot on Hausen’s World. Colonel Reid sat down with me for a rare one-on-one interview to discuss what we know of Incarnation civilian life based on the findings at Hausen’s and elsewhere. Nojus, obviously, was back on Ashkelon maintaining the feed item, as I did not know initially when I would be back. 

Because of its length, I will be splitting this interview across two weeks’ text feed items. 


D.L.C. - Duncan Chaudhri – Junior editor and wartime field reporter for Cosmic Background 

K.R.R. - Lieutenant Kirsten R. Reid is a Naval Intelligence senior analyst assigned to Seventh Fleet. Recently, she has been at Hausen’s World, the site of Operation HELLESPONT, examining the wealth of Incarnation intelligence left in the supply depot captured there. 


[D.L.C.] Lieutenant Reid, it is a pleasure. I don’t think we’ve met before. 

[K.R.R.] We have not met, though I already feel like I know you, Mr. Chaudhri. I have been reading your text feed for nearly four years. I saw you at one of Admiral Abarca’s press events late last year, but I did not get a chance to speak to you then. 

[D.L.C.] Lieutenant, I am flattered. Surely in your line of work there’s far more interesting reading material to keep you busy than our feed. 

[K.R.R.] I think you have a rather romantic idea of what we do in Naval Intelligence. Most of what we work with really is terrifyingly dull reading, and the stories you publish are anything but. 

[D.L.C.] Thank you again, but I must say I am not here for an endorsement to use in our advertising, Lieutenant. I’m here- 

[K.R.R.] Call me Kirsten, please. I was a civilian analyst before the war, and those stuffy titles don’t fit me very well. 

[D.L.C.] Kirsten. We had planned to talk about some of what data from Hausen’s World has revealed about life on the Incarnation home worlds. 

[K.R.R.] That is what we discussed, and I brought a few documents that I am cleared to share with your publication that will expand on what we talk about here. 

[D.L.C.] It is good that this was cleared for release. I’ve had something of a variable experiences with the Naval Intelligence clearance process, as you probably know if you’re a regular reader. 

[K.R.R.] Of course. Fortunately, this is a collection that has no bearing on the military situation but which I think your readers will find quite interesting. We have collected a little bit of data on what the Nate home worlds are like from devices captured on other worlds, including a few rare video recordings, but the Hausen’s depot seems to have been a mail stop for messages and packages being taken back from the Incarnation fleet to their home worlds. Unfortunately, they are careful to conceal the coordinates of the worlds themselves, even from their own rank and file, but we know quite a bit now about those worlds. 

[D.L.C.] I suppose if we’re reading mail sent by their service personnel back to their loved ones at home, that would make sense. They don’t use a Hypercast relay chain to send data to and from their fleet, of course, otherwise we would have found some of their Hypercast nodes already. 

[K.R.R.] That is correct. Incarnation technology is very capable of creating a Hypercast relay network, but they do not do so. They seem to consider the network a vulnerability, and employ a system of what amounts to high-capacity mail courier vessels to move data and small parcels around their space in a relatively regular manner. We have never captured one of these courier ships, but they seem to be a civilian government rather than a military institution, with the fleet having no control over their movements. 

[D.L.C.] That is strange to hear, but I suppose I’m used to the fleet mail system and Hypercast relay network, both run and maintained by the military. 

[K.R.R.] Yes, it is strange how weak their Naval institution seems to be. We are used to the Confederated government being somewhat subsidiary to the Naval authorities, and the Rahl Hegemony’s leaders being military leaders first and civil leaders second, but that was not the way of governments before the Terran-Rattanai War. The Incarnation, being descended from a Ladeonist schismatic group from that period, seems to have organized itself more along the lines of a civil government with a military arm. As far as we can tell, not even the Immortals program or the Inquisition, both of which have featured in your text feed, are military institutions. They’re initiatives of the civil government, created to infiltrate and control the Naval forces at a relatively low level. 

[D.L.C.] They don’t trust their own fleet? 

[K.R.R.] Their leaders keep the fleet on a very tight leash. They trust them to fight the war, but grand strategy is coming all the way from the top. 

[D.L.C.] Very interesting. Who is at the top? 

[K.R.R.] A single dictator with the title The Incarnate. They don’t ever use his or her name directly, but supposedly everything comes down from a single person, probably a person whose brain is implanted extensively to take some of the load, like they do to their senior officers. 

[D.L.C.] I shudder to think of what horrors such a leader might do to himself to maintain power. 

[K.R.R.] At least as much as he’s doing to the Immortals. Fortunately, it seems that the universal implantation thing we see in their military forces does not extend to the civil population – based on stills and video we captured on Hausen’s, it's only overseers, law enforcement, and government officials who get implants, mostly. The bulk of the population is unmodified, or at least, is not visibly modified with that characteristic temple implant you see on captured Incarnation personnel. The lower on the totem pole one is, the less they are implanted. 

[D.L.C.] Interesting. I suppose that makes sense. Implanting tens of billions would be hideously expensive. 

[K.R.R.] To say nothing of the percentage that would die from unforeseen complications of the procedure. Perhaps one in five hundred by our analysis of the technology. Even with as many as they do implant, the death toll must be grim. 

[D.L.C.] I can imagine, not that I want to. And all those people live in fear of implanted and augmented law enforcement? 

[K.R.R.] Their system is not really based on fear, as far as we can tell. Military personnel seem unafraid to speak their minds to their families back home, and if there is any censorship of their negative opinions of the progress of the war, it is done back there, and in a way that the personnel censored do not suffer for it. There is some rule by force – we have hints that the Inquisition is also responsible for hunting down any opposition to the Incarnation’s program – but most people are on board with the ideas, if not precisely the individual steps, of the regime. 

[D.L.C.] They’re all Ladeonists, then? Not just the leaders and the military? 

[K.R.R.] Incarnation civilians have been educated by Ladeonist ideologues for at least four generations. It is the culture, and there seem to be few dissidents. They see themselves, as Ladeonist cells in the Reach do, as doomed to do their part as part of a great collective effort to save the human race from extinction, and though they do not always agree with the steps being taken, they generally trust that those at the top know better what is needed than they do. 

[D.L.C.] That is not particularly encouraging to think about, when it comes to what happens after the war. 

[K.R.R.] We have thought of that, yes. I can’t speak to any optimistic conclusions of that thought. 

[D.L.C.] What about their planets? You say we have some idea of what life is like on them? 

 

2952-10-16 – Tales from the Service: The Incarnation Home Front, Part 2 

This is the remainder of the interview with Naval Intelligence lieutenant Kirsten Reid, whose first portion was posted last week. I have no further comment on this, except to speculate in hindsight that the names of the two worlds we discussed are very similar. Perhaps they are neighboring worlds, or even two planets in the same star system – that would explain the seemingly strange practice of shipping raw materials and food between them. I did not ask this at the time, unfortunately. 


D.L.C. - Duncan Chaudhri – Junior editor and wartime field reporter for Cosmic Background.

K.R.R. - Lieutenant Kirsten R. Reid is a Naval Intelligence senior analyst assigned to Seventh Fleet. Recently, she has been at Hausen’s World, the site of Operation HELLESPONT, examining the wealth of Incarnation intelligence left in the supply depot captured there. 


[D.L.C.] What about their planets? You say we have some idea of what life is like on them? 

[K.R.R.] Some of them, yes. There is one world that seems to be the home of many of troops in the garrison of Hausen’s World which we know most about; its name seems to be Prospero. It is most likely the closest of the Incarnation worlds to Sagittarius Gate but that distinction may be largely academic, a matter of a few tens of light years difference. 

[D.L.C.] Let me guess: it has a large, urban population? Heavily urbanized settlements have traditionally been the main source of Ladeonist sentiment in the Reach. 

[K.R.R.] We thought so too, and there is at least one major city on the planet’s surface, a fairly sizable metropolis called Kannagh’s Prospect. Strangely, though, analysis of the mail we intercepted suggested the garrison troops were drawn mainly from smaller settlements in the hinterland, not from the city itself. The only mail sender or receiver we can positively say had relations in the city was the second in command of the base. 

[D.L.C.] Strange. That would suggest that most of the population- 

[K.R.R.] Is distributed throughout the smaller settlements? Possibly, but more likely this garrison was selected specifically from the small communities. We aren’t sure why. 

[D.L.C.] Well, at least we must know a lot about life in these smaller towns on the planet. 

[K.R.R.] What we know is extensive but leaves gaps. We know that the average size of one of these communities seems to be about three hundred, and that they are by and large young places, with few elderly citizens, for example, and family structure is, despite Ladeonist tendencies in Reach cells, fairly strong. 

[D.L.C.] Well, perhaps the Incarnation centralizes elderly citizens in the cities, leading to the disparity. 

[K.R.R.]  We considered that but it doesn’t really fit the other facts. None of the garrison or the fleet in the system seemed to be sending anything to elderly parents or grandparents in the city for example. 

[D.L.C.] What about day to day life in these communities? 

[K.R.R.] Civilians in these communities are generally tradesmen focused on the agricultural industry. It seems strange that the industry needs so much labor – after all, references to agricultural automation equipment are fairly common in letters from Prospero to the troops here – so we have to assume this planet is a food exporter to the rest of Incarnation space; it’s the only thing that makes sense for that much of an investment in agriculture. Most likely, that means the city is a concentration of packing facilities intended for turning these products into long-shelf-life items that can be shipped to other worlds, but even this does not make sense. Where are the people sending messages to their relatives who work in factories? Why not also draw troops from these people? 

[D.L.C.] Perhaps the factory workers are implanted with specialized equipment that disagrees with the military implants. That doesn’t explain the lack of message traffic between the groups though. 

[K.R.R.] That... Almost works, actually. Not quite, but almost. I hadn’t thought of that. 

[D.L.C.] What’s the climate of this Prospero like? 

[K.R.R.] Prospero seems to swing wildly between long, hot, arid summers, and shorter, brutally cold seasons. That indicates a highly elliptical orbit. Most likely the rainy seasons that make the place such a good farming world are in the narrow “spring” and “fall” between hot and cold, but we don’t have direct sources for this yet. What we do know is that keeping most crops alive requires careful consideration for irrigation and careful management of planting and harvest dates; the farmers of this world often have harvests planned out to the day and hour, a level of precision we’d never need on any world in the Reach. They also seem to use far more genetically altered crops than we use, which probably leads to increasing need for precise harvesting; that sort of artificial organism can be pretty unstable. 

[D.L.C.] That probably explains the Bitter- 

[K.R.R.] The Bitter Harvest story? Yes, I remember that one. How someone back in Farthing’s Chain got ahold of Incarnation farming equipment, I’m still not quite sure, but what that story portrays is consistent with what we know, if you factor in increased instability due to a strange environment. I’m still not sure why plants would explode, but that could always be an exaggeration to help hide your source’s real identity. 

[D.L.C.] What is the standard of living like there? 

[K.R.R.] It’s not too far off what a colonist on one of the outer Coreward Frontier worlds might expect. It’s spartan, but with all the basic comforts met; the central authority maintains very standardized schools and vocational programs in all the communities, so most of these conscripts had plenty of shared experiences even if they grew up scattered across a whole planet. All the communities had shops and meeting houses, but we don’t see many references to taverns or to any sort of hospitality business, suggesting that travel over long distances might be restricted. The government probably maintains checkpoints on the major roads to track movement, but again we have no direct source for that. 

[D.L.C.] This isn’t a fresh colony, though – this is a relatively high population planet. Why would people be living like first- or second-generation colonists when obviously they aren’t? 

[K.R.R.] I don’t know. None of them seemed to question it; that’s just the lives they lived before they were assigned to military training. And it certainly does not seem to have been a bad upbringing, in the whole. Perhaps by forcing them to live in a simulated colonization environment, the Incarnation is trying to raise them to be tough and not too reliant on creature comforts, which would be good traits for military conscripts needed for garrison and second line duty. 

[D.L.C.] Horrific to think that someone might engineer an entire planet to have standardized early life experiences so they are useful for particular tasks. But I will admit the idea sounds very Ladeonist. 

[K.R.R.] Unfortunately so. We have much less about other worlds, but this engineering does seem to be a consistent policy. There's one called Paradiso, for example, which seems to be a super-habitable environment like Makaharwa or Håkøya, where we see shared experiences of very different sorts mentioned in their message traffic. Paradiso natives – of which we have only a few examples in the captured traffic – seem to have outdoorsy upbringings, with very small houses but communities spread out through large, jungle-like areas, and forestry being a dominant industry. 

[D.L.C.] Forestry? You think they have a planet exporting wood in bulk? What for? 

[K.R.R.] No idea. Perhaps it is to build the houses on other worlds like Prospero. After all, we have no indication that Prospero has any trees to speak of, at least not anything native. 

[D.L.C.] Shipping building materials and food between planets sounds horrendously inefficient. How does their economy work? 

[K.R.R.] We aren’t completely sure, but if they are shipping such raw materials around, it suggests that manufacturing facilities are distributed relatively equally across their worlds, at least across a group of worlds. As to efficiency... Well, we’ve done some simulations, and can’t see how it would be anything but morbidly wasteful. 

[D.L.C.] And yet, they field hundreds, of highly advanced warships that put most Reach shipbuilders to shame. They have to have a smaller population than the Confederated Worlds, and with an economy that backwards, it seems impossible. 

[K.R.R.] The full economics of the situation are not yet clear. Surely we are missing components of their economic plan that would make it all make sense. 

[D.L.C.] Perhaps their warships are stolen? 

[K.R.R.] They seem to use similar technology to Grand Journey vessels, but there’s no indication they simply stole the ships, and every indication they’re building them. We do see new ships show up in engagements fairly regularly, as an example. You can always tell the smooth gravitic signature of a ship that’s fresh out of the yards within the last few months from one that’s just been reassigned from elsewhere. 

[D.L.C.] Pity. If they were working off a stolen stockpile that would suggest the war would end quickly in our favor. 

[K.R.R.] Wishful thinking, I’m afraid. And I am also afraid I’m running out of time for this discussion. 

[D.L.C.] I appreciate your coming to discuss this for the audience, Kirsten. Hopefully when you have those missing pieces that explain the strange oddities of Incarnation life, we can sit down and talk about it again. How our foes live is very interesting to me, and I think also to my audience. 

[K.R.R.] Duncan, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you. And if I am cleared to discuss further developments with the media, I assure you I will be in touch. 

2952-10-23 – Tales from the Service: The Anomaly in the Clouds

Though I recorded some other interviews while I was away, I don’t want to overload the feed with this relatively dry, informative material.

While we have been out in Sagittarius, a few interesting things have happened back in the Coreward Frontier worthy of mention. The raid at Adimari Valis has been well covered in other media outlets, obviously, but the arrival of Flit Diver at Maribel the day before the raid was announced in the media seems to have been largely overlooked.

For those of you who do not know, the Flit Diver is a carrier of the Rahl Hegemony Navy. While no formal pact appears to exist between the Confederated Worlds and the Hegemony stabilizing the border region until this conflict is ended, even a token force sent to the Maribel defense zone seems a gesture of goodwill indicative that such negotiations are ongoing. We at Cosmic Background get very little message traffic out of Hegemony space, though we are certain we have many readers and viewers there.

Apparently, the Flit Diver’s pilots had a bit of an interesting experience on the way across the Reach; their course took them close to the edge of the Brushfire Nebula, where they claim to have seen something quite spectacular.

[N.T.B. – This gesture of supposed goodwill is also an excuse to rotate Hegemony squadrons through a combat zone; trust the Hegemon to never let an opportunity to season his forces go to waste.]


Stefan Giunta adjusted the settings of his interceptor’s onboard radar, trying to find a combination where the artifacts along the left margins of the display disappeared. The Cavalier was a relatively new machine, having just been introduced the year before, and he still hadn’t flown one with a properly automated radar rig. He didn’t mind; the techs would work out the bugs eventually, and in the meantime, it was the fastest and most nimble strike rig in the Hegemony fleet, with enough firepower to make quick work of anything it managed to run down.

“Lead, I’m having sensor trouble. Anyone else picking up anything in that cloud?” Stefan bit back the word “again” automatically; he didn’t want the squadron comms log to suggest he was dissatisfied with the quality of his machine, and thus risk being reassigned to a squadron flying the older, far less glamorous Cuirassier. Stefan had flown Cuirassiers for the first four years of his service career, and while they were a capable machine, they would feel slow and cumbersome next to the Cavalier.

“Nothing on my plot.” Commander Daniel Jansson, the squadron leader, replied in an instant. “Anyone else?”

“Just some radar artifacts.” Elliott Clemens’s voice was full of grumpy exasperation that fortunately the transcript would be unable to record. “The radar is so sensitive it picks up denser areas of the nebula.”

“Probably nothing, but why don’t you both go check it out anyway.”

“Aye, Commander.” Stefan switched to a direct channel with the other pilot. “Clemens, you’re ahead of me, so why don’t you lead.”

“Acknowledged.” Clemens split from the formation and banked toward the extending arm of the nebula, and Stefan followed. The purple and orange haze of a nearby active area of the Brushfire Nebula soon filled his forward view, hiding all but the brightest stars. Few people lived in or around the nebula, partly because the area was not suitable for planet formation, and partly because high concentrations of phased-Epsilon and phased-Rho particles posed a risk to starships with standard phased-matter condensing reactors. Dense nebula clouds could even interfere with strike craft operations.

Fortunately, their squadron’s forward patrol, and their mothership’s course generally, were not intending to go into the Brushfire; they merely needed to skirt it until they reached the edge of Memoire de Paix. A more direct route to their destination through the Silver Strand was of course quite out of the question; it would violate treaties if Hegemony military forces passed openly through that region, and no-one had been able to arrange it even on a solidarity mission.

Though they didn’t intend to go through the nebula, its many far-spreading and poorly mapped arms moved, in astronomical terms, relatively fast. Theoretically, a pirate band – this was one sort of inhabitant the Brushfire always seemed to have plenty of – could use its greater knowledge of this shifting condition to set up ambushes on passing ships, thus requiring the Diver to send out forward patrols to clear each jump zone. Pirates attacking a fully escorted light carrier seemed farfetched to Stefan, even if brigands from that very nebula had battled Confederated cruiser squadrons on almost equal terms not yet fifteen years before. The Confederated military was soft and risk-averse; pirates knew that the same wasn’t true of the Hegemony Navy.

Oddly, as he came out of his turn on Clemens’s tail, Stefan saw that the radar artifacts in the nearest section of nebula hadn’t gone away. Normally, this sort of interference was resolved when the more capable forward-facing sensors were brought to bear on the problem.

“Still seeing it.” Clemens made a small course adjustment, and Stefan mirrored it. “You think maybe there is something in there?”

“Several somethings is more likely.” Stefan again tried to adjust his radar to clarify the plot, again without result. “But that’s a dense gas pocket, probably holding together under its own gravity. Visual sighting in there is going to be impossible.”

“No reactor signatures, nothing on infrared.” Clemens sent a proposed course to Stefan’s display. “Let’s do a close circuit. If we don’t pick anything up on thermal, there’s nothing to see.”

“Lead on.” Stefan moved the course from his display to his autopilot, then turned to the sensor controls. Even with the unreliable hardware on the Cavalier, if there were pirates hiding in there, he was about to know it.

2952-10-30 – Tales from the Service: The Beauty of the Nebula 


Stefan Giunta swept his Cavalier’s directional sensor cluster across the thick mass of nebula gasses as he and Clemens circled around it. Based on the strange readings he was getting, the cloud had to have a high phased matter concentration, but he lacked the equipment to determine quite what kind. Flying through a phased-matter soup would put a lot of wear and tear on their rigs, but compared to the damage it could do to their mothership, they would be expected to take that risk. 

Beyond that, of course, it was nearly impossible to get any clear picture of the inside of the cloud. There was some chaotic radar reflection from some angles, but no infrared readings, nothing on gravimetrics, and nothing on the visible light scopes. 

“Think maybe there’s some debris in there, Giunta?” Clemens asked. 

“Could be.” Stefan panned the directional array back and forth, looking at the raw-data readout to try to get some better sense of what he was looking at, since the modeling computer had spat a series of errors and given up on the problem several minutes beforehand. “I think it’s all contiguous, but I can't get a good picture of the structure.” 

“Denser sub-layer of gas?” 

“Don’t think so.” Stefan fiddled with the frequency settings on his radio emitter. “The radar profile has hard edges from some angles.” 

“Let’s just call it in as a possible pirate harbor.” Clemens sighed. “The skipper will either have us light it up or route us around, and either way it won’t be a problem anymore.” 

“That’s probably safest.” Stefan knew only too well that Brushfire pirates did love to build forward bases in outriding clouds of the nebula, making it easier to raid nearby systems and get back into hiding, without leaving an easy trail back to the main hideout deeper in. “But I think we should get a visual.” 

“Bad idea.” Clemens’s voice had gone from lackadaisical to sharp in an instant. “Our rigs will be in maintenance for a week while the techs figure out what that cloud has done to them. And Commander Jansson will have us scrubbing deck plating and recycler tanks the whole time for risking a couple of brand-new Cavaliers just to satisfy our curiosity.” 

“No sense for us both to go in, then.” Stefan disengaged his autopilot and put his hands back on the stick. “Continue your orbit. I’ll catch you on the other side.” 

Clemens’s sigh was cut off by the other pilot muting the comms channel, probably in order to call in the uncertain sighting as a possible pirate installation. Stefan chose a course across the slightly narrowed middle of the cloud, then accelerated to a speed that would take him through in about two minutes and pointed all of his sensors forward. Running right into some object was incredibly unlikely, because even at the thickest part the cloud’s gasses would not reduce his visibility below a dozen kilometers, but he was interested in surviving this gamble, even if it did mean scrubbing recycler tanks. On the off-chance there was something to see, he’d be the one to see it. He’d heard stories of strange things people thought they’d seen in the Brushfire Nebula, and thought most of them just spacers’ tall tales, but perhaps today he’d have a story of his own. 

A few moments later, Stefan’s Cavalier entered the outer part of the gas cloud. There was no sudden transition from open space to misty pink and grey, only a gradual transition from the usual infinite crowding of background stars, to a black sky with fewer and fewer stars, then to no stars at all except the hazy orb of the putative local primary. Only when he was deep into the gas did the Cavalier’s lights start to light up the colors and striations that had been visible from a distance.  

“Still got you on sensors, Giunta.” Clemens had apparently gotten over his distaste for the idea, probably because he would get to be the one to tell Janssen “I told him so” if things went wrong. “See anything?” 

“Nothing yet.” Stefan gave his rig some reverse thrust, further extending his time inside the cloud. “Visibility is about fifteen or twenty klicks.” 

“You’ll be coming up on the largest area of radar artifacts in about ten seconds... Make that twelve.” 

Stefan put hi counted down in his head as his craft hurtled through the darkness. What was he expecting to see? Pirates building a new outpost? The shattered wreck of a hauler which had blundered into exotic phased matter and had its reactor go critical? Some strange nightmare shape uncoiling in the gloom like the cantina tall tales? 

The Cavalier’s lights glinted on something ahead. Stefan leaned forward against his restraints and stared hard, even though he would have plenty of time to review the recordings from all his cameras later. Whatever it was, it reflected the lights back into his eyes as it gently tumbled through the nebula pocket, but he got a glimpse of a jagged but somehow regular profile. 

In an instant, he was past the object, but just as quickly another one, this one far larger but obviously of the same kind, loomed up on the starboard side, each of its pillar-like protrusions as long as a space station’s docking gantry, each a different thickness, and each faceted like it was cut by a jeweler with hands the size of moons. 

“Woah.” Stefan made a few small corrections to his course. What he was looking at was so beautiful it could only be natural formations, but he hadn’t the faintest idea how such things could form out here. “No pirates, Clemens.” He paused to appreciate a smaller object, about the size of his Cavalier, that was particularly intricately formed. “Just some of the prettiest rocks you’ll ever see.”  


The position of this anomalous formation is, obviously, withheld, presumably to protect the objects from tampering until a Hegemony scientific expedition can study them in greater detail. Unfortunately, no images are provided with this account; most likely the intelligence officer aboard Flit Diver put them under seal to reduce the chances of someone guessing the location of the anomaly. 

I will spare you all Mr. Giunta’s longer description of the objects; it would nearly double the length of this feed item. He seems to regard seeing them as a life-changing event, though he is certain they are natural crystalline minerals.