Post by Catsmate on Feb 1, 2021 21:06:25 GMT
The Archivist.
The situation started, as so often these days, on a web forum. Except this one wasn’t dedicated to conspiracy theories or politics (or worse, their intersection) or sexual antics or even arguments between fans of a cancelled television series.
It was dedicated to the far more wholesome, if still illegal, matter of pirating television and films. To be exact it started with forum post 32793, the second post by a person with the handle of ‘The Archivist’
He1 posted a series on links to files on a popular file sharing site that claimed to be missing episodes of the old (and cult) science fiction television series ‘Professor X’2. But the episodes s/he claimed to be posting were ‘missing’ ones.
Except they weren’t.
They were in fact the missing five episodes of “The Tombs of the Ladeks”, which hadn’t been seen in fifty years. Extremely well digitised and utterly intact.
For a while the oddity was limited to the forum, but soon the links were reposted elsewhere (mainly on fora dedicated to the various shows) and the files were uploaded elsewhere.
The Archivist posted a seemingly random and eclectic collection of material; British, Australian, Irish and American sources predominated and people were reintroduced to shows long forgotten, like Certain Women, Tolka Row the 1952 version of Nightshade!, James Burke's coverage of the moon landings and the Paul Temple crime dramas.
Soon the Powers That Be noticed. Copyright holders were annoyed, even more so than the usual piracy; they hadn’t had a chance to make money off the materials being shared. This led to a lively discussion, which spread the story even further, on the legal status of the copyright on a work that you’d created and them lost or destroyed. This soon vranched out into a discussion of the merits of copyright as a concept and the minutiae of IP law before descending into abusive exchanges.
Meanwhile The Archivist continued to upload files, lots of them. Television series, a few “lost” films and some radioplays and broadcasts. He ignored requests for information, his sources and (generally) for specific material; though he seemed happy to upload "birthday" material for polite posters.
Demands by forum moderators for information were likewise refused, and threats of bans also ignored.
For a while the phenomenon was a minor internet sensation, but generally ignored in the real world. Then a certain individual, part of UNIT's 'Misfit Mob'3 noticed something4. She's been downloading some Churchill speeches for a cousin's school project and listened to one of them ("We shall shall fight on the beaches") to check the quality, and noticed that the background sounds of the House of Commons were audible on the excellent recording.
But that, as an AV geek, she knew was impossible. The speech wasn't recorded at the time, but only in 19496.
So where did the recording come from? Was it a really clever fake?
Now most people would dismiss the recording as a fake; but most people don't work for a clandestine global organisation dedicated to protecting the Earth from alien threats. Most people don't work daily with a collection of professional paranoids and jigsaw assemblers who make cryptic crossword enthusiasts look well balanced.
Most people don't know time travel is real
So she, slightly reluctantly, abandoned her weekend plans and worked very hard looking at other materials7.
She found several more impossibilities; media that wasn't just lost but couldn't reasonably be expected to have survived at all. Plus there was the probability analysis; while prints of While Nobody Ordered Love, Farewell Performance, Jail Birds of Paradise and Squadron Leader X8 might have survived, how could one person have found or acquired them all, as well as the variety of television material? Some of which simply wasn't recorded at all, but broadcast live.
Something weird was going on.
By the early hours of Monday morning she had a detailed, annotated and analysed report for her boss, who'd be in at 7AM sharp, as always. Time for sleep and a shower.
Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?
1. It's assumed that anyone on the internet is male unless proved otherwise....
2. A British television science-fiction serial that started broadcasting in 1963 and continues today.
3. Every organisation has it's oddballs and needs somewhere to dump them. UNIT has far more than it's share of those special individuals5 and that's where they're dropped.
4. Who was, she assured her superiors, monitoring the murkier parts of the internet for suspicious activity and not preparing for a long weekend binge of The Freewheelers and Ace of Wands.
5. The flaky psychic with unreliable telepathy. The acerbic, wheelchair bound scientist. The investigator who can see patterns no-one else can (even when they're not there). The soldier with no sense of humour and a preference for force as the first, second and third options. The junior officer who annoyed her superiors and got stuck running this mob. The in-over-his-head geek student who Saw Too Much and got conscripted. The timeworn cynic who remembers the Doctor's exile. The PTSD case who had to kill her comrades to save the planet. The practical joker who takes nothing seriously, for a good reason. The alien with a dodgy shimmer who's not quite trusted fully. The lab tech who's unflagging cheerfulness induces homicidal urges.
6. This is, BTW, completely true. While Churchill delivered the speech in parliament he did not, as with his other famous speeches, later repeat it on the radio from a BBC studio.It was only during the Wilderness Years that it was finally recorded.
7. The near petabyte of downloaded data was, of course, purely for research purposes.
8. Actual lost films.
The situation started, as so often these days, on a web forum. Except this one wasn’t dedicated to conspiracy theories or politics (or worse, their intersection) or sexual antics or even arguments between fans of a cancelled television series.
It was dedicated to the far more wholesome, if still illegal, matter of pirating television and films. To be exact it started with forum post 32793, the second post by a person with the handle of ‘The Archivist’
- His(?) first post was a test of message formatting.
He1 posted a series on links to files on a popular file sharing site that claimed to be missing episodes of the old (and cult) science fiction television series ‘Professor X’2. But the episodes s/he claimed to be posting were ‘missing’ ones.
- Back in the 1960s and 70s the videotape used to record television broadcasts, whether live for broadcast or pre-recorded, was expensive and hence if a programme wasn’t expected to be needed again the tape was erased and reused, a process called 'wiping'. So dozens of episodes of ‘Professor X’ and dozens of other programmes were lost.
Except they weren’t.
They were in fact the missing five episodes of “The Tombs of the Ladeks”, which hadn’t been seen in fifty years. Extremely well digitised and utterly intact.
For a while the oddity was limited to the forum, but soon the links were reposted elsewhere (mainly on fora dedicated to the various shows) and the files were uploaded elsewhere.
The Archivist posted a seemingly random and eclectic collection of material; British, Australian, Irish and American sources predominated and people were reintroduced to shows long forgotten, like Certain Women, Tolka Row the 1952 version of Nightshade!, James Burke's coverage of the moon landings and the Paul Temple crime dramas.
Soon the Powers That Be noticed. Copyright holders were annoyed, even more so than the usual piracy; they hadn’t had a chance to make money off the materials being shared. This led to a lively discussion, which spread the story even further, on the legal status of the copyright on a work that you’d created and them lost or destroyed. This soon vranched out into a discussion of the merits of copyright as a concept and the minutiae of IP law before descending into abusive exchanges.
Meanwhile The Archivist continued to upload files, lots of them. Television series, a few “lost” films and some radioplays and broadcasts. He ignored requests for information, his sources and (generally) for specific material; though he seemed happy to upload "birthday" material for polite posters.
Demands by forum moderators for information were likewise refused, and threats of bans also ignored.
For a while the phenomenon was a minor internet sensation, but generally ignored in the real world. Then a certain individual, part of UNIT's 'Misfit Mob'3 noticed something4. She's been downloading some Churchill speeches for a cousin's school project and listened to one of them ("We shall shall fight on the beaches") to check the quality, and noticed that the background sounds of the House of Commons were audible on the excellent recording.
But that, as an AV geek, she knew was impossible. The speech wasn't recorded at the time, but only in 19496.
So where did the recording come from? Was it a really clever fake?
Now most people would dismiss the recording as a fake; but most people don't work for a clandestine global organisation dedicated to protecting the Earth from alien threats. Most people don't work daily with a collection of professional paranoids and jigsaw assemblers who make cryptic crossword enthusiasts look well balanced.
Most people don't know time travel is real
So she, slightly reluctantly, abandoned her weekend plans and worked very hard looking at other materials7.
She found several more impossibilities; media that wasn't just lost but couldn't reasonably be expected to have survived at all. Plus there was the probability analysis; while prints of While Nobody Ordered Love, Farewell Performance, Jail Birds of Paradise and Squadron Leader X8 might have survived, how could one person have found or acquired them all, as well as the variety of television material? Some of which simply wasn't recorded at all, but broadcast live.
Something weird was going on.
By the early hours of Monday morning she had a detailed, annotated and analysed report for her boss, who'd be in at 7AM sharp, as always. Time for sleep and a shower.
Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?
1. It's assumed that anyone on the internet is male unless proved otherwise....
2. A British television science-fiction serial that started broadcasting in 1963 and continues today.
3. Every organisation has it's oddballs and needs somewhere to dump them. UNIT has far more than it's share of those special individuals5 and that's where they're dropped.
4. Who was, she assured her superiors, monitoring the murkier parts of the internet for suspicious activity and not preparing for a long weekend binge of The Freewheelers and Ace of Wands.
5. The flaky psychic with unreliable telepathy. The acerbic, wheelchair bound scientist. The investigator who can see patterns no-one else can (even when they're not there). The soldier with no sense of humour and a preference for force as the first, second and third options. The junior officer who annoyed her superiors and got stuck running this mob. The in-over-his-head geek student who Saw Too Much and got conscripted. The timeworn cynic who remembers the Doctor's exile. The PTSD case who had to kill her comrades to save the planet. The practical joker who takes nothing seriously, for a good reason. The alien with a dodgy shimmer who's not quite trusted fully. The lab tech who's unflagging cheerfulness induces homicidal urges.
6. This is, BTW, completely true. While Churchill delivered the speech in parliament he did not, as with his other famous speeches, later repeat it on the radio from a BBC studio.It was only during the Wilderness Years that it was finally recorded.
7. The near petabyte of downloaded data was, of course, purely for research purposes.
8. Actual lost films.