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2003 Atlantic Trade Center Incident
"The ASC really fucked up that time. Do you how many drinks you have to spike and brownies you need to inject with memory-erasing cocaine to make an entire city forget one of the tallest towers just fucking moved?! I'll tell you what; a metric fuckton!"
Alex Parsé commenting on the 2003 ATC Incident.
The 2003 ATC Incident refers to an incident when agents of the American Security Compound incorrectly performed a teleportation ritual inside the north tower (ATC1) of the Atlantic Trade Center Complex, causing the entire tower to be relocated 2700 feet westward; directly into the Hudson River. The United Deep State Nations took it upon themselves to resolve the issue, and eventually managed to re-teleport ATC1 back to its original location before the end of the day. After the incident, the UDSN forced the ASC to compensate them for 'cleaning up their mess' by paying a sum of 50 million dollars to cover the costs of the coverup operation the UDSN had executed.
Incident
A photo of the ATC, with the ASC owned space highlighted in red.
ASC Interest
In early 1999, Congress passed a law stating that all asbestos in office buildings are mandated to be removed before 2013. In August of 2002, the owner of the Atlantic Trade Center Complex stated that the asbestos removal of the buildings will begin. A month later, maintenance began in ATC buildings 4, 5, and 6. The asbestos removal took until December, and then maintenance began in ATC1 to remove all the asbestos.
At this time, the American Security Compound was interested in the asbestos removal of ATC1 as the ASC wanted to experiment with deific rituals in the hopes that they could be useful to the ASC´s operations. The ASC rented several spaces inside the building, specifically the northeastern quadrant of ATC1, between floors 78 and 87 — largely because palindromic numbers are believed to be of religious significance — on an unconfirmed date in May. Throughout January and February, agents of the ASC prepared for the rituals, installing mirrors at the windows to darken the interior and prevent anyone from looking inside. To create a more open ritual space, the floors and ceilings between floors 78-79, 80-81, 82-83, 84-85, and 86-87 were demolished, turning the nine floors into five. The five new chambers were labelled according to the Greek alphabet bottom up, namely Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. The doors that would now lead to a sudden drop — the doors on floors 79, 81, 83, 85, and 87 — were firmly welded shut. All walls and remaining doors were thickened and had soundproofing installed. At the request of ASC agents, air conditioning was also installed, as the rooms would get hot due to body heat accumulating inside. The location was designated as a site and nicknamed TWIN after the Twin Towers.
ASC Rituals
The ASC had determined that no large-scale rituals were to take place in TWIN, as it was deemed that it was too risky to perform potentially destructive rituals in a metropolitan area. Over the course of March and April, the ASC instructed their agents to perform several experimental test rituals like object summoning and object relocation. It was deemed these kinds of rituals would benefit the ASC, as these would eliminate the need for large-scale logistics and harvesting of resources. Several relocation tests would take place, transporting the objects between the different chambers of site TWIN. On July 20th, agents in Site TWIN managed to ritually relocate a copy machine from chamber Alpha to the ASC headquarters 206 miles away. The copy machine arrived in working order, and no faults had been found.
On July 24th, a 'targeted relocation ritual' was performed. A Targeted Relocation Ritual (TRR) is a ritual that involves targeting a specific resource within a specific area and relocating it to another place. A large crate filled with various office supplies such as printing paper, pens, staplers, calculators, rulers, computer mouses, and sticky notes was placed in chamber Epsilon. The box was surrounded with tiny metallic devices called HRC Pods (Hidden Ritual Candle Pods) — tiny objects that can be distributed in a public space as an innocuous object like a pen or cigarrete, while containing a lit ritualistic candle which can be used in rituals — . Using HRC pods, ASC agents were able to link the box in chamber Epsilon to the ritual site itself in chamber Gamma. The goal was to extract specific materials out of the box, while keeping the others in. This would imitate the asbestos removal inside the walls of ATC1.
The ritual would be executed at 7:04 PM on July 24th, with the printing paper and pens as targets, a ritual site in chamber Gamma as a throughpoint for the transportation of the target, and a remote location in the west of Long Island as the destination of the ritual. The ritual was performed over the course of seven minutes, and four minutes after the ritual ended, confirmation arrived that the targeted objects had arrived at the destination in an undamaged state. As such, the ritual was considered a success.
Incident ritual
The final ritual would take place on August 14th, which would be the asbestos removal ritual. This would prove to the ASC's upper board that TRRs could be reliably used for the instant transportation of large objects, saving costs in labor, gasoline, jet fuel, and maintenance. The ASC had the entirety of ATC1 closed that day under the guise of "building-wide maintenance" and claimed that "potential release of asbestos during the removal could harm office-goers". ASC Agents placed HRC pods throughout the building, near locations where asbestos was inside the building's structure. The target would be the asbestos inside the walls of ATC1, the throughpoint as a ritual site in chamber Beta, and the destination as the middle of the Hudson river (40°42'44.4"N 74°01'26.3"W).
The ritual was started at 4:08;44 PM, and would last about ten minutes. This is the point where things went wrong. One of the ASC agents had miscalculated the amount of Aberrant required to weigh down the CR Field enough to commence ontokinesis in a way that led to the agents estimating far too much Aberrant to commence the ritual. None of them had suspected anything to be wrong with the incorrectly calculated amount of required Aberrant, as no rituals of this size had been performed prior, meaning everyone saw the total and presumed it to be legitimate. It was also due to the fact that Pararealistics within the ASC was still poorly understood and that the ASC's Division of Pararealistic Science and Field Research (DPSFR) was still underfunded at the time.
Due to the overestimated amount of Aberrant calculated, when the ritual reached its apex, the CR Field weakened around the entirety of the ATC1 tower, instead of just around the asbestos. As a result, the entire tower was sliced off of its foundation and instantly relocated to the intended destination, plopping the 1368 feet tall tower in the middle of the Hudson river. The tower remained structurally sound, with no major damage made to the tower. The ASC agents, quote, "knew that we fucked something up, because we felt the entire damn building shake and drop a few feet", due to the fact that the base of ATC1 was built a few feet above sea level and dropped before hitting the riverbed.
USDN Incident Handling
The United Deep State Nations caught wind of the incident 48 seconds after ATC1 was unceremoniously dropped into the middle of the Hudson river. A UDSN Abroad Monitoring Agent (AMA) staying in ATC3 Marriot Hotel immediately noticed the sudden disappearance and relocation of ATC1 from his hotel room and immediately phoned the Office Center, describing what just happened. In order to prevent mass media coverage of the incident, UDSN operatives shut down electricity in the entire Hudson Metropolitan Area. The shutdown unintentionally spread to a larger area than intended, also blacking out the states of Massachussets, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Superior, and the Canadian province of Ontario. The blackout has since been dubbed the Northeast Blackout of 2003.
The blackout resulted in media corporations being unable to broadcast the event, however various people still recorded the incident on personal camcorders. The United Deep State Nations Operations Wing of Pararealistics (UDSN-PARA) had a team of Abroad Pararealistics Specialists (APO) located in Norwalk, Connecticut, UDSN Site 21. They were immediately dispatched to lower Manhattan to find a way to undo the ASC's snafu. They arrived after roughly forty minutes, at 4:49;23 PM. The immediate problem was that ATC1 was now 1700 feet away from the nearest shore. The team seized a boat docked at North Cove Marina and used it to ferry themselves over to ATC1, now in the middle of the Hudson river. The team encountered the ASC team in the lobby of the building, and the ASC team briefly explained what they just did to the UDSN team. Reportedly, the first words spoken after they had finished explaining was "Of course you did."
A map of the non-euclidean space of chamber Delta of the ATC Anomalous Zone.
The UDSN-PARA team was — just like the ASC DPSFR was — grossly underfunded at the time. The specialists had a vague knowledge of pararealistics, but not wholly. Despite this, the UDSN-PARA as a whole was more advanced in pararealistic research, such as the initiation of a relocation ritual that did not require a marked destination for the target object. The UDSN-PARA team asked the ASC team what measurements they used and then proceeded to enter the building. Due to the absence of electricity in the building, the team had to walk up the stairs all the way up to floor 80, where chamber Beta was.
Upon entering chamber Beta, they immediately noticed the absence of the supposed ritual site. More alarmingly was the now constantly shifting non-euclidean nature of the chamber. The chamber was now an impossibly expansive labyrinth of endlessly shifting corridors and rooms, stretching beyond what was spatially possibly for the design of the Atlantic Trade Center. Immediately, one of the specialists grabbed a fire extinguisher and used it as a way to mark a path through the shifting interior of chamber Beta. After ten minutes of wandering around the space, the specialists noted that the space was finite, but indeed shifting, and still far beyond the boundaries of what was supposed to be the original building. At roughly 5:01;55 PM, one of the specialists found the original ritual site between the shifting walls.
Aftermath
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