Weather Run

Weather Run, also known by the military codename "Project Storm", was a secret joint project between Küiser Laboratories and the United States Government, intended to control the impending Climate Crisis via means of ionospheric manipulation with an added bonus of being able to be weaponised if required during wartime situations. Küiser’s weather control towers were deployed at classified sites throughout American states, until around 2030, when the project was shut down and the towers handed over to FEMA; over time, they fell into disrepair due to lack of funding, allowing their automatic control systems to slowly malfunction and cause the weather in certain regions to stay in a permanent state of rain. The name "Weather Run" is a rearrangement of the term for weather control, "running the weather".

Workings

Components

Weather Run facilities had multiple components: the tower, which housed a large electromagnetic coil known as the resonator; the support building on which the tower stood on, which housed capacitors and monitoring equipment; and the sub-basement, which contained step-up transformers, as well as a small FLiBe molten-salt reactor and a RTG for emergency backup power.

Also next to but separate from the main mechanical buildings were small underground facilities known as Project Storm Command Bunkers (PSCBs). The true original purpose of these bunkers is unknown, but they are believed to have been related to the US military's potential tactical uses for the towers. After the project was terminated, all equipment was removed from the bunkers and the access hatches were welded shut.

Some of these bunkers also were seemingly connected to a sort of subsurface rapid transit network using pneumatic tubes. Remnants of this network have been encountered multiple times by urban explorers, often completely collapsed.

Power Levels

Weather Run towers could operate at several different power levels, which would produce increasingly more severe weather effects.

• Power Level 1: Overcast sky, but no rain.
• Power Level 2: Light rain. Darker sky.
• Power Level 3: Heavy rain. Darker sky.
• Power Level 4: Thunderstorm.
• Power Level 5: Severe thunderstorm.
• Power Level X-1: Military use. Extreme thunderstorm. Planes unable to fly above cloud layer.
• Power Level X-2: Military use. Extreme thunderstorm. Potential cyclone formation.
• Power Level Z: Maximum power. Reality distortion may occur due to vacuum decay.

Power levels X-1 and X-2 were restricted for military use only; they were only possible to enable from consoles at Project Storm Command Bunkers (PSCBs), since decommissioned. Power Level Z was a special capability - the hardware required to activate it was not present in any production Weather Run site; the use of this power level for any significant amount of time would result in eventual meltdown of the tower's on-site reactor.

History

Inception

The science of W.R. was realised some time after 2011, when Küiser acquired the Wardenclyffe estate from the Brookhaven Town Historical Trust. Dr. Elias Montgomery, the project lead at the time, became interested in the vast underground network of conductors below the installation.

After conducting proton-beam scans of the site, Montgomery realised the underground component of the Wardenclyffe tower was much larger than initially anticipated, extending hundreds of metres down into the bedrock. According to a witness, Küiser managed to break through into a sort of secondary underground facility.

Whatever was in that facility, it was enough for Dr. Montgomery to commit serious resources towards restoring the tower, going as far as borrowing period-correct machinery from nearby museums. Ultimately, he realised that while Tesla was indeed wrong about the possibility of wireless power transmission - if the right arrangement of conductors was made, a large enough electromagnetic pulse could begin to agitate atoms in cloud layers.

Deployment

After this breakthrough, security on the site was increased threefold and Weather Run was started as an official project. A few years later, Küiser was contracted by the US military to deploy the first of their prototype weather control towers across America, both for tactical purposes and to theoretically allow FEMA to prevent disasters.

In 2018, the progression of WKC-backed forces towards New York meant Küiser would lose control of the Wardenclyffe site. The Weather Run research team, working with Küiser Internal Security and the US Military, destroyed the site with a nuclear warhead before it was overrun.

End

In 2030, congressional approval was given for the US DoD to pull their funding from the Weather Run project due to the ineffectiveness of the technology and questions on Küiser's ongoing stability. The towers were transferred to FEMA in the hopes they might have proven useful in extreme weather events.

However, FEMA did not possess the expertise to operate the towers nor the documentation required to maintain them, which resulted in them gradually falling into deeper states of disrepair as the years went by. Combined with the collapse of Küiser in 2037, their fates were all but sealed as a remnant of a weather control technology once thought revolutionary.