Society for the Imposition of Alternative Cosmologies
The origins of Society for the Imposition of Alternative Cosmologies (SIAC) are not so much hidden as they are not taken seriously. SIAC is widely – for given values of widely – known to have been created as a sort of allergic academic reaction to the Michelson-Morley experiment. There were a number of physicists who refused to accept at first that the luminiferous aether did not actually exist; and barely enough of them went mad during the horrors of World War I to sustain a crackpot group. Essentially, they decided that if the laws of physics did not support the concept of a substance that allowed light to propagate through it, then the laws of physics would have to be changed.
The Society has spent its existence since then attempting to come up with a set of physical laws that would allow for their favorite crackpot scientific theories, while at the same time still permitting things like gravity and entropy and the universe not suddenly imploding into a sullen mass of subatomic particles. Coming up with that theory is Step One. Step Two is actually rewriting the physical laws of the Universe… and there’s probably a Step Three, but nobody reputable ever sticks around for that long.
If you’re wondering how a group like that gets funded, they largely don’t: SIAC is self-financed by its members. Said members are generally college graduates, usually with bachelor degrees in mathematics or various hard sciences; but SIAC does not attract academics. Still, SIAC does not seem to lack for money, although its requirements are modest. A website, a mailing list, and an annual convention seem to be the extent of SIAC’s activities: it doesn’t even self-publish papers.
So why should anybody care? Well, probably because five of its most ‘prominent’ members have been assassinated in the last four weeks, in a sufficiently professional manner that nobody realized that the targets were assassinated until the fifth death. And why are they being killed? …Well, that’s a very interesting question, isn’t it? No doubt the party’s supervisors are quite keen to have this mystery cleared up.
Perhaps the assassins wish to prevent a Tlon/Uqbar event.