Tag: adventure

Kozlov’s Endemic Pattern-Layering Syndrome – Google Docs

Kozlov’s Endemic Pattern-Layering Syndrome

(Blame this.)

This unique disease was named after Sergei Kozlov, a minor bureaucratic official working at Naryan-Mar during the Khrushchev regime.  On December 16, 1960 Comrade Kozlov was admitted to a state facility for observation after it was discovered that the pattern on his pajamas had spread to his wrists and ankles – and that removing his pajamas revealed that the same pattern had colonized the rest of his body, albeit at a much slower rate. Over the next four months the condition was studied, meticulously: Koslov’s Pattern spread until it covered the entire body, then began imposing itself on the hospital bed and floor.   Throughout Kozlov continually complained of mild headaches, nervous irritation, and shadow sensations every time somebody touched or otherwise interacted with the Pattern-infected areas.

In April of 1961 two members of the medical team studying Kozlov also came down with his Syndrome, despite the best quarantine protocols known at the time (the hospital had long since been evacuated, with the patients and the staff either sequestered onsite, or relocated to Ilimsk).  All three patients subsequently reported being hyper-aware (and accurately so) of each other’s positions and opinions at all times, as well as the ability to perceive ‘Pattern-Seeds’ supposedly growing in all human brains.  When one patient (surviving records are unclear which) proved the existence of Pattern-Seeds by forcibly infecting a researcher with Kozlov’s Syndrome — at a short distance, and through two layers of glass — offsite Soviet officials responded by remotely flooding the hospital area with yperite, demolishing the entire block with earthmoving equipment and captured POWs, loading the rubble, equipment, and POWs onto a series of cargo containers usually used for transporting plutonium, transporting the containers via ship to Sukhoy-Nos, portaging the ship to the inland test center there, and then detonating the RDS-220 hydrogen bomb directly overhead.

No further outbreaks of Kozlov’s Syndrome have since been reported.  However, in 1985 a KGB internal directive flat-out forbade all personnel from drinking water from the Ust-Ilimsk Reservoir, under any circumstances whatsoever.  The originator of this directive remains classified to this day. As is this entire dossier, really: it only got revealed to the world because it had been misfiled and included into another set of documents that got swept up in the Mitrokhin Archives.  And at that, the person who grabbed it believed that he was duplicating what was essentially disinformation against… somebody?  To be fair, it probably is.

Check it out anyway, of course.