Blame this.
Multi-User (Psychic) Positional Exogene Tracker
The concept behind the MU(P)PET is simple: if you can see it, you can hit it; if you can hit it, you can kill it; and if you see it, it maybe can see YOU, too. So if you’re going to psychically scan the local dimension-space for things that might want to pop in and start eating humanity’s brains, you probably want to have a breaker switch put into place. That’s what the MU(P)PET does: something attacks you with a psychic blast while you’re using one, the MU(P)PET takes the blast and you drop out of the link with just a blinding headache, instead of an imploded cerebellum. The Multi-User part reflects the fact that you don’t have to be linked to a specific MU(P)PET; after all, they’re just puppets, right?
MU(P)PETs are new and old at the same time. You see, psychic adepts have been using simulacrums ever since we as a species gained enough moral awareness to realize that simply using another person’s mind as a fuse was hideously unethical – but it wasn’t until the late 20th Century that using puppets as failsafes really started to take off. It was easy enough to make puppets that looked enough like humans to work. Getting the voices down was much trickier, but plausible. But trying to get a part of the population to believe that the simulacrums were real? Nobody even really tried. But, hey: turns out that kids are the batteries that kick the engines of belief into overdrive. …Which is why a portion of the Pentagon’s ‘black’ budget goes towards public broadcasting.
And before you ask: of course this means that Jim’s not dead. He’s just out there fighting a very secret, and very quiet, war…