Sunil Cariappa

Sunil Nadikerianda Cariappa (born June 2nd 2001) is an Indo-Canadian public health physician, data scientist, and climate epidemiologist who is credited with the discovery of Cariappa-Muren disease (CMD) along with Connie Muren.

Born in Dharwad, Cariappa’s family moved to Toronto in 2004. He obtained a degree in Epidemiology from the University of Ottawa in 2026 and started working as a research analyst for the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) in 2028.

In 2038, Cariappa first identified piscine transmissible amyloidotic encephalopathy (PTAE) after his cat became infected, which led to the discovery of CMD in 2039. He played a pivotal role in the international response to the CMD pandemic and the later description of CMD phobia.

Cariappa’s experience with the CMD pandemic and the response to it, which he summarised in a widely quoted report, led to his cooperation with Zhupao on the development of G6. In 2040, Cariappa distanced himself from the project, believing that it had drifted too far from its original design goals.

After disappearing from the public eye, Cariappa founded Nuance in 2045. He currently serves as the company’s CTO, though he has announced his intention to retire in 2051.

On October 6th 2049, Cariappa was reported missing during a visit to India, with his whereabouts unaccounted for since September 30th 2049. On October 9th 2049, Cariappa published a posthumous message from Muren that implicated Spencer Hagen in the abuse of G6 for the purposes of neurosurveillance.

Early life and educationPermalink

Sunil Cariappa was born on June 2nd 2001 in Dharwad, India. He is the third child in a family of two sons and two daughters born to Nadikerianda Poovayya Cariappa, a consultant for the Canada-India Business Council (C-IBC), and Vijayamma Jayashree.

Cariappa’s parents met when they were both disciples of Sathya Sai Baba. They fled his cult together in 1994 and openly spoke out against him. In 2004, they left India and moved to Toronto, Canada after suffering a decade of prosecution and harassment due to Sai Baba’s connections with government officials and state police.

Cariappa initially wanted to become a doctor, but became fascinated with epidemiology after seeing Contagion. His mother claims he watched the film “once or twice a day for a month.” In 2019, Cariappa was accepted to McGill University on an entrance scholarship and completed his undergraduate degree as a Doctor of Medicine. In 2026, he graduated as a Master of Science in Epidemiology at the University of Ottawa.

CareerPermalink

From 2026 to 2027, Cariappa served as a representative on the Committee on Health Policy and Economics of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA). In March 2028, Cariappa began to work as a research analyst for the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), where he contributed significantly to the field of climate epidemiology.

In 2033, Cariappa became acting Head of Knowledge Development and Research for the PHAC and held the temporary position for eight months, after which it was made official. In this capacity, Cariappa led two working groups, supervised three research analysts, issued correspondence on matters related to community-associated infections, and chaired the planning committee for a symposium on waterborne diseases in Quebec City.

In 2036, Cariappa worked with the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the investigation of a clustered outbreak of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM) in several states and former territories of the United States (US). ^[1]CDC officers had attributed the outbreak’s higher rate of infection to increased flooding and the continental super summer, but Cariappa’s research indicated that the outbreak was linked to water fleas infected with Pasteuria ramosa serving as a novel food source for Naegleria fowleri, the causative agent of PAM. ^[2]

Discovery of CMDPermalink

Index casePermalink

In October 2038, Cariappa’s cat, a 14-year-old Maltese named Captain Thunderpaw, began developing symptoms ranging from unusual aggression and excessive drooling to gait abnormalities and convulsions. A veterinarian diagnosed Captain Thunderpaw with ataxia, possibly due to an underlying neurological condition, but in spite of the prescribed medications, he died two weeks later. ^[3]

When looking into Captain Thunderpaw’s illness, Cariappa made use of the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) to look for any mention of similar cases. He found an upward trend in reports and descriptions of domestic cats exhibiting unusual behaviour followed by progressive immobility and death, which were variously diagnosed as Addison’s disease, epilepsy, hypoglycemia, and different types of ataxia.

Cariappa suspected an outbreak of food poisoning and coordinated a preliminary investigation, including a series of necropsies on recently deceased cats in Canada and the US. Over half of the necropsies revealed the presence of amyloids in the nervous tissue, a hallmark symptom of feline spongiform encephalopathy (FSE).

Cariappa was hesitant to confirm this diagnosis, as most reports of the cat deaths described a much faster progression of the clinical stage, and none of the FSE-positive samples displayed any spongiosis. When Cariappa determined that all of the deceased cats had been fed Lassgard tuna, he believed this line of tuna to be contaminated with a novel prion agent.

Shared discoveryPermalink

Fearing that the prion agent was spreading to people as well, Cariappa searched for any reports of atypical variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), eventually finding an article co-authored by Connie Muren and Gerhard Kobl-Thissen on the medical case of Deng Yixing. ^[4] Since the article specifically mentioned rapid neurodegeneration and a lack of spongiosis in Deng’s symptomatology, Cariappa reached out to Muren in November 2038 and suggested a link between the cat mortalities and Muren’s diagnosis of Deng.

Cariappa and Muren began to communicate over video calls so they could confirm their find before raising any alarm. While Muren had samples of Lassgard tuna delivered to the University of Düsseldorf for analysis, Cariappa worked out epidemiological models based on distribution figures of Lassgard tuna and established research into previous bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) epidemics.

By January 2039, Muren had determined that a significant proportion of brain samples gathered from Lassgard tuna showed advanced amyloidosis. Although there was some debate regarding its origin, Cariappa and Muren jointly described this amyloidosis as piscine transmissible amyloidotic encephalopathy (PTAE) and reported it to the Global Foodborne Infections Network (GFN).

WHO responsePermalink

Largely due to a disinformation campaign from Lassgard Bioteknik, the GFN limited its response by exploiting PTAE’s foodborne origin to convene an Outbreak Control Team (OCT) instead of starting an official investigation, which Cariappa described as “tantamount to inaction.”

Lassgard Bioteknik’s awareness of the report made Cariappa a target of abuse from William Lassgard, who questioned Cariappa’s scientific credentials and made baseless accusations of sexual abuse against his parents because of their past association with Sai Baba. On February 25th 2039, Cariappa suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of Lassgard’s abuse and was hospitalised.

After speaking with Muren, Cariappa consented to a medical colloid to help him with his recovery. He reportedly found the therapeutic effects so striking that he had an additional colloid configured to mitigate his anxiety. After joining Muren in Düsseldorf, Cariappa began to conduct surveys through GPHIN, which uncovered a number of additional cases with pathologies similar to that of Deng.

By July 2039, Muren had demonstrated that transgenic mice infected with brain material from Lassgard tuna could develop a clinical disease similar to vCJD. Cariappa and Muren prepared a report on the disease, which they described as acquired prionopathic neurodegeneration syndrome (APNS), and submitted it to the World Health Organisation (WHO). ^[5] This resulted in the declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), which significantly expanded the OCT’s scope.

In October 2039, the OCT was given access to a leaked data cache of internal Lassgard Bioteknik correspondence. After reviewing the files, Muren was able to conclusively determine that Lassgard tuna was contaminated with BSE-infected fish meal, which had been continuously used as a feed stock since the tuna’s first aquaculture cycle was started in 2031. Cariappa estimated that the outbreak of CMD would result in approximately three million cases worldwide.

On October 23rd 2039, World News Wire (WNW) began running a series of investigative articles that exposed Lassgard Bioteknik’s malpractice based on the data leak and the OCT’s work. When the WHO classified Cariappa-Muren disease (CMD) as a pandemic and issued a global alert on October 25th 2039, Cariappa experienced a sudden increase in media attention.

Description of CMD phobiaPermalink

In December 2039, Muren asked Cariappa to assume her liaison duties with the WHO’s Emergency Committee. Cariappa proceeded to coordinate with the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) to distribute information packets and medical colloids to physicians and hospitals in countries with reported cases of CMD. The information packets included instructions for logging all positive diagnoses with GOARN, allowing the OCT to gather more precise epidemiological data.

Cariappa found a discrepancy between the data being gathered by GOARN, which was trending towards three million positive CMD diagnoses, and his ongoing GPHIN surveys, which started climbing rapidly to a peak of 30 million cases. He initially attributed this discrepancy to the lack of official information coming out of China, which was refusing all cooperation with the WHO. ^[6] When the GPHIN numbers began to taper off on December 20th 2049, Cariappa was able to map a correlation with the increased availability of diagnostic colloids, which were considered to be the most reliable and accurate diagnosis method for CMD.

Cariappa attributed this correlation to a somatic symptom disorder (SSD) after a related GPHIN search suggested that people were excessively and unduly worried about being infected with CMD, experienced psychosomatic symptoms, and sought medical assistance. This pervasive anxiety was contaminating records of doctor’s visits and hospital admissions with false positives, which were subsequently retracted as the steady distribution of colloids allowed for more conclusive diagnoses.

After writing a report about the CMD-specific SSD, which would later become known as CMD phobia, Cariappa issued a recommendation for updated communication guidelines to the WHO’s Emergency Committee. The new guidelines advised health communicators to emphasise the low likelihood of contracting CMD and avoid the use of severe-sounding and loaded terms such as pandemic, infection, or spread.

In January 2040, Cariappa’s updated guidelines were rescinded by then-WHO Director-General Yang Jinglei, who believed that “softening the language surrounding CMD at a time when people need to be acutely aware of the disease’s long-term implications is premature and irresponsible.”

Dismissal from OCTPermalink

On January 10th 2040, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) accused Cariappa of intentionally misrepresenting CMD’s epidemiology figures as part of a conspiracy to avoid a mass panic. ^[7] The accusations, which came from an anonymous source claiming to be a member of the OCT, were based on Cariappa’s GPHIN surveys, which listed a total of 30 million cases of CMD while the officially released estimates were capped at three million.

The FAZ article was picked up by international media outlets with nearly all headlines highlighting the total of 30 million cases as genuine, which supported conspiracy theories that Cariappa and the WHO were downplaying the gravity of the CMD pandemic. Cariappa issued a clarification on January 17th 2040, stating that “the report mentioned in the article is part of early research into the psychological impact of CMD and has no bearing on the official epidemiology figures.” Yang followed up by correcting the public CMD infection count in line with Cariappa’s clarification, but continued to stress the importance of strict health and safety measures.

In the days following the publication of the FAZ article, GOARN noted a exponential rise in negative CMD diagnoses, which indicated that more people were consenting to a diagnostic colloid in order to allay concerns that they may have been infected. At the same time, online chatter related to CMD revealed an increase in discussions about colloids, with the prevailing impression that they played an instrumental role in bringing the CMD infection count down from 30 million to three million.

When colloids were labelled as “the cure for CMD,” Cariappa urged Yang to dispel this misconception, attributing it to the CMD-specific SSD he had described in December 2039. Yang responded by removing Cariappa from the OCT on January 27th 2040, telling him that he had lost the public credibility necessary to reflect the actions of the WHO. In her statement on Cariappa’s dismissal, Yang said that “the WHO’s response to the CMD pandemic requires a united front, not constant vacillating and second-guessing from within its own ranks.”

On February 17th 2040, Kobl-Thissen admitted to being the author of the FAZ article after he was publicly called out by Muren. Although he had never been a member of the OCT, Kobl-Thissen did have access to Cariappa’s workstation at the University of Düsseldorf. Subsequent to this, the FAZ retracted the article and Kobl-Thissen was let go from the university.

Chinese investigationPermalink

In February 2040, the University of Düsseldorf offered Cariappa a three-month scholar programme so that he could retain his access to the campus facilities and continue his work for the OCT in an unofficial capacity. Fearing that doing so would put Muren and other OCT members who supported him in a difficult position with the WHO, Cariappa declined the offer. On Muren’s recommendation, he spent the week of February 6th 2040 assisting her and Anse Daems with the editing of Refusing to Fold.

In March 2040, Cariappa was identified as one of the last persons to speak to Muren before her disappearance on March 4th 2040. He travelled to Berlin to cooperate with German authorities and launched a personal appeal for any leads in the case, which included crowdfunding efforts on behalf of FindConnie.

On March 11th 2040, Cariappa was contacted by Yang, who was engaged in negotiations with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to allow international authorities to assess the CMD pandemic in China. Muren had been part of the negotiations prior to her disappearance, but the CCP had withdrawn her invitation after her criticism of mìngyùn had gone viral in February 2040. Yang informed Cariappa that the CCP was prepared to extend him an invitation in Muren’s stead on the condition that he discontinued his support for FindConnie, which was accusing China of having a hand in Muren’s disappearance.

Based on the advice of Daems and his last conversation with Muren, Cariappa ended his crowdfunding efforts for FindConnie and accepted the CCP’s invitation. Cariappa started to assemble a field team comprised of interdisciplinary OCT members, but was rebuffed by Yang, who stipulated that the CCP’s invitation only included the two of them.

On March 21st 2040, Cariappa and Yang travelled to Beijing and met with officials from the National Health Commission (NHC). After sitting in on a conference organised by the CCP’s Politburo, Cariappa was assigned an office in the NHC building. He was immediately struck by the strict limitations imposed on whom he could speak to and what data he was allowed to review, an experience he later likened to “being held hostage.”

When Cariappa found out that the OCT was working with information that was incompatible with what he was sending out, he learned that his reports were being intercepted and altered by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS). Cariappa also noticed that his activities in China were being misrepresented by CCP officials, who framed his and Yang’s presence in China as part of the CCP’s development of mìngyùn and the distribution of implantable medical devices (IMDs) designed by Huawei.

At some point during his stay, Cariappa was contacted by Li Qiao Fan, a psychiatrist attached to the Chinese Society of Psychiatry (CSP). Li had noted an increase in patients suffering from anxiety and mental distress related to CMD, but her article on the condition had been censored by the NHC. ^[8] Worried that this had also flagged her for heightened surveillance, Li concealed her identity using CV dazzle, joined a group of campaigners along Cariappa’s route to the NHC building, and handed him a copy of her article concealed as a pamphlet.

Cariappa studied the article and found that it described aspects of the CMD-specific SSD he had reported in December 2039. He raised the issue with the NHC without mentioning Li’s involvement, stating that his own research had highlighted a possible SSD that he considered to be widespread in mainland China as well. When Cariappa made the mistake of using the term CMD phobia, which Li had coined in her article, NHC officials deduced that she had reached out to him. As a result, she was dismissed from the CSP and blocklisted by the CCP, which kept her under effective house arrest. Cariappa had his NHC access privileges reduced and was warned that any further discussion of CMD phobia would violate the terms of his invitation.

On March 30th 2040, Xu Shaoyong publicly vouched for Cariappa, stating that both the WHO and the CCP should “take [Cariappa’s] words more seriously instead of always hiding or twisting them,” and invited him to Zhupao’s headquarters in Shanghai. He agreed on the condition that Xu extend the same offer to Li, who accepted and travelled to Shanghai alongside Cariappa.

On April 3rd 2040, Cariappa and Li took part in a press event during which Xu accused the CCP of covering up its failings in addressing the CMD pandemic. ^[9] On April 12th 2040, the CCP authorised the NHC to cooperate fully with Cariappa and the WHO, which allowed the OCT to complete a range of spatial epidemiology studies.

The WHO declared the CMD pandemic contained after the OCT issued its official report to the NHC on April 19th 2040. The report included a widely quoted appendix with Cariappa’s personal observations on the WHO’s and the CCP’s handling of the pandemic. He concluded that the CCP’s initial censorship of CMD and refusal to cooperate with the WHO had created an information vacuum that promoted rumours and speculation, serving as a catalyst for the spread of CMD phobia. ^[10]

On April 26th 2040, Cariappa made provisions for Li, who had left China after participating in Zhupao’s press event, to head a research team at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland for the further study of CMD phobia.

Contribution to G6Permalink

First designPermalink

On May 1st 2040, Cariappa travelled to London City at Xu’s request and met with Spencer Hagen, who explained that Zhupao was in the final negotiating stages of a partnership with the CCP to overhaul China’s healthcare system. At the same time, the CCP was drafting a new cooperation strategy with the WHO to “strengthen the national healthcare system, ensure that quality health services are delivered to the people, and enrich China’s contribution to global health and biosurveillance.” ^[11]

Hagen proposed to combine both missions with Cariappa at the centre, suggesting that he was uniquely qualified to spearhead the data science and interoperability aspects of a biosurveillance network that would meet the concerns listed in his appendix. After reaching an agreement with the PHAC to officially represent Canada’s contribution to the cooperation strategy, Cariappa relocated to London City and joined the G6 design team.

On May 7th 2040, Zhupao organised a conference to unveil G6 as “a new WHO-endorsed standard for biosurveillance, health informatics, and IMDs,” with Xu naming Cariappa, Hagen, and Efua Amankwah-Crouse as the team leads of the project. ^[12] Cariappa participated in the conference via livestream and spoke about his vision for G6, explaining that “it would not be a top-down solution that can be dropped onto every crisis of public health. If G6 is to be a system that can be deployed in every situation, we will ensure that it is designed to capture and respect the nuances of each.” ^[13]

On May 10th 2040, the NHC provided the G6 design team with restricted login credentials to mìngyùn as part of a CCP mandate to emulate its software and artificial intelligence (AI) components. During the development of G6, Cariappa became closely involved with Amankwah-Crouse’s AI work. He was fascinated with the PACOTTI architecture, which he described as “elegant in its simplicity. It works not by attempting to mimic the complexity of the human brain, but by finding foundational mechanisms that drive the highest levels of human thought, resulting in a new grammar of intelligence, both artificial and biological.”

In September 2040, Cariappa joined Amankwah-Crouse, Hagen, and Xu to introduce G6 to an audience of officials from the CCP and the WHO, leading to a series of pilot programmes to test G6 in the Chinese provinces of Guangdong, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Zhejiang. Cariappa was invited to supervise the tests, but he felt uncomfortable with travelling to China and decided to coordinate with the PHAC for a G6 pilot programme in Canada.

Project walkoutPermalink

On September 19th 2040, Cariappa was contacted by Amankwah-Crouse, whose life-cycle assessment (LCA) study of the pilot programmes had indicated that G6’s differentiable neural computers (DNCs) were being trained on undisclosed data sets. When Cariappa made further inquiries, both his and Amankwah-Crouse’s login credentials were expired, locking them out of G6.

Cariappa reached out to Hagen, who claimed that he and Xu were being stonewalled as well. Cariappa later learned that the NHC officials who had sympathised with him during the time he spent in China were being carefully monitored, instructed to refuse any contact with him, and removed from office in some cases. To confirm Amankwah-Crouse’s discovery, Cariappa suggested the use of a security exploit that he was planning to patch out before his login expired.

Using the exploit to regain access to G6, Cariappa and Amankwah-Crouse found that its DNCs were being used to process close to 85 quintillion (10¹⁸) databases, all originating from worldwide public and private sources. The filenames showed references to data formats attributed to social media and data platforms, surveillance systems and companies, and financial institutions. Cariappa believed the CCP to be responsible and suggested they inform Xu, but Amankwah-Crouse was reluctant to contact him.

On September 28th 2040, Cariappa terminated his contract with Zhupao, stating that G6 “works as intended, but it is not being used as intended.” Contrary to popular belief, Cariappa was not involved with G6 being adopted outside of China, and has claimed no knowledge of the quantum neural network (QNN) retrofits engineered by Cengal following his departure.

Cariappa made no public appearances or communications between 2041 and 2044, giving rise to various rumours and conspiracy theories, including that he remained a silent partner on G6, that CMD was deliberately engineered by him, and that he orchestrated Muren’s disappearance. In 2043, Cariappa moved to Düsseldorf after the CCP announced that London City would be established as a Chinese special economic zone (SEZ) by 2045.

NuancePermalink

In May 2044, Cariappa founded Nuance as “a counterweight to Omnius,” accusing the company of “doing no more than taking ownership of localised data extraction systems, integrating them into G6, and then licensing them back to Zhupao’s clients.” ^[14]

After an initial slate of Nuance partnerships and projects in Canada, India, South Africa, and the US, Cariappa asked Amankwah-Crouse to join Nuance as a consultant. She accepted in August 2045, though she was forced to step down in October 2045 after being accused of having instigated a leak of sensitive information related to G6. Cariappa defended Amankwah-Crouse from accusations that she was Adira and echoed assertions that Adira is a false flag operation orchestrated by Zhupao.

In 2046, Cariappa transitioned to the role of Nuance’s CTO and announced Zac Paris as the company’s newly appointed CEO. In 2049, Cariappa indicated his intention to retire from public life on June 2nd 2051, his 50th birthday.

DisappearancePermalink

On October 6th 2049, Cariappa was reported missing in Mumbai. According to a statement from Paris, Cariappa was visiting India because “he’d never been back there since his family moved to Canada.” ^[15] A police investigation has been started, which revealed that Cariappa’s neurometric ping stopped in a local hotel after 22:30 IST on September 30th 2049, indicating the use of a collocidal, possibly as part of an abduction. Amankwah-Crouse has been cited in the investigation, as she had travelled to Düsseldorf for a meeting with Cariappa a week before his disappearance.

On October 9th 2049, Cariappa published a posthumous message from Muren that implicated Hagen in the abuse of G6 for the purposes of neurosurveillance, as well as an attempt to murder her in 2040. Cariappa has commended Muren’s “incredible bravery” in coming forward with this information. Interpol has determined that the message was published from a location in Dharwad, with Cariappa’s whereabouts remaining in question. Many individuals have come out in support of Cariappa, including Brad Berkemier, Laura McDonald, Sofia Peña, Kelly Rose, and Jagrati Thass.

Personal lifePermalink

Cariappa met his partner Chris McLaren through an online dating app in 2026. They married in 2028 and separated in 2043 when Cariappa moved to Düsseldorf. McLaren was diagnosed with CMD phobia in 2039 due to their habit of letting Captain Thunderpaw lick their face, which may have transferred FSE prions via the cat’s saliva and resulted in a double cross-species transmission with a significantly lengthened incubation period.

Cariappa was diagnosed with a mild form of autism spectrum (AS) in 2006 after he struggled with basic social interactions in school. His parents were initially reluctant to recognise this diagnosis, but later came around and helped him with practicing routines and building familiarity.

See alsoPermalink

• Cariappa-Muren disease
• Connie Muren
• G6
• Nuance

ReferencesPermalink