Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Triskweline, SjK units
From: Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo [A known military corporation of the High Beyond. If this is a masquerade, somebody is living dangerously.]
Subject: The Blight’s goal at the Bottom
Key phrases: Sudden change in Blight’s tactics
Distribution: Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Date: 8.15 days since Fall of Sjandra Kei
In case you don’t know, Sandor Intelligence has a number of different Net feeds. We can collect messages on paths that have no intermediate nodes in common. Thus we can be fairly confident that news we receive has not been tampered with en route. (There remain the lies and misunderstandings that were present to begin with, but that’s something that makes the intelligence business interesting.)The Blight has been our top priority since its instantiation a year ago. This is not just because of the Blight’s obvious strength, the destruction and the deicides it has committed. We fear that all this is the lesser part of the Threat. There have been perversions almost as powerful in the recorded past. What truly distinguishes this one is its stability. We see no evidence of internal evolution; in some ways it is less than a Power. It may never lose interest in controlling the High Beyond. We may be witnessing a massive and permanent change in the nature of things. Imagine: a stable necrosis, where the only sentience in the High Beyond is the Blight.
Thus, studying the Blight has been a matter of life and death for us (even though we are powerful and widely distributed). We’ve reached a number of conclusions. Some of these may be obvious to you, others may sound like flagrant speculation. All take on a new coloring with the events reported from Harmonious Repose:
Almost from the beginning, the Blight has been searching for something. This search has extended far beyond its aggressive physical expansion. Its automatic agents have tried to penetrate virtually every node in the Top of the Beyond; the High Network is in shambles, reduced to protocols scarcely more efficient than those known below. At the same time, the Blight has physically stolen several archives. We have evidence of very large fleets searching for off-Net archives at the Top and in the Low Transcend. At least three Powers have been murdered in this rampage.
And now, suddenly, this assault has ended. The Blight’s physical expansion continues, with no end in sight, but it no longer searches the High Beyond. As near as we can tell, the change occurred about two thousand seconds before the escape of the human vessel from Harmonious Repose. Less than six hours later, we saw the beginnings of the silent fleet that so many are now speculating about. That fleet is indeed the creature of the Blight.
In other times, the destruction of Sjandra Kei and the motives of the Alliance for the Defense would all be important issues (and our organization might have interest in doing business with those affected). But all that is dwarfed by the fact of this fleet and the ship it pursues. And we disagree with the analysis [implication?] from Harmonious Repose: it is obvious to us that the Blight did not know of the Out of Band II until its discovery at Harmonious Repose.
That ship is not a tool of the Blight, but it contains or is bound for something of enormous importance to the Blight. And what might that be? Here we begin frank speculation. And since we are speculating, we’ll use those powerful pseudo-laws, the Principles of Mediocrity and Minimal Assumption. If the Blight has the potential for taking over all the Top in a permanent stability, then why has this not happened before? Our guess is that the Blight has been instantiated before (with such dire consequence that the event marks the beginning of recorded time), but it has its own peculiar natural enemy.
The order of events even suggests a particular scenario, one familiar from network security. Once upon a time (very long ago), there was another instance of the Blight. A successful defense was mounted, and all known copies of the Blight’s recipe were destroyed. Of course, on a wide net, one can never be sure that all copies of a badness are gone. No doubt, the defense was distributed in enormous numbers. But even if a harboring archive were reached by such a distribution, there might be no effect if the Blight were not currently active there.
The luckless humans of Straumli Realm chanced on such an archive, no doubt a ruin long off the Net. They instantiated the Blight and incidentally—perhaps a little later—the defense program. Somehow that Blight’s enemy escaped destruction. And the Blight has been searching for it ever since—in all the wrong places. In its weakness, the new instance of the defense retreated to depths no Power would think of penetrating, whence it could never return without outside help. Speculation on top of speculation: we can’t guess the nature of this defense, except that its retreat is a discouraging sign. And now even that sacrifice has gone for naught, since the Blight has seen through the deception.
The Blight’s fleet is clearly an ad hoc thing, hastily thrown together from forces that happened to be closest to the discovery. Without such haste, the quarry might have been lost to it. Thus the chase equipment is probably ill-suited to the depths, and its performance will degrade as the descent progresses. However, we estimate that it will remain stronger than any force that can reach the scene in the near future.
We may learn more after the Blight reaches the Out of Band II’s destination. If it destroys that destination immediately, we’ll know that something truly dangerous to the Blight existed there (and may exist elsewhere, at least in recipe form). If it does not, then perhaps the Blight was looking for something that will make it even more dangerous than before.