65

Introductory Text

65th Post

Posted 24 May 2016 at 01:38:30 EDT

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> It simply appeared in the primitive infraspace one day, like a hungry lion showing up on the edge of a village. Over the course of a few hours, it breached a multitude of hardened systems, going where it wanted, taking what it wanted, seemingly capable of breaking any form of crypto. Then it disappeared. That was in 1991. More than a decade passed before it was seen again.
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> By the time it reappeared, it had already become something of a legend -- in the sense that people scarcely believed it had ever really existed. Most experts had convinced themselves that the original episode wasn't what it appeared to be, that prime factorization techniques were still secure, that the attacks had actually used fairly mundane techniques.
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> But it came again and did much as it had done before, this time on a larger scale, one commensurate with the more highly developed state of the infraspace. Nobody could really be sure this was the same entity responsible for the original attacks. It was only known that both sets of attacks involved the same almost magically advanced capabilities. Now, at least, we knew we were dealing with something real.
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> In the years that followed, it appeared sporadically, accessing government systems, defense systems, nuclear systems, RL infrastructure systems, social networks, no-latency communities, whatever it wanted. And as time went on, the appearances grew more frequent.
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> Naturally, the governments of the world were extremely alarmed. A lot of accusations and threats flew back and forth. The activity proved that our best crypto, even our best physical security, was inadequate. But what could be done? We couldn't just roll back the information technology revolution and put everything in manila file folders. So we looked for new techniques to protect ourselves. But it was a lesson in helplessness. It defeated everything we came up with.
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> After the first attack, it began to use a technique of taming satellites and transmitting information to random locations in the middle of the ocean. We trained instruments on these locations and sent ships racing out to find whoever had been receiving all this stolen data, but they never found anything.
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> Then one day, an attack occurred, and a tamed satellite began transmitting to a location in the Atlantic just a few kilometers from where a Royal Navy frigate happened to be. When the warship arrived at the location, the satellite was still trying to open a connection with the surface. There was nothing in sight, but they quickly detected a very large object on their sonar, coming towards the site.
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> Was it an accident? With all those millions of square kilometers of open water to choose from, would it accidently choose a location near a warship, of all types of vessels? No, I think it wanted us to see. Personally, I think it has guided every step of its interaction with us, slowly revealing itself as its powers have developed, slowly drawing us in closer. It's sad. Some of the others believed that we were valiantly struggling against it. But I don't think we were ever struggling against it any more than a rat struggles against a maze.
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> "A large stewed tomato, rather ugly." This was how it was described by the skipper, apparently not a poetic man. The video shows an enormous glistening mountain of flesh rising out of the ocean, dwarfing the warship, expelling streams of water out of myriad holes that cover its surface like giant pores. A latticework of huge purple veins runs between the holes, pumping dark globular objects along the structure's surface.
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> The visible portion which emerged above the ocean surface was shaped like a round hump with a slight ridging along the center. The sonar record paints vague picture of what was beneath the water, apparently an oblong object with a number (as many as twelve) of thin appendages as long as the main body itself. The conceptual artists of the day produced a great many imaginative monstrosities based on the information.
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> After it surfaced, the warship assumed a "defensive posture," meaning it backed off, and waited. The metallic cylinders appeared shortly after. These were much smaller than the Iwo Jima or Novaya Zemlya cylinders, but much more segmented, with thousands of cubic portions flickering in and out of existence like bad pixels. They lasted for 3 minutes and 13 seconds before vanishing as suddenly as they appeared. A moment later, the fleshy mound expelled an enormous geyser of what was apparently air and seawater, like a whale blowing out of its blowhole, and dived beneath the surface.
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> The warship attempted to give chase, but was unable to track the object on sonar. It seemed to fragment and disappear. Eventually the warship returned to the site and took samples of the water. Mixed amongst all the random plankton and fish cells, there was a fair amount of human DNA. In fact, we were able to trace some of it to specific people, and this was how we proved conclusively that this creature, later to be called a "skin ship," was related, in a literal sense, to the so-called Artigas portal, which was actually underwater several hundred kilometers away from Artigas, Antarctica.
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> So, in the end, it turned out we had built it. We had built Q.
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