The Identity Problem, Part 1 [T'au Fanfiction from Noah Van Nguyen]

Disclaimer: Nothing in the text that follows is official Games Workshop material, and none of the content should be construed as official. Although I happened to write a novel about the T'au Empire, I'm also a fan who just loves to write. I wanted to explore an idea and thought doing it as an in-universe epistolary would be fun. With all that — enjoy!

Esteemed Mior'la—

Before my departure, I happened to glimpse an official bulletin signed with your name in the shuttle depot on Dal'yth Non. Standing in the crowd, staring at your bulletin, I found myself chuckling. And I had worried so much about you. But already you have become a junior supervisor, already you have been elevated to the second rank. It is the joy of a teacher to see one’s pupil excel. I should expect that your discipline and focus, famed in the short time you spent at our institution, will bring you far in submission to holy T'au'Va.

Forgive an old teacher her delay in answering your last letter. I did not deliberately ignore you; I simply got carried away with new research. You will remember that I was not always as attentive to my pupils as a more devoted instructor should have been. As you came to learn well yourself, assisting me in my research on the unusual digital properties of the light from the Sappa star, I have been, as always, embroiled in a quest to destroy all enigma.

This quest now calls me to Ergo, an arctic world at the burning edge of Empire. Ergo is a frigid prison of ice and snow and sea whose primary settlement (a generous word, from what I've heard) spends half its native year in sunlight and half in darkness. I render here its name in alien phonology — gue'la, if I'm not mistaken. I was told by a young fire warrior in the shuttle depot that the sacred Kor'Vattra found the world unoccupied, save by a handful of forgotten human outposts. Those apes greedily accepted the enlightenment of submission, like dried berries rejuvenated in a cup of water. (Forgive the clumsy metaphor. Even the water caste must sometimes find their turns of phrase wanting.)

I write this missive in a vast chamber filled with fellow passengers. We have accepted our stasis unguents. As we await interment within the stasis pods aboard The Divine Fortieth Machine for our journey to Ergo, I find myself thinking of our conversations during the Sappa research, before the star blinked out of existence. And then I thought of your name on the bulletin, and the communication, and how far you’ve come. And all of it brought me to my current research and the months of scientific enquiry that have preoccupied me since your last letter.

You, young fio’ui, must hear of the conundrum before me and share your thoughts.

Consider the following: you send a primitive transmission to one of your cohorts in the civil engineering cooperative. Let us presume this transmission takes its most primitive form — a written letter. (Though I know your letters, like mine, can sometimes be indecipherable!)

The letter’s recipient reads your communication. A sudden suspicion strikes them. 'How do I know that the sender of this communication was indeed Mior'la?' your cohort asks. 'How do I know that it does not belong to an imposter?'

Stricken by this irrational doubt, the reader must now determine whether the communication is genuine. To do so, the reader examines the letters and recognises your hand. Perhaps a tea stain mars the page; perhaps the letter's recipient knows you for an avid drinker of tea. All available markers indicate that you wrote this letter. The letter itself is written in your voice, your style, your words.

This evidence should be sufficient for the lay reader. However, we are not the burning brethren of the Fire Caste, chasing after impulse and instinct. We are sober, firm, and rational, and so is your hypothetical cohort. To dispel their suspicion, the rational mind must therefore set aside their biases and consider the likelihood that a nefarious actor has impersonated your handwriting, your tea-drinking habit, and your written style. The rational mind undertakes a review of the contents of your communication. They are utterly ordinary. The rational mind assesses that no nefarious actor would have made the effort to impersonate a second-rank communications supervisor for such a routine dispatch. The rational mind, in all its rigour, then considers the possibility that another t'au agent would have impersonated you. The rational mind, of course, concludes this is impossible, as is all discord among servants of the Greater Good.

And thus the rational mind concludes that you indeed wrote the letter. This tremendous effort and rigour has allowed them to confirm you are who you say you are, and that your letter is what it seems to be, beyond any reasonable doubt.

The questions, begged: How do we know those with whom we interact are who they say they are? Presented with evidence, how do we know the evidence is legitimate and not falsified? Presented with a convincing abundance of evidence, how can we be utterly certain that it is not simply a convincingly falsified abundance of evidence?

This is the Identity Problem, and I assure you it amounts to more than philosophical excess. During a recent conversation with a fourth-rank instructor from Laa'l Battle Dome, I learned of how the lobotomised organic computers built into advanced gue'la technology are capable of making rudimentary judgements regarding the veracity of instructions they receive. Essentially, these servitors can aggregate various qualitative indicators — tone, facial appearance, poise — to determine whether their interlocutors are indeed who they claim to be. This crude necrotic instinct has made remote interdiction of servitor-guided missiles by our forces exceedingly difficult. Even the unblooded fire warrior in the shuttle depot mentioned rumours of how the backwards human inhabitants of Ergo had attempted to falsify communications from our fleet so that we would bypass their world. (They apparently failed in this utterly, but if they had grasped even the basics of our third-waveform-based communications, I fear they could have succeeded. Good, that they eventually realised the error of their resistance.)

The Identity Problem is a hidden vulnerability in T'au technology. Like human servitors, drone intelligences can distinguish individual users, but they are not trained sceptics. Drones do not have gut instincts; a driven foe could fool a drone into believing they were someone else, both physically and remotely. Similarly, our data infrastructure is not resilient to identity attacks. A skilled opponent could feign to be t'au in order to access our data. Identity hashes are not difficult to calculate algorithmically, and only scrupulous dataform engineers maintain or audit access logs. I have heard of certain coalitions that go so far as to keep centralised repositories of their identity data, some even compressing the database into every drone module. A sophisticated enemy compromising these would essentially know everything that we know in a war. They would know our plans and disposition, our supply and reinforcement schedule. They would know how to defeat us.

You can imagine the more mundane disadvantages presented by this vulnerability, as well. For example, I cannot think mere administrative oversight has allowed the misguided Enclaves beyond the Damocles Gulf (Aun'Va's blessings upon them, destroy their ignorance) to obtain modern technology, munitions, and surplus inventory from the Empire. The truth is, the servants of the Commander could likely routinely access our datastores. They could plunder what they needed at will, simply altering instructions for logistical fleets to deliver drone payloads to drop sites, whence they then convey them to the Enclaves.

The spring of my obsession with the Identity Problem is fortuitous, Mior'la. After completing my duties at the institute, I was elevated to the fourth rank and assigned to Ergo to oversee the world's communications enclave. As a planetary post, Ergo requires a fourth-rank master in such a role. But the world is underdeveloped. Its communications enclave consists of one technician; its inventory, two transponders, with one of those in deep orbit and technically under the purview of the world's single ship. All of this is to say I will have an abundance of time to commit to the solution of the Identity Problem.

I have just been told we will soon begin boarding. But I must finish this letter, for we approach the most fascinating component of the Identity Problem: its solution.

In my reflections and research, I have come to understand that the Identity Problem is mitigated by three identity processes: Harmony, Alignment, and the Unbroken Seal.

Harmony is the initial process employed to solve the Identity Problem, and it is one all of us are familiar with. Imagine a new commander reports to take command of her cadre. She arrives to her cadre and must present the appropriate documentation proving she is who she says she is. This is nothing new. Harmony allows her new subordinates to confirm that the documents indeed correspond to an existing person and template, and that this existing person should be in possession of the document in question.

Alignment is a second-order development of Harmony, a logical interrogation and outgrowth. Having accepted the commander's documentation, the subordinates now must verify their legitimacy. They do this by any number of means. Perhaps the document is signed, and the signature recognised. Perhaps the cadre subcommanders make the effort to contact their shas'ar'tol to confirm such orders were given. Upon receiving assurance that the documentation was indeed issued by legitimate authorities, the subordinates safely verify that the documents were not falsified.

With Harmony and Alignment complete, we now arrive at the most critical part of the Identity Problem: The Unbroken Seal, which is undoubtedly the hardest part of the solution to perfect. For after our commander's cadre has achieved Harmony and Alignment, confirming that the commander exists and that her documentation is legitimate, her subordinates must now determine whether the commander is who she says she is.

In a face-to-face meeting, this is not difficult. (I truly doubt any adversary could effectively mimic our species.) Therefore, in this particular example, our theoretical commander achieves the Unbroken Seal with ease, merely having presented herself.

However, in the case of your letter — or even the bulletin I glimpsed in the shuttle depot — maintaining the Unbroken Seal becomes more difficult. Even convinced of the communication’s authenticity, how could its recipient truly confirm that you were the one who sent it? Perhaps you dictated the letter and never meant to send it. Perhaps your own subordinate misunderstood your intention to destroy the draft yet still sent it on your behalf, and thus the information is erroneous or obsolete.

Faced with such doubt, I suppose the recipient could expend the effort necessary to confirm with you personally that you sent the communication. But that approach is not scalable and it is not swift. It would not be feasible, for example, for every passenger in the shuttle depot who scanned your bulletin to contact you personally and confirm that you sent it. Simple measures, such as official printed seals, can serve authentication purposes in a shuttle depot. But they are not applicable at war. Thus, the vulnerability arises.

Commit yourself to solving the Identity Problem, Mior’la, and I think you will quickly see that there is no perfect Unbroken Seal. There are effective solutions, certainly — encrypted hashes, encrypted datastores, training protocols, operating procedures. But none of these are truly perfect.


Mior'la — do you understand the significance of what I am telling you? My hands tremble. Our burning kindred and sacred fleets currently exist in a state where a determined adversary, given enough time and resources, can falsify our war communications or breach critical data. They can learn all our secrets and interpose their will on our communications. In such a situation, the disadvantages would be tremendous, defeat all but certain. It has not happened yet, save on the smallest of tactical scales. But to me, that is only an indication that the Identity Problem must be solved before the consequences become catastrophic. Is it not our duty to anticipate and prevent such catastrophes before they occur?

This is why I have not written in so long, the enigma that I cannot slay. This is the trouble I ache to solve, the glory I yearn to achieve for our Empire and our sacred unity.

But it so happens, Mior’la, that I think I have discovered a natural solution. Or perhaps unnatural is a more appropriate word.

I was reviewing censored literature on gravitic drive technology when I caught reference to the extraphysical plane that Mankind refers to as the Warp. Delving into the subject, I obtained older literature that spoke of more openly than our contemporary research. In your first year, we did a small communications unit that skirted the subject, if you recall, on the nature of Mankind's interstellar travel and its reliance on an immaterial communication field — a “beacon in the dark,” if you will, called Astronomicon.

In older literature, it is written (in somewhat rhythmic and poetic terms) that the Warp functions as a psychic mirror to the physical world. Sentient entities possess a psychosignature in the Warp. Our scholars have never analysed these in depth (at least, not in available literature), but my investigation has led me to believe that these psychosignatures are distinctive and complex. They cannot be surrendered — willingly or unwillingly — and humans, in their benighted ignorance, have even conflated them with our understanding of T'au'Va in its third form. That is, the Soul.

You were a canny and focused pupil. I have no doubt you already understand what I wish to say. This psychosignature — this soul — may in fact be the perfect implementation of the Unbroken Seal. Imagine an unbreakable password, immutable and unique, tied inherently to each of us. An inviolable identity, if you will, one that cannot be falsified, nor imitated. To employ this psychosignature for authentication purposes, one would merely need to observe, measure, and algorithmically represent it in dataform. This representation would inherently tied to the individual in question. Think: Every individual within our Empire, armed with their own perfect, personal Unbroken Seal. It is a flawless solution to the Identity Problem, Mior'la. And on Ergo, I will learn how to implement it.

Unfortunately, this is the end of my message. A very frustrated kor'la is waiting for me to board my stasis pod so we can get underway. It may be some time before I receive your response or can respond in turn. Therefore, Aun'Va's blessings for the kor'la's patience — and for yours.

Forever Your Teacher, For the Greater Good,

[DATA CORRUPTED]