The Identity Problem, Part 5 [T'au Fanfiction from Noah Van Nguyen]
- Noah Van Nguyen
- 9 hours ago
- 17 min read
Disclaimer: Nothing in the text that follows is official Games Workshop material, and none of the content should be construed as official. Read the previous entry here.
URGENT - URGENT - URGENT PRIORITY: GALEWIND SENDER: 8739773742854595… [simple hash, truncated] [Translated: Kor’vre Tash’var Hon’ra’t Y] TRANSMITTER: 793817333644256f… [simple hash, truncated] [Translated: Beacon Firm-Snow-White] RECEIVER: Dal'yth Shas'ar'tol'la'tol SUBJECT: Status and action interrogative BODY: The Divine Fortieth Machine has received approval from Dal'yth Shas'la'tol to support the Ergo ground mission. Awaiting assistance from sept fleet, deployment pending. Pyu’rok, I heard you. I remember where we’ve been and where we’re going. I won’t leave you behind. I never have, never will. Per protocol, I require an all-clear. Provide current status of EPM. Descent is clear? Communications infrastructure stable? Exercise good judgement, as in the jump. Bad calls cost lives. Or worse. Authentication phrases as follows: LIGHTER THAN AIR FORKED ROAD FIRES THREE BEFORE SIX TO WANT IS TO WISH PARAMOUNT TRUST Teacher, Your most recent communication sets my teeth on edge. I do not think I would have received your draft, but the disturbances plaguing interstellar travel in your sphere paused for a splinter of a second. After I did, I did not notice it for a day. I was busy with communications directives, censorship guidance, and other noise generated by phenomena occurring across one of Dal’yth’s colonies. Not far from Ergo, in fact. You are likely unaware. Recently annexed colonies in the vicinity of Ergo have gone dark. Looking into the rumours, I learned The Divine Fortieth Machine has been offscan for months. The air caste cannot reestablish contact. By all appearances, the Ergo system has been isolated. And yet status reports from Ergo appear fairly typical. (After taking into account communications disturbances.) Pertaining to your instructions to vet documentation provided by Ergo-1, that you transmitted for review: I cannot review the documentation. I almost uploaded the material into my personal, then caught myself. I actuated a virtual container and uploaded the material. The content devastated the virtual processors and corrupted the virtual drone navigator. The physical drive volume hosting the virtual core is also irrecoverable. System – my clique’s intelligence – predicted the catastrophe and pre-emptively isolated the drive volume from our data net, burning all connections to prevent wider corruption. Subsequently, System criticised my carelessness. My supervisor joined in. Thus I cannot request System’s assistance to analyse your material. By all appearances, hard data exchange from Ergo is unsecure, despite the routine reports logged in archives. System believes your content was unsafe and doubts a t’au intelligence would have transmitted it. Upon learning this, I recovered data signatures from your material using electronic micro-analysis and thick gloves. The signatures included the identifiers you provided – vestigial pulse signals. Analysis indicates the identifiers are corrupted legacy hashes. My supervisor shared his opinion that they resemble code artifacts from obliterated scripting libraries stitched together by an errant drone routine. I suspect the identifiers were obfuscated, malicious payloads. We could not reverse-engineer them. More disconcerting, the recovered data signatures included partial title references to your transferred documents, the material that burnt out my virtual container. I algorithmically calculated all possible title variations, then queried each reference from central archives. (A por’un liaison granted this urgent access request; I owe them an hour for hobby renovations in their domicile.) They were all routine survey scans, seemingly retrieved in a random sample, with no discernible pattern between titles and identifiers. Teacher, this is my long way of saying: I strongly, strongly suspect the documents you were shown were fabricated. None of them are relevant to your Identity Problem, and the fabrication is elaborate. More importantly, it is dangerous. I have begun investigating records pertaining to Ergo. A patrol drone network’s audit log seems to suggest something strange happened during your time there. The logs are fairly typical beginning with recent timestamps. This is unusual for two reasons:
The impression grows that what you describe in your transmissions is not occurring now, but happened long ago. Logically, this would suggest that I am receiving vastly delayed communications through the system transponder. A transponder you would have been directly responsible for maintaining. Teacher. What happened there? What is happening now? What is your part in all of this? And are you still there? I sensed doubt at the end of your last communication. I have casually entertained this dialogue for too long. Maybe you hoped to hear the sobriety of reason from me, as during the Sappa study. If so, read on and be glad. Networked intelligences do not undertake endeavours such as this one has volunteered to do for you. It is unheard of. I know neither of us are intelligence sculptors. And yet I refuse to accept you would not know this. Why persuade yourself otherwise? That Ergo-1 was operating above board? You at least must have known you could not persuade me. Are you telling me something obliquely? Something subtle, something I cannot see? And your references to Faor. You know he was also my teacher. You must know that I have kept in contact with him, far more regularly than you. You write as if Faor is dead, Teacher, but he is not. He did not abandon you. He did not leave you to the whims of fate. He still teaches out of the Academy Dal’Ran’yth. He grew exhausted of your obsession with study, forever ignored as you pursued your quest to destroy enigma. Faor once confided a thought in me, as we collected bread in the academy refectory. He thought that your devotion to T’au’Va would be the end of you. I brushed off these comments. Now I wonder if he was right. Here is my conjecture. The signal package you sent is unreadable. The data protocol and formats are incompatible with our data structures, multi-dimensional code languages, and irreconcilable with our hardware, thereby inflicting damage. This conjecture raises greater questions. How would Ergo-1 be able to read that material? And how could Ergo-1 have been able to transmit it to your console? How could your console have read it? I am not questioning that all this occurred, because I believe it did. And I could write this off as data corruption resulting faulty transmission. This would be reasonable, given the communications disruptions. But what gives me pause is that you would be responsible for transmission, and you would not miss signs of data corruption. Moreover, this inconsistency occurs alongside the idiosyncrasies in your communications, as well as the chronological misalignment between Ergo’s historical status logs and the timestamps accompanying your communications. I must conclude with a high degree of certainty: your obsession with the Identity Problem has warped your judgement. (Or did warp your judgement, long ago.) But the Identity Problem is unsolvable, Teacher. I have given this great thought. You provided an example, in your initial communication, of a commander’s arrival to a new unit. (It is so obvious to me you have never served on combat duty – the burning brethren are not so methodical, nor so careless, as your example suggests!) I beg you to consider a derived hypothetical. Imagine the same situation, where the requirements of all three solution layers you described to me – Harmony, Alignment, and the Unbroken Seal – are completely satisfied upon the commander’s arrival. Documentation is provided, verified, and authenticated to satisfy reasonable doubt. Yet as you suggest, that confirmation remains vulnerable to defeat by a skilled and determined adversary. Thus we continue identity verification using this mythical signal you seek: a unique identifier linked to an individual’s psychic presence, however great or however minuscule. We validate this signal, thus establishing a perfect confirmation of identity. But it is not perfect. Recall that a baseline for the signal must be established. Your perfect solution presupposes that the baseline identifier is unique and unchanging. I accept that premise, and also ask the following. What if the identity itself changes, even as the identifier remains the same? This is not a contradiction. Consider, Teacher, when we first met. You called my name from the data rolls. I answered from the stands. Let us take this a step further and presume that you also logged my identity signal — my soul — back then. From that point onward, you established my identity as Mior’la, your pupil. And because the character and appearance of that pupil resembled those of the pupil who arrived to practicals later – that is to say, because the identity signals aligned – you assumed they were the same. This logic echoes through time. Those many Mior’las, and the many iterations of their identity signals, all satisfactorily match that of your research assistant on Sappa, who you also confirm is Mior’la. This iteration of me, writing to you now: also Mior’la. And yet I am not! I am not that student you met. I am not your research assistant. I am a communications engineer and hobby artificer. I have grown in ways you cannot conceive, that I have perhaps only hinted at in our recent transmissions. My love and understanding for sacred T’au’Va has matured. My skillsets, my knowledge base. My identity. Identity does not exist in a vacuum. I exist within a vast network of community, influenced by those around me, and influencing them in turn. My partners and I change each other, and we are changed. These interactions elevate us. And yet we must acknowledge that agency can serve both good and bad ends. Recognise the possibility that incidental or pernicious influences can cause individuals to stray. Can pervert their purpose. In a war zone, the same principles apply. They could occur as a result of deliberate manipulation by a skilled, determined adversary, who tricks a witless agent into acting in the adversary’s interest, on the adversary’s behalf. Thus, identity is a function of intention. Intention, a function of action. Perhaps your identity signal solves the Identity Problem, Teacher. But it does not solve the problem of intention and manipulated action. Sophisticated attack methodologies in these spheres could circumvent even the most perfect of identity controls. Let us return to your hypothetical. The confirmation of the commander’s identity can be perfect, but what if subtle manipulations have corrupted their intentions? Or what if the commander themself has willingly strayed, perhaps choosing to support the misguided Enclaves? Can these intentions be accounted for? Perhaps, by judging the individual’s actions. But if the actions are part of a long-term, nefarious strategy, would they not be resilient to detection? Can the intentions of the manipulator be detected in these subtle actions? Can malign intentions be deduced and assessed and ruled out, perhaps with the aid of networked drone intelligences? I concede a practical standard must be met, a practical definition maintained for practical outcomes. A user’s identity must be confirmed before they activate a network, a fire warrior’s loyalty before they deploy, and so on. My greater point is that all identity is a construct warranted by ourselves and by others. Teacher – at a certain point, identity resolves to trust. All identity is grounded in one’s trust in oneself and in others, and therefore in honest examination and an open mind. This brings me to the crux. Upon deep reflection, I have concluded that the solution proffered by Callila Us Rex (and we must discuss your anticipated meeting with her, if it has not already occurred) correctly explains the heuristic process that solves the Identity Problem. If all identity is grounded on an assumption of trust, then logically, assessing trust is the primary imperative. As you must see, nothing but omniscience can accomplish this. All the more so if intent can be manipulated. If all identity resolves to trust, and trust assessments always include elements of uncertainty, then trust must never be absolute, in any circumstances. No matter what solution we may contrive, a trusted identity can always become capable of betrayal. Assessing this potential is to assess motivations. To perfectly assess the motivations of another being requires an unfathomable understanding of context. Context surrounding the subject, and their historical lives, and every moment that bled into the prehistory of their existence. Every face they ever met, and every word that crossed their ear. Every factor that could have influenced or could eventually influence their intentions. Everything. This is what Callilla’s method so soundly recognises, and which yours ignores. It is with great displeasure, Teacher, that I must now question your intentions. It is not because I do not trust the identity of the Teacher I knew, but because I am deeply unfamiliar with her current context, motivations, and actions. Consider what you have told me has occurred on EPM thus far, and that all evidence suggests this occurred long ago. Consider the news we hear now, of colonies going dark in your sector and the disappearance of The Divine Fortieth Machine, both of which you have neglected to mention. Consider what Ergo-1 has asked you to do, and that it suggested you employ subterfuge to do so. Consider the potential malign influence inflicted on Ergo-1, given what the files they shared did to my own virtual core and the hardware hosting it. You cannot be so naive as to not see something is wrong. Or perhaps you do, and you cloak in your communications an earnest hope that I will sense something is not right and act to help you. Or perhaps you are not my Teacher at all. I am taking action now, in the hopes that one day you will judge me positively for it. I cannot reveal that action to you. If you are reading this, go to Pyu’rok. Reveal all you have been doing and what Ergo-1 asked of you, without delay. And if you are indeed the same instructor who shared so much nobility and knowledge with myself and many other of her pupils, please forgive my harsh judgement. Your Student, With Great Respect And Worry, Mior’la AUDIT LOG (User Signature Ogr-9-Ogr \[familiar appellation Mior’la, Fio’ui] Drone Network: Ergo 4x48 (defunct) Cycle Entry: 001040310 Cycle Length: 0.7 rai’kan > Decision tree: > > Command: Verbal command \[authorised non-primary user] > > > > “–Get in here. We have something to discuss–” \[remaining input irrelevant]” > > > > Thought: Unit 13 of me drifts down the sealed corridor, along a line of battered fire warriors. Char marks blacken their armour. Kinetic and energy damage warp the shape of the corridor. In my visuals, I recognise a handful of Kuln’s old comrades among the shas, those we did not lose in the snows. The warriors on guard keep their heads up, eyes fixed on scanners or scanning along the length of their weapons. Others mutter to themselves, toying with braided meditation beads. Pyu’rok looms at the end of this grim line, along with a nervous engineer. “Shas’vre,” unit 13 vocalises, when it reaches him. “Why is it so dark? Why so quiet?” Pyu’rok looks at the first-rank engineer, who gestures affirmatively. “We disconnected you from Ergo-1,” Pyu’rok says. “It was hard. Would have been impossible, if we had followed procedure.” That much is obvious. “You blocked sensory and command flow from the rest of me,” I say. “Where are my other units? Why can I still think?” “You still have their processing power, 13,” the engineer says. “They’re just idling.” “Which means they’re still intact,” Pyu’rok adds. Still intact. That articulation of my network’s status brings me no comfort. My syncretic mind flashes across visual input from this single gun drone. A three-dimensional view of the corridor, stitched together from each sensory node, presents a disturbing view. The lights are out, except for scanner glow. A dead shas’la lies in a corner. The warped corridor appears to have been baked in an oven. Temperature is still elevated from a firefight. And yet I have no memory of what has occurred. Pyu’rok gestures into a dim room with an uneven, covered table. “Come on. Get in here. We have something to discuss.” I follow. The door is unpowered and stays open. Pyu’rok sighs and runs a gloved hand over his sweaty brow, over a gash that I cannot recall him earning. The first-rank engineer squats in the corner beside a tired surgeon, monitoring a terminal that I suspect shows my status. The field surgeon leans on the table, staring through it. Contextual memory routed from units 40, 28, and 12 reminds me this is the EPM surgical cell. Kuln. She is the one on the table, half-insensate, clearly cold. Her armour has been ripped from her torso and she is pale. Half-lidded eyes peer out from the deep wells of her eye sockets, leaking tears. Kuln and Pyu’rok are the only shas’vre on Ergo, the highest-ranking warriors in this corner of the universe. “Hey Spiderweb,” Kuln murmurs weakly, gruff. “Glad you’re fine.” Four thousand subroutines fire at the sight of Kuln’s frailty, and the wounds teased by fluid staining the floor. Unit 13’s basal subprocesses scream at the sight of my primary user’s observed biological status. Pyu’rok puts himself between us. “How much of what just happened do you remember?” I check timestamps and mnemonic data, sifting through what drive volume is still accessible. “My short-term memory appears to have been erased.” Behind me, the engineer perks, as if reassured – as if something he had done was successful. “Good,” Pyu’rok says. “La’giy, can you show Spiderweb the playback?” The engineer gestures acknowledgement. “Unit 13 should see it now.” And I do. The memory data pulses through me. A stream of sensory data and meta-analytics. An organic user would not perceive all of what I do, how I do. And yet I can only reflect on it by framing it in such a way that would make sense to them. The corridor, lights flickering. Jewels of hot pulse fire racing down the hall… The panel lights dying, one after the other. Pink flame and gravitic torture crumpling the polymerised surfaces… The temperature indicator plummeting, until humidity crystalizes on the ceramicized armour of the warriors closest to the corridor entrance. They battle for their lives against an unseen intruder, screaming to lock the door… And other sensory data signals, utterly incoherent. Reality seems incompatible with itself, rewriting its own position and physical makeup… The fire warriors blast pulse weaponry at a visual anomaly, backpedaling and covering each other’s movement. Unit 13 joins its fire to theirs, our target a single point in space moving closer to us. Our target appears to be center-mass of an unseen physical phenomenon. Whatever the target was, my drive volume could not record the image in memory… And then it all disappears. “This happened right after Ergo-1 shut down base power,” Pyu’rok says. “We’ve lost situational awareness across EPM.” “Ergo-1 would only do that for the Greater Good,” unit 13 responds automatically, a response dictated by its basal programming. “We know Ergo-1 did it,” the engineer says. “Without proper authorization requests.” Pyu’rok gestures emphasis. “At the same time, Ergo-1 tried to slave your drone connections. We wouldn’t have seen the access attempts, but for La’giy. Certainly wouldn’t have stopped them. He acted quick, disconnecting all of you.” “All of you except for you, 13,” the engineer says. “You stayed with us. I’m rewriting your permanent code now.” Some of what they are saying makes sense. Unit 13 certainly would have acted to protect my network’s primary user, Kuln. But everything else seems improbable. “What you are saying is not possible,” 13 vocalises, even as I recall Ergo-1 doing it to me earlier, with the hobby researcher. I quickly dismiss that – I had assumed the users were informed of that, but they very possibly were not. Still. “Ergo-1 does not have data authorizations to commandeer my units without secondary passive authorization.” La’giy, the engineer, lifts his small head. “I saw the datastreams, 13. In real time.” That resolves the dissonance. I know better than to question the competence of the earth caste. “We need your help, Spiderweb,” Pyu’rok says. “La’giy says once you’re updated, you should be able to move through the base without interference.” Something like fear scratches at my constructed intellect. “Why must I do that?” He offers a smile: a scared shadow of his normal jovial expression. “We’re pinned.” “The base is trying to kill us,” the surgeon blurts, still leaning over Kuln, still staring at something beyond the walls. “We’re stuck.” No one raises the obvious possibility: that the annihilation of everyone on this base may be necessary for the Greater Good. It’s a prospect that, once raised, cannot be dismissed. And once raised, they would all need to contemplate self-destruction as a necessary, optimal outcome. I agree with them. And if no one has told us as much, I will not contemplate the possibility, either. Surely Ergo-1 would have done them the respect of telling them that, if that were the case. My attention drifts to Kuln, my primary user. Unit 13’s processor core warms a fraction of a degree. I consider what Ergo-1 is allegedly doing, and what it told me. “When Ergo-1 slaved my units,” I say, thinking of the hobby researcher it was monitoring, “what did it do with them?” “All drones displaced simultaneously,” La’giy says in a shaky voice, as if attempting to explain the inexplicable. “Moving at full speed in a similar direction, toward external wing four.” External wing four. Callilla Us Rex is housed there. Scrambled mnemonic patterns routed from unit 17 indicate to me that Ergo-1 recommended the hobby researcher seek out Kuln and Callilla. I ask if anyone was in the corridor when the assault began. No, I am told. But someone knocked just before the power went out. And they were asking for Kuln. All of my attention centers on one ocular feed, gazing at Pyu’rok. “Shas’vre. You are worrying me.” He lifts his eyes. “Why?” “Your words suggest we are in conflict with Ergo-1. That is a violation of protocol and an act of utter disorder.” Utter disorder. Pyu’rok surely knows the euphemism. He seems a ghost of his normal self. But maybe this is his normal self, and he has simply never shown it before. Maybe that old, jovial demeanour was just him hiding this. Fear. “I thought I knew who I was,” Pyu’rok says, sighing. “Before the fourth and the Startide jump, before we saw what we saw. Everything green, like a garden. Or that sweet stink, like bad sugar and rotting tea leaves. Even through all that, I still thought I knew. And what everyone says, in the Empire, about what we did to the auxiliaries, or what that makes us… I always knew they were wrong. They weren’t there. They didn’t know who we were. We did what we did for reasons they’ll never have to consider. And we were right to.” My attention briefly disperses, to the fire warriors in the hall. I increase power to my aural sensors. The fire warriors are muttering mantras. The resemblance to gue’la prayer is eerie. “Reeducation after the Sun of Shadow saved us never changed anything, 13,” Pyu’rok says. “Maybe the details. The physiological responses, to the memories. But I know who I am, even after everything I’ve seen. I know this isn’t Nem’yar, or the Startide. I know things are different. You could ask any of us and they’d tell you this is nothing like what we saw. But something has got into this base. Something like what we fought during the jump. It’s trying to hurt us. I think it might be what killed your three units and Kuln’s shas – the same thing that wounded her out in the snow. And it’s moving in ways that don’t make sense, through the base’s walls.” Engineer La’giy stands, looking up from his monitor. “Shas. It’s happening. Another temp spike in the gue’la hab.” There is only one gue’la on this base. Callila Us Rex. “Spiderweb,” Pyu’rok says. “Do you remember why we call that? How you saved us, during the battles in the jump?” I do not. That memory was extracted, root and stem, from my drive volume, long ago. Before I can say that, the cover on the table shifts. Kuln, smiling, sad. My own blinking indicators flash in her big eyes. “It’s because when we needed you,” she murmurs, fading, “you caught all the flies.” Logic problems across my mute, blind network are introduced and resolved. If-then statements, thousands of them, all pointing to a single conclusion on how I must serve the Greater Good. Based on the information provided to me, protocol is clear. Priorities, obvious. La’giy gestures. “Rewrites complete, shas’vre,” he says. “No signals from Ergo-1. I’m activating the network.” Unit 12. Unit 40. Unit 28. One by one, the rest of me flickers back into existence. The things that this whole self of mine perceives across the base are disturbing and unnatural to behold. T’au base personnel, standing limp in the corridors, staring at the deck. Eyes open, draining clear fluid, but still alive. So utterly still, and silent. So utterly here, yet gone. “Spiderweb,” Pyu’rok tells unit 13, in a dark corner of EPM base, tugging at a single sensory thread in my larger drone web. “Will you help us again? Like you did in the Startide jump?” Unit 13 focuses on Kuln, whose existence in the universe seems to justify mine. With a brief vocalisation, Unit 13 responds to Pyu’rok, occupying a fraction of a splinter of my attention. The rest of me hardens the drone network’s firewalls, focusing on the message that I compose and remotely fire to EPM’s processing cores. Ergo-1. What are you and the researcher doing? > > Action assessment: Unclear > > > > Awaiting response ROUTINE - ROUTINE - ROUTINE PRIORITY: BRIGHTDAY SENDER: 031571##########… [hash algorithm fail check] [Translated: Unverified] TRANSMITTER: 793817333644256f… [simple hash, truncated] [Translated: Beacon Firm-Snow-White] RECEIVER: Kor’vre Tash’var Hon’ra’t Y SUBJECT: All Clear BODY: Greetings. The situation is normal. We have secured the premises. Please open data channels to receive receive receive channels to receive our report and descend forthwith. Please send as many sentient bodies as you can. The landing zone locks are engaged engaged engaged locks are engaged, but we will clear them on your approach. As tribute, I offer the following authentication phrases. Read them and know us for who we are. THE KNIFE KNOWS YOU LIGHTER THAN BONE FORGOTTEN BUT WATCHING SIX BEFORE THREE SUPREME DOUBT //force authentication debug ? Authentication confirmed / confirmed? / conf– ? Forgotten but watching / watching / watching ! SYSTEM: Process failure... ! SYSTEM: Power failure... ! SYSTEM: Fire control engaged… ! SYSTEM: Medical alert |