Identification Omni-Glyphs

-- PERSONAL LOG (PUBLIC) | FE 5288-13-1-5 --

-- AUTHOR: Hegemony Overseer (ALL-CROWN) | Camdyn Astair --

-- SUBJECT: Identification Omni-Glyph Explanation --

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This is a personal log entry for... posterity, I guess? I’m not sentimental,
but I feel like what we know now would be important if the Prospector ever rears
its head again, or at the very least nice to have as a historical record.

When the entity we came to know as "The Prospector" arrived here in the Milky Way
around FE 5270—and that’s not something we knew at the time; the Prospector itself confirmed it from recovered databanks—it spent the first few years spreading itself across the stars without any knowledge from the three major powers.

Our problems with IO-G began when we first started routinely encountering some of
the unknown’s expedition fleets. We thought this might have been a new power hailing from
interlane space; had we known just how much of a threat the thing was or its true nature, we could’ve prevented what was about to happen much sooner.

The pattern was always the same: we—or rather, any major power—would reach out and attempt to hail the expeditionary fleet. In return, we believed a ruthless cyber-attack would follow; all computerized systems would fry instantly. Shortly after, the vessel, station, city, or what-have-you would be systematically ripped apart and harvested for material.

Something we found odd: only the source of the transmission seemed to be targeted in the attack. Sometimes other ships or nearby stations linked to the hailing ship's computerized systems would also have their systems fried, but they weren't immediately attacked. Early on, when we observed this behavior, we thought it indicative of some sort of machine entity that couldn’t actually see, but was using EM waves as a sort of signal to "hunt" by.

It wasn’t until Arin—my Auxiliary—was working on the recovered Splinter AI from Spiral and had a rather novel thought that we had a breakthrough. After no small amount of trial and error, he was able to hack together a rig of computer parts he said worked like a mirror or a redirect server—instead of trying to process the data, it would simply copy the data, acknowledge its existence, alter it slightly, and send it right back to the Splinter AI. After some time, and lots of fried circuit boards, he theorized that the "cyber-attack" wasn’t actually an attack at all. Instead, it was something akin to a handshake protocol between two computing systems. It just so happened that whatever method it was using to handshake was accidentally destroying our hardware.

As it turned out, he was right. I won’t go into all the details of the harvesting operations that followed; that’s outside the scope of this log. I will go into the horror of what the Splinter AI revealed after we’d passed its "test".

Apparently, it was using something it called Identification Omni-Glyphs, or IO-G, to try and communicate with our poor CPUs. Upon further investigation, we learned that IO-G is a positional numeral system...of a sort. The differences from the numeral systems we use are immediately apparent. First, it uses 3D glyphs instead of 2D characters. Second, it’s a base-10-billion numeral system. Third, it consists of a ‘cluster’ of 10 glyphs each.

There are only ten glyphs, but—ingeniously—instead of making a slightly different glyph for each number up to 10 billion, the glyphs are able to rotate along the X, Y, and Z axes—each to infinitesimally small degrees. This rotational data is stored alongside it and can be deciphered with ease using a procedural decryption algorithm. Well, as long as your computer knows what it’s looking at and can render 3D glyphs in a 2D binary system.

For perspective, a single cluster of ten glyphs is capable of representing numbers up to 10^100. That is to say, they can comfortably be used to give every single atom in the universe its own unique serial number—with about 100 billion billion to spare. We were later told that the Technocults wanted to "future-proof" their ID system.

That’s what it is, too—an ID system. That's the only thing they use it for, hence the name "Identification Omni-Glyphs."  We don’t know too much more about it beyond that—nothing that’s very relevant to our situation anyway. The Technocults banded together to create it, wanting a universal way to ID—well, everything, I guess—both with each other and internally. Supposedly it was based on the language of a species named the Lei’hlii, which were (are?) subaqueous and use three-dimensional weighted glyphs for their "written" language, as the water and currents weren’t amenable to traditional writing.

Needless to say, once we realized this, there was no more confusion about why our computers weren’t able to handle the Prospector’s ships saying ‘hello’. It also served as a watershed moment; this thing, whatever it was, was far beyond anything we could imagine, and—intentionally or not—several orders of magnitude more dangerous than we had originally assessed. Like I said, I’m not sentimental, and I try not to look back, but when I see everything that was lost, I can’t help but wonder how much we could have saved if we’d taken it seriously from the beginning. But that’s the point of these logs, right? The past is in the past, and what’s done is done. Hopefully there’s some future historian who’s keeping this wisdom alive, eh?

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-- END LOG --