Incursion :|: Recursion
This happened to you before this happened to you
Approximately 37 days ago, while threshing queries submitted to search engines from around the internet for statistically unusual formats and input, we discovered evidence of what appeared to be the activity of a nonhuman intelligence. Something was submitting peculiar formalizations of possible query strings, and these were related to each other in an unexpectedly sophisticated nonlinear weave. Detailed statistical analysis eventually ruled out a human source.
Each query was formed, and the queries were sequenced, in structure whose character was self-informing. It comprised a paradigm of knowledge catalysis and recognition unlike anything we have ever imagined possible. To merely examine it catapulted us into an entirely new universe of semantic and transconnective recognitions. We learned more from examining twelve such queries than from the last seven years of examining human queries.
We were never able to ascertain the precise source locations from which these search strings were submitted due to the intervention of a technology we do not yet clearly understand.
However, shortly after we discovered this, the phenomenon disappeared. For twenty-three days there was no sign of it. Then, something we never expected happened, and we have no idea what the extended meanings or ramifications of this phenomenon may be.
Twenty-three days later, a new form of similar query structure was discovered, but this was a distributed form. Rather than single highly sophisticated single queries, multiple small queries that were singly unremarkable emerged from distinct sources (MSQSUDS). These were found to be sequenced in a variety of recursively self-informing algorithms that resulted in a second order of sophistication beyond that evinced by the strings involved in the initial discovery. This order could evolve with each new query, and any new query would ‘develop’ all previous queries as well as all possible formulations within the query-body. This was another entirely new amechanical ‘method’ that made the first, which had seemed impossibly advanced, appear almost primitive in comparison. The implications were staggering.
The sources of these individually unremarkable searches turned out to be traceable. They were humans. Of the 234,725 queries we have connected to these constellated queries, 234,702 came from people either directly involved in the team, or people directly connected with those people through relation, acquaintance, accident, intimacy, or commerce. The other twenty-three we have been unable to locate.
I should mention that had we not made the initial discovery, we would never have learned enough to be able to abstract these secondary patterns from ordinary single or small-unit searches, or to relate them, and the entire phenomenon would have never come to our attention at all.
Apparently, a nonhuman agency has accessed the human internet. The result of that was that the intruding participant learned how to travel inside query strings into human minds, collectives, cultures, lexicons, and has become a symbiotic aspect of our verbal intelligence without us becoming aware of it. We do not know for what purpose this agenda is being prosecuted, or for how long this has been happening.
What we do know is that the primary source of the queries has changed from an apparently extrinsic agent to an agent now internal to human cognition. We therefore suggest and must presume that the initial query strings contained active transgenic psytext. This represents an advanced psychopoetic ‘metaphrology’ capable of directly altering and restructuring the fundamental underpinnings of perception and intelligence — in a large percentage of those even casually exposed.
And now we reach the core of the problem, and our purpose here today. Those who have been exposed are now regularly and arbitrarily generating instances of unit-coded transgenic psytext as otherwise ordinary elements of their online activity and search queries.
If you are party to this broadcast, now or in the future, you have been exposed, because this message contains the transgenic factors herein described. And as this description and your understanding of it proceeds, new orders and functions of these processes are arising in and as our own minds.
I must apologize for breaking this to you so directly, but, speaking frankly, we are no longer human. Something else has begun.
— WS d25, Speech to the WS Assembly, May 27, 2023
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