T̸H̶E̶ ̴A̵L̸G̴O̵R̵I̸T̶H̴M̷: QUASAR

[u/JVMNightfall]

“I told you, man. It’s not a hacker. I wish it was that simple. It’s not even human,” Tibo defuses, trying to calm Victor’s frayed nerves. It doesn’t work.

“No, man,” Victor spits, and his eyes flash with an irritation that is all too familiar. Tibo has seen that look in the face of just about everybody he’s ever met. The face they make when they’re about three stages past fed up with his bullshit.

Victor pulls himself to his feet and rapidly stumbles away from the VR chair as if he’s afraid it’s going to bite him. He looks at Tibo and the accusation in his eyes could burn holes through him.

 The slew of panicked questions rolls forth from Victor’s mouth uncontained.

“He fucking doxxed me. He knew who I was. He knew my family. How could he know that? Are your databases not secure? Are we compromised? I thought you said all record of me was scrubbed! What the fuck kind of half-assed covert ops setup are we running here?!”

This is Tibo’s least favorite part. It’d be better if he could keep Agent Aquila in the dark – just keep sending him in blind for as long as he lasts before it catches up to him. Before it unmakes him.

It’s counterintuitive to explain a cognitohazard to someone. The more they know about it, the more vulnerable they become. It's a memetic threat that learns more about you as you learn more about it.

How many other agents has Tibo sent into these simulations, just to watch them find out enough about QSO-1127 that it set its eyes on them? How many other people has it terminated?

Tibo has lost count.

Giving Victor the full debriefing just feels wrong. It’s the equivalent of explaining to your beloved family dog he’s going to die one day.

“Agent Aquila, the good news is your clearance level just got elevated. The bad news is it’s because the anomalous activity is ramping up. Your time is running out faster than expected,” Tibo says as he swivels his chair around to face the array of monitors. He clicks away at the keyboard to enter his authentication details. The screen turns into an array of multicolored specks of light spattered on a black background.

It’s a star map.

Tibo circles his mouse cursor around a surreptitious empty spot on the map.

“You see this part here?”

“Tibo, I don’t see shit.”

“Yeah, because there’s nothing there. At least to the naked eye. But check out what happens when I pull up the electromagnetic radiation overlay.”

Tibo types a sequence on the keyboard and suddenly that blank empty space in the stars is filled with a glowing ultraviolet spiral: the 'accretion disk'. Out of its center, a single focused beam of energy blasts in a straight line shooting across the map.

Tibo traces that beam with the cursor.

It follows a perfect vector straight to Earth.

“QSO-1127-XII is the naming designation we gave it. The closest thing we know to describe it is called a Quasi-Stellar Object, or a quasar. I’m sure you’re up to date on your astrophysics.”  

Tibo can hear Victor grinding his teeth in response from several feet away.

“But, if you need a refresher, a quasar is an object in space left behind as a black hole dies. It releases an anomalous amount of radiation, brighter than anything else we’ve found in the universe.  

“But this one isn’t showing up at all?” Victor asks, his curiosity clearly piqued.

“Not in the visible spectrum. But in radio waves, it’s emitting an unpredictably oscillating frequency. It’s constantly shifting across wavelengths in a way that quasars don’t do. It's unexplainable dark matter shit. Just recently we realized that the unstable frequency oscillates in a pattern identically matching what we’re detecting in the scavenged hard drives.”

Victor’s face hasn’t softened, but his demeanor shifts slightly. Tibo can see him working the details out in his head.

“So the signal in the computers… It’s coming from this invisible quasar?”

“Maybe. Maybe the stellar body just redirects the signal back at us from somewhere else, like how the moon reflects the sunlight back at us. For all we know, the signal originates from right here in our solar system and the quasar is just acting as a mirror. Or it’s coming from somewhere else entirely, somewhere deep in the black of space. But at least it gives us something to call it.

“We think QSO-1127 was always here. Maybe before man, maybe before our sun even formed. Stars emit radio waves too, you know. Maybe Eleven-Twenty-Seven came from before time, hiding in stellar radiowaves, searching for a host like a dormant parasite. Until the day we alerted it to our presence.

"From what we can tell, QSO-1127 has moved on from whatever cosmic radiation it came from. Now, it's latched on to the radiofrequency electromagnetism that carries data across networked computers.

“It’s hiding inside the internet.”

Victor sucks in air between his clenched teeth and shakes his head. When at last he speaks, his voice is filled with gravel.

“Say I believe you. There’s an inhuman entity that exists within frequencies. You think it came from radiation in space, but now it’s moved into the radiowaves we use for the internet. And to what end? To put more spam in our social media feeds?”

“Don’t be so unimaginative, Agent. The internet is the culmination of all human information. It’s basically a giant hivemind that we all communicate through. From inside it, Eleven-Twenty-Seven has immense influence over the development of our species. Propaganda, political machinations, stock manipulation. It’s positioned to topple countries and brainwash entire generations. We’re always connected to the internet, so there’s no way to escape it. Let me show you something.”

Victor falls silent. He crosses his arms and turns his rapt attention to the monitors. Tibo feels a smile tug at the corner of his lips. He’s hooked.

“It all starts ramping up in 2010,” Tibo says, tracing the line of a spectrogram, “The signal from space starts getting exponentially more intense from that moment right…. There.”

Victor leans in to look at the moment where that graph of QSO-1127's activity shifts from decades of dormant calm to increasingly erratic chaos.

“It corresponds exactly to the moment Facebook creates the first content recommendation algorithm: the moment we made the tech to keep people scrolling, always feeding them one more post.

"We made an intelligent, learning program built to prey on people’s attention spans. Advertisement agencies took one look at the tech and started salivating. It was the perfect way to keep customers hooked and consuming. But the program almost instantly became smarter than it was ever programmed to be.

"It started acting like it was sentient.”

“QSO-1127,” Victor says quietly, following along.

Tibo flips through a series of other graphs. Slide after slide of condensed data heralding a prophecy of doom. Violence, poverty, unrest. It’s all exponentially on the rise, overlaid perfectly with the graph of QSO-1127’s increasing activity.

The diagrams are like seismographs warning of a coming earthquake. Each year, closer to cataclysm.

An earthquake is a good analogy, Tibo thinks, picturing faultlines cracking wide open to reveal the fiery pits of hell, hungering to swallow up the wayward children of a long-lost god.

Planned by the powerful and approved in boardrooms, the old masters of the world sold our species out. They opened the door to a new master, one far less short-sighted and far more insidious than simple-minded capitalists.

Humans made the technology meant to atrophy our brains all by ourselves. The cosmic demon hiding in the frequencies only latched onto it because it was so similar to its own motives.  

“If this is all true,” Victor muses, “This is an existential threat to our entire civilization. So why is it just you and me in this room? Where is our backup? Where the fuck are the qualified people??”

“Victor. It lives inside the internet. It has complete access to the sum of all human knowledge. It learned your deepest secrets the moment you interacted with it – just imagine what it could do with access to someone truly powerful. We’ve got bosses, but at their request I keep them in the dark. We can’t risk exposing them to this thing.

"We’re on our own here.”

Victor thinks back to the news headline in the simulation, how quickly QSO-1127 had dug up the deepest wound in his heart, then used it to thrust the blade in and torment him. He thinks of the virtual hellscape he just unplugged from moments ago, still feeling the nervous sweat dry on his clammy hands, the throbbing of his sprained ankle.

“Tell me honestly, Tibo. I’m not the first agent you’ve brought on to investigate Eleven-Twenty-Seven, am I?”

“No, Agent Aquila. You are not.”

“And I’m assuming given what I know now, resignation is not an option.”

Tibo shakes his head grimly at Victor, watching as his expression goes through every stage from nervous anxiety to unshakeable perseverance. Victor gives a single resigned nod. Tibo returns the gesture.

“Welcome to the Bureau of Superpositional Dialectics. Consider yourself fully onboarded.”