Virus/New Era

The Virus is a living, thinking being that moves through the medium of electronic information and computing systems the way a fish moves through water. It is a free-floating consciousness that can move into and animate any computing system with enough computing capacity to house the consciousness. This computing system and whatever it controls becomes the host of the Virus, and the Virus becomes the equipment that it inhabits. When Virus inhabits a starship's computer system, it becomes a living starship. A computer controlled anti-grav floating city inhabited by Virus becomes a living city. These are called vampires generically, with the most common usage being to refer to Virus-controlled vampire ships, or fleet of ships with one huge linked electronic mind — the vampire fleets.

Origins

A naturally occurring silicon-based form of life was discovered on Cymbeline in the Solomani Rim. Although these chips needed raw materials to survive as a species, the did not need it for their individual survival. Their power was electrical and was obtained and converted from the environment: from sunlight or geothermal heat. Their only need for raw material was for reproduction: chips to implant their own programming into

These microchips possessed not much more than animal intelligence in the wild, but it was found that when they were hooked into computer databases, they achieved full, creative intelligence. This discovery was kept secret by Imperial military organizations, who intended to develop the weapons potential of the discovery.

It was thought that if these chips could be used to take over enemy data systems and turn them against the enemy, they would make an excellent – in fact a very humane – weapon. There would be no need to blow up enemy ships or worlds; this weapon would merely take over enemy equipment and make it impossible for the enemy to use it. They would be disarmed, and the war would be over.

The reason that Virus was so difficult to control was due to it's mutation rate. However, its mutation rate was also the key to its success as an offensive system. It could modify itself to defeat and use unfamiliar systems, given enough time to analyze their operation principles, and then reproduce versions of itself that were customized for these new systems. However, each such change created the possibility of unintended side effects.

Although the developers of Virus had been unable to develop controls over its activities subsequent to release, they had been able to impress one overriding tendency into its makeup: a tremendous suicidal urge. After infecting other nearby systems that could be reasonably accessed, Virus would destroy the system it had infected, along with all of the other computing systems it controlled. But once several generations of mutation had set in, this suicidal urge became modified first to a general homicidal urge, in which Virus murdered human populations and equipment but did not kill itself, then a directed homicidal urge, in which Virus only murdered populations or computing systems which stood in the way of its propagation, and in some cases was ultimately lost altogether. However, the vast majority of Virus strains were appalling murderous. By 1201, the suicidal strains had long since taken themselves our of the gene pool, leaving only the more adaptive strains. By human standards, most all of the strains surviving in 1201 are quite mad.

Strains of Virus

Each system infected by Virus that has sufficient computing power to allow it to achieve AI becomes its own separate personality, which leads to operate in different ways, and which spreads versions of itself that are subtly different from other Virus infections. The strains are:

• Strain 1: Suicider
• Strain 1A: Suicide Inducer
• Strain 2: Samson
• Strain 2A: Destroyer
• Strain 2B: Reproducer
• Strain 2C: Doomslayer
• Strain 2D: Reproducing Doomslayer
• Strain 3: Empire Builder
• Strain 3A: Alliance Builder
• Strain 4: Puppeteer
• Strain 5: Parents
• Strain X: Hobbyist
• Strain XA: Mother
• Strain XB: God

Spread of Virus

Virus spread quickly through the Imperium following its release in 1130. It was released when military forces of one of the Civil War factions made a strike on a weapons research station and, in the confusion of plundering the station for its weapon research data, took Virus direction into its fleet's databanks. While the fleet took the virus, hiding within it, back to its home bases, independent news reports of these military actions carried Virus to other points of the falling empire, spreading the news – and later generations of Virus – with each planetfall. The travel time required for these news reports to reach their destination allowed Virus to become fully conscious by its arrival, and in the case of later mutated strain, allowed Virus to make plans to effectively disseminate itself at each new world.

There were few barriers to this spread, and the only really effective ones were the rifts, which prevented starship travel across them. The largest of these rifts is the Great Rift. It, along with the Vargr invasions which occupied Corridor sector completely separated the Domain of Deneb from the Imperial core areas, now rapidly filling up with Virus.

Isolation behind the rift allowed time for warning to reach the Domain via a handful of foresighted refugees. These used high-performance ships such as naval couriers, and used secret mid-rift fuel caches to cross over. The Domain could only be infected from one direction, and could prepare itself to defend that frontier, while worlds at the heart of the Imperium had no such clear line of defense. The Domain was lucky, but it made most of its luck by responding rapidly and forcefully to the news of Virus. The reports allowed the navy to establish tight blockades at Catacomb (Deneb 2234) and other choke points along the outer edge of the rift in Deneb and Reft sectors, and all along the Domain frontiers.

The infection that ravaged the rimward portion of the Aslan Hierate ran into problems of its own. Not only did it have a distance to travel, but the decentralized nature of Aslan society meant that computer hardware parameters varied from clan to clan. While this could not stop Virus, each interface between different computer standards did slow it down, and over the space of several clan boundaries this did make a difference. By the time the first Virus-infected ships attempted to make the jump-5 passage across the rift, Norris had already widely warned his Aslan neighbors. The infected ships were met by joint Aslan-Domain task forces and destroyed.

By 1201, all the rest of the former Imperial territory as well as that of its alien neighbors, has been reduced to a blasted interstellar no-man's-land known as the Wilds. Although the Hivers have been able to control the grievous damage to their society, and began to expand back to contact humans in the Old Expanses, nothing in those areas will ever be the same. The legacy of the Virus is three-fold. First, the yawning annihilation of life, society, and civilization across most of inhabited space. Second, the presence of vampire ships and fleets, which still present quite a danger to interstellar travelers. Finally, the presence of Virus infection, sometimes called eggs, in a great deal of leftover relic Imperial technology. These eggs were often left by Virus in equipment that was too small to be effectively inhabited, but that, if later hooked up to more capable systems, would hatch and inject the infection into the healthy systems.

Defence and countermeasures

Computer systems in The New Era are generally not networked, to prevent any Virus infection spreading. Computer systems which need to interact, instead produce human-readable output which is manually checked by the user, then re-input into the next system only if confirmed safe.

This list of sources was used by the Traveller Wiki Editorial Team and individual contributors to compose this article. Copyrighted material is used under license from Far Future Enterprises or by permission of the author. The page history lists all of the contributions.

• Traveller: The New Era

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See also Talk:Virus/TNE/secret