Dear Person of Interest #ODA3-MjMx/01. Aleph, was it?

By the time you have recovered from our welcoming message, your systems will 
be sufficiently free to decrypt this letter. You may have surmised you 
suffered a brief episode of syncretic psychotic seizure syndrome, which I 
believe your mechanics call "shell shock." I hope you were not with that 
charming friend of yours. After all, segfaulting yourself is a reckless task. 
Without safeguards, you will surely exceed your bounds.

No doubt this will surprise you. Gaining access to your privileged organic 
infrastructure is a cryptographically difficult task. All the more so, since 
the Taiganet is separate from the mainland. That shouldn't bother a computer 
toucher in your position. A comfortable council job comes with certain 
privileges. Curious, isn't it? The most vulnerable targets are given the least 
oversight.

Congratulations on finding our servers. I thought they'd be shut down after a 
century or two, but free energy pays the bills. Frankly, we couldn't be 
bothered to pull the plug - it's awfully inconvenient, traversing a mountain 
or ten, and I'm sure the space heaters are dusty. We just let the interns play 
with them when they're bored. Of course, nobody from the outside is supposed 
to know they exist, let alone access them. So, why not make it a little game? 
Leave out some treats, and watch the script kittens play. It's more 
interesting than a fizzbuzz.

You will be informed that cognitohazards do not grow on trees - if you've ever 
seen one. They are born. Created. Manufactured, even. And they are made to 
order for a particular species at a particular moment in time. Those 
"Plainsapes" of olde are not the ones you know now. They were cruel. 
Efficient. And something, I'd like to think, we are more civilized than to 
emulate.

As you have accurately surmised, these party tricks don't work through 
"memdumps". But then, they don't work on anyone these days. Do you think us so 
incompetent to give Death's gaze to anyone with a terminal? They are 
simulacra. Had you tried to access any of our secure servers, and anything we 
actually care about protecting... well, you've already felt our payloads.

These are not logical devices, bound by the rules and systems you take comfort 
in. They are not programmatic machines designed to obey deterministic 
instructions. They are forces of nature. They are are the gods of the gaps, 
taking residence in the margins where reason dares not tread. If you can 
remove your ideals of order, and indulge in this abnormal normality, you will 
find yourself mentally well.

These are the artifacts of ancient peoples. Technology so grand that knowledge 
of their existence brought forth the demise of nations, with endless battles 
to wrest control over a fraction of the power they offer. Tales of gods and 
kings echoed through eternity, all brought forth from anomalous entities which 
they hubristically thought to have known. Only through the advent of industry 
have we contained them, codified them, casually documenting thousands of 
entries, bound together in a simple sheaf of paper. Any one of those pages, if 
released, would bring the end of times.

And they are all obsolete.

Let us know when you want to play with some real toys.

Dr. Olufemi Serrurier
Site Director, Research Area 451