I feel I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind pilots that the consortium, its partners and associates have considerable experience engaging Drifters with a variety of doctrines under a variety of circumstances, including during the Throne Worlds campaign.
That said, as the matter is moving into the public view, it seems reasonable to discuss malware origins so long as it doesn’t compromise operational matters. Very simply, at this time we can’t rule out a variety of potential origins for the malware.
- Indeed, there is a non-zero chance the rogue drones being disassembled by Zainou Biotech aboard their facility may have either incorporated or been infected by some manner of Triglavian code. The intent and nature of such an action is of course unknown, but would indeed align with intercepts indicating that elements of the Collective wish to engage in a sort of religious unity-of-purpose with the rogue drones, as we’ve discussed at various points in the past. The Navka hives are indicative of this.
- Vailakkel may have himself been suborned by the Collective. As we know, CONCORD has repeatedly indicated that it is concerned about the risk of neuromemetic control over susceptible populations. How this occurs, and under what circumstances, is of course unknown. However, it may be with precedent, given the interference of the ‘Astromancer’ in a CONCORD experiment that we later learned was intended to verify abnormalities that resulted in the discovery of the Abyss and the Collective. Unfortunately, we did not have sufficient time with the ‘Astromancer’s’ cadaver to adequately study it. Likewise, the on-going interrogation of Vailakkel remains subject to operational security concerns.
- There is a non-zero chance that the recent Triglavian worm that unlocked additional filament functionality has been used as a code base, alongside elements of rogue drone code, by an unknown actor. In this assessment, Vailakkel is a willing agent for a third party targeting the facility. In this assessment, the rogue drone disassembly facility is more of an arbitrary target to cause further chaos than a target on its own merits.
- There is, of course, the chance that Zainou Biotech itself has been experimenting with rogue drone and Triglavian code. Naturally, researching defenses against a repeat of the Triglavian Galnet worm’s rapid spread would require testing novel information warfare constructs in a contained environment. It is therefore a possibility that sabotage caused an inadvertent failure of containment for a test environment.
There is a possibility that the answer is in fact some combination of these four possibilities. At this time, we hesitate to theorize, though I’ll admit to personally thinking the first two options the most likely.
That said, of more importance in this case is advancing the purge of compromised systems, both station and cybernetic, to limit the damage and injury that is resulting from this on-going crisis.