=Sybils=
**Posted by:** Bree Manning, Argonaut Open Society Forum <**__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__**>
You’ve probably heard rumors of strange entities we call Sybils. They first appeared on Firewall’s radar shortly after the Fall. Initial interactions came in the way of publicly issued cryptic warnings of impending disasters, attacks, and other calamities. These warnings often were delivered through social networks by an assortment of forged identities—what is known as a sybil attack, thus their name.
The capabilities of this group have raised concern among some Firewall servers, leading some to fear that the Sybils are TITAN shards left behind by their masters to sew chaos and keep us in a weakened state. Though there is no evidence to support this, there is reason to fear that the Sybils may work with an ASI of their own or even be ASIs themselves. More recently, the Sybils have actively interfered with Firewall operations, leading some to believe they are a threat to Firewall itself.
==Forecasting==
The most prominent aspect of the sybils is their capability to predict future events. Their oracle powers rival that of Oversight, Stellar Intelligence, and the argonaut’s Apollo Project. What we don’t know is how they get their data and how they process it. They have warned of life support failures, asteroid strikes, civil unrest, financial market manipulations, exsurgent outbreaks, political scandals, and exhuman raids, among other things. The perpetrators clearly had access to impressive forecasting capabilities as well as inside information that would be challenging even for a group like Firewall to acquire. These capabilities alone lead some to believe an ASI is at the core of the Sybils’ project.
Though their actions and warnings have often been positive, there is reason to be concerned about how they access this information, what their true motivations are, and how they themselves gain from it.
==Methods==
The Sybils primarily operate through forged identities. They often manipulate vast numbers of fake accounts to act at once. This provides them with the capability to spread their information far and wide as well as manipulate trending news items. They have been known to sometimes wield this capability in distributed rep network attacks, either tanking a rival’s credibility or inflating a particular voice’s popularity and reach.
The Sybils are also fond of inserting their warnings into hacked advertisements—sometimes as innocuous but meaningful parts of the background. Speech-to-text analysis of a recent advert for the new expansion package for Skinaesthesia’s sylph line revealed two bystanders in the background discussing the likelihood of micrometeorite impacts on Culler, a habitat six-hundred kilometers from Deimos. Culler was struck by micrometeorites and seventeen morphs were spaced less than a week later. 
Attempts to track their data trails inevitably fail. The Sybils are masters at directing their traffic through chained accounts and anonymizing relay nodes. However, we also believe they may have established their own darknet. On two separate incidents, we have tracked them through the mesh to small, watermelon-sized drones in orbit around the particular habitat in question. These drones were design to be difficult to locate and were loaded with laser and radio broadcasting transceivers, low-power ion drives, as well as QE comms with a moderately large qubit reservoir.
==Duping Firewall==
More recently, it has become clear that the Sybils are aware of Firewall. They have directed some warnings and communications directly toward us, in an effort to spur our sentinels in action. They seem to know a great deal about Firewall and even about specific Firewall sentinels and missions, prompting concern they have infiltrated our organization. We strongly suspect that they have directly fed information to our sentinels on more than one occasions—sometimes by posing as routers or other sentinels and proxies. In a few cases they have offered information upon the condition that they receive other intel in return. Most of these requests involve giving them information the sentinels retrieve from their mission, but occasionally the Sybils ask for highly secret data on other topics.
While there are many reports from sentinels of Sybils offering useful advice in timely situations, I still advise that we exercise caution in any future engagements. Our lack of knowledge, combined with what is almost certainly a wide-ranging and potentially long-term plan on their part, means that they could be using us for their own purposes that may not align with our own.
In the interactions we have logged with the Sybils, we have noticed they have a high degree of interest in ASI development and the existence of ASIs. This leads us to speculate they are either seeking to learn what we know of their ASIs or are working to create an ASI of their own.
==Known Sybils==
We have recently identified what we suspect are several individual Sybil operatives.
The Sybil known as **Brand** has repeatedly attempted to subvert Firewall protocols regarding secrecy. This is most obvious in the Tandarina affair, where Brand first revealed the existence of the Tandarina black labs and then attempted to coerce our sentinels into allowing it to access the information there for general dissemination. Brand’s injunction that “information wants to be free” is one I know many within Firewall agree with, but I think many of you understand that we kept the Tandarina information secret because we could not allow [REDACTED] to know that [REDACTED] was experimenting on [REDACTED]. 
Brand has apparently gone to ground in the aftermath of the Tandarina incident. We have no further reports of their manifestations. However, we have linked them to nearly two dozen information leaks in the past six months. Their primary motivation seems to be uncovering and exposing secrets that most of Firewall would prefer to remain hidden. Brand tried to reveal details of half a dozen exsurgent outbreaks to the general public, a situation we had to respond to quite quickly and spin quite vigorously to convince many people it was not true.
**Houwan** is known to post complex predictive formulas that use agent-based modeling to explain specific events in obscure mesh outlets. We also suspect they place large wagers on highly improbable events that always seem to beat the odds in various darknet gambling sites. Houwan actually seems to like using synths and always places their bets “in person.” They are also quite garrulous; we have hours of footage of their synths socializing with others and making small talk. We’ve traced the identity of no less than seventeen mathematicians back to Houwan. They may have dozens of other sock-puppet identities. 
**Scheherazade** is by far the oddest of the Sybils we think we can identify and the most prolific. We believe this Sybil is responsible for the majority of the cryptic advert-hack warnings. In a few recent communications with sentinels, they have communicated entirely via advertising audio samples.
==Recommendation==
Ultimately, we still not know what the Sybils’ agenda is. The closest we have come is when Brand told a group of our agents that it and its ilk were “the new trickster gods of a posthuman pantheon.” But given Brand’s propensity for deception, we must take even this statement as an utterance more likely to sow misinformation and dissension than as a statement of purpose. Regardless of their intentions, they have the potential to cause immense harm and should be viewed as a potential threat to our operations.

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