=The Exsurgent Virus= 
**Posted by:** Qi, Vector <**__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__**>
We recently intercepted communications between Hirst, an AGI executive at Titanian microcorp Eir Biomedical, and a TITAN artifact broker who called herself Regina. Hirst wanted multiple exsurgent virus samples and not just from Iapetus. They wanted strains from the New Mumbai Quarantine Zone on Luna and a few from Mars transported to a remote lab on Titan. Carrying multiple existential threats across the system is no easy task, so Hirst wanted verification that Regina’s crew could handle the job. We caught the briefing documents she sent as part of her proof.
This is a rare insight into the exsurgent virus and some of the claims in this briefing have been corroborated by independent sources. Others, not so much. I’ll make notes when appropriate. I think with a little editing, we could use this for our own sentinels. After all, we usually focus on destroying the virus, not containing it for transport and study. Most of our people don’t appreciate how incredibly adaptive the virus is—and that leads to restoring sentinels from backup.
After we intercepted the briefing, a team moved in to ego-nap Regina when she traveled to Titan for final negotiations. Intel suggests she has ties to Ozma—undercover or moonlighting, we can’t tell. Fleet Intel got wind of the operation and we had to abort. I think Regina wound up in their hands. This is especially troubling because Eir is a front company for some group deep in the Ministry of Science—something to do with their research on curing the immortality blues. Why they need the exsurgent virus for that is beyond me, and all more the reason we should take another look, right?
==What We Know== 
**Excerpted From:**
//Regina’s Rules, Part One: Know Your Enemy//
Everyone remembers the nanoplagues released by the TITANs during the Fall and the monsters they created from former humans. Everyone has seen them, fought them, survived them, seen the same fucking footage, read the same fucking stories. Everyone’s a goddamn expert. Everyone is full of shit. Most people don’t even realize that those monsters were created by variants of the same virus, or that this virus has a name: the exsurgent virus.
I hired you because I saw that you weren’t 100 percent full of the same shit, but it’s not enough. You memorize this. Everyone in my crew does, or they’re gone. If I hired you, then you know what I mean by gone.
===Rule 1: The Exsurgent Virus is Smarter Than You Think=== 
The first rule is to treat the exsurgent virus as a hostile intelligence. It’s not like anything else, anywhere. It might be alien for all we know. I’ll get to that in a bit. You have to realize that this virus is a really a family of infectious vectors. It first began as a digital virus, spreading from the TITANs to infect mesh networks, but then it spread to multiple mediums: as a biological virus, a nanoplague, and basilisk hacks. In order to make that leap from computer to meat, it had to subvert tech capable of manufacturing biological viruses, nanobots, and mind-affecting sensory inputs. Just think about that for a second. In digital form, the exsurgent virus can burn through almost any defensive software and outwit talented hackers and system admins. Then it knows enough biology to take whatever medical tech is available to it in order to engineer a virus that can infect a biomorph in ways we can’t replicate even if we wanted to. It can beat us in two separate fields of knowledge, all contained in a payload small enough to be transmitted through a standard mesh upload in a fraction of a second. It is a mistake to think that this is a disease like rabies or ebola. It is intelligent. It can think, albeit in a way we can’t recognize as such. There’s no better evidence than how it uses its anatomical and neurological knowledge against us.
Every strain of the virus uses the biological or synthetic body as a multi-purpose tool, shaping and mutating it to suit its needs. It knows more about our own biology than we do; knowledge I presume was encoded into it by the TITANs. During the Fall, it seemed like every strain could turn a biomorph into a monster, but we don’t see as much of the tentacle and thousand-fleshy-mouths freaks these days. This probably isn’t because we have gotten so much better at fighting the virus, but because the shock value has worn off. It was great psychological warfare back then, but we’ve all gotten used to it. Newer strains are usually more subtle, only affecting the mind of the victim, turning them into sleeper agents for the TITANs. Fact is, any strain can do things a dedicated hypercorp research team with an unlimited R&D budget couldn’t do on its best days. Out of all of the TITANs’ achievements, the exsurgent virus is probably their most complex one. Fortunately, even it has its limitations, which brings me to the next rule.
===Rule 2: Quarantine Protocols Work—Except When They Don't=== 
[[image:ExsurgentVirus_JacobAnderson.png align="right"]]Scientists developed effective quarantine protocols for the exsurgent virus based on the principle that it can’t do everything at once. It might exploit aspects of biology or nanorobotics that we don’t understand, but even it can only do so much at a time. By this, I mean that if you faced a purely biological strain of the virus, a bot or synthmorph was safe from it because it wasn’t organic. A digital virus can’t infect someone in a Faraday cage, assuming its integrity remains intact. It can’t magically jump from one vector to another, which a lot of people assume it can. To be fair, exsurgent strains are smart. An infected biomorph can sometimes transmit multiple vectors—a touch or cough could transmit the biological infection, while its mesh implants could transmit digital viruses and basilisk hacks. Victims may even be infected with multiple strains that work together. That’s how a lot of people get confused. The quarantine protocols work by assessing what infectious vectors are present and then it assumes anything susceptible to a given vector is infected. Isolate the hazardous area, then eradicate the vector with the strongest counter-measures you have. The technical specs for the protocol should be installed in your muse now. It will walk you through the process should you need to implement it. [Note: The skillsoft had a surveillance malware app embedded in it that alerted an anonymous server whenever it was used. Guess Regina didn’t trust her employees that much.]
The quarantine protocols compiled by the argonauts were pretty effective during the Fall. If they weren’t, we’d all be dead, right? Since then, they’ve been improved through experience and data. Containing the exsurgent virus is one of the few things nearly every transhuman faction can agree to work on. Even the Jovians make their results public because even if they hate the anarchists, they don’t want to deal with a wave of exsurgent-infected commie scum popping up near their system.
The problem is, the protocols are only as good as the data you give it, and you rarely get good data during an outbreak. Do the infected have access to fabbers or makers? What kind of implants and gear do they have? Is more than one strain present in the outbreak? Were any asyncs exposed to the vector? Make one wrong assumption and the virus can exploit your mistake. You have to make quick decisions, including when to risk exposure to the virus. You usually can’t afford to burn or space everything that might have been exposed. You will need at least some of that gear or those people later on. We get paid to transport the material too, so we can’t be too burn happy. Dealing with the virus is about risk management, not total destruction. There’s no school or skillsoft for learning that—just hard-won experience and good instincts. My best people know that they know very damn little about the virus because the minute you think you “get it,” you’re fucked.
===Rule 3: The Virus Has An Agenda=== 
I’ve talked to cognitive scientists, people who study intelligence and sapience. I’ve shown them what the exsurgent virus has done in the past, how different strains adapt to our tactics and countermeasures. This isn’t evolution, at least in any way we can recognize it. Evolution can’t use zero-day exploits to bypass software security measures or engineer nanoswarms. We can’t even blame the TITANs for that. At least one strain, stockholm, can avoid detection from medichine implants. In fact, this strain seems to specifically target victims with medichines built with technology developed after the TITANs disappeared. Older medichines are unaffected. That isn’t a disease, but enemy action. The exsurgent virus is never random or accidental. Everything it does, it does for a reason. We just can’t comprehend it.
===Rule 4: It Will Always Reveal Itself=== 
Like I said, the exsurgent virus is not perfect. It acts in ways we can exploit, the biggest being that it always identifies itself. Buried in its encoding are identifiable patterns and structures that we can recognize as unique. In biological strains, we can identify these elements no matter how the virus mutates or conceals itself. In computer code, they appear as nonsensical data structures that serve no real role. We can identify it like junk DNA, remnants of … something else. Now what these elements are, nobody knows.
The most common theory is they are the instructions left behind by the TITANs encrypted in a format transhumans can’t even begin to crack. Other researchers have compared them to human endogenous retroviruses, which are bits of DNA in the human genome left over from ancient viral infections. Of course, these elements have nothing in common with anything in the solar system. These researchers question the common wisdom of TITANs creating the virus. What if something infected them? Something alien? If you look at some of the fucked-up mutations the virus can cause, you can see their point. Tell me that whippers or chrysacids come from Earth, through evolution or a lab. Just tell me with a straight face. It doesn’t matter to us though. What you need to know is that, sooner or later, any infected victim will show it. The exsurgent virus can’t hide forever. It always blossoms into a fucking nightmare, one way or the other.
==Vectors== 
All right, now let’s talk about how the virus is spread. If you don’t want to end up infected, I suggest you pay close attention.
===Digital Virus=== 
The first known strains of the exsurgent virus were digital, technically no different from the garden variety malware you pick up in the streets of New Shanghai with an unsecured mesh implant. It’s far more insidious and complex than any commercial malware, so think of it more like an infomorph than a simple program. It can “think,” react to security admins trying to block it, and exploit bugs in damn near any software transhumanity builds. It not only has a thorough understanding of our coding languages and structures, it can adapt to and learn new code in impressive time. It optimizes itself to maximize use of system resources and uses advanced mesh-networking techniques to distribute its processing and load. It uses compression algorithms beyond anything we’ve devised and encryption schemes that give quantum computers headaches.
Behaviorally, the exsurgent virus behaves a lot like any other malware. It obfuscates its code and processes and infects all linked devices using a library of exploits. It embeds itself in the kernel and firmware, making it nearly impossible to eradicate. It establishes encrypted command-and-control channels to distribute new techniques and exploits to iterations on different machines, or to coordinate distributed attacks. It identifies certain types of systems as infection priorities: mesh inserts, cyberbrains, fabbers, enhanced servers.
During the Fall, the virus was very direct, seeking to undermine and overwhelm local system admins before it was detected and deleted. We became pretty good at spotting it, though, so it adapted. In the years since the Fall, we’ve seen more subtle variations. These move slower and more cautiously, only infecting a few machines at a time, waiting long periods between attacks to reduce the chance of detection, and discarding techniques that it knows are identified. Again, the exsurgent virus keeps up with us.
Regardless, the virus can be fought like any other digital virus. Skilled infosec specialists can isolate and erase the virus in infected machines. You usually destroy them anyway, but sometimes you need that fabber or plasma rifle to survive. It’s been known to counterattack, so your best defense is to air gap yourself or layer you defenses. Consider using an ecto and disabling your mesh implants, and be extra careful if you’re sporting a cyberbrain—it finds them tasty. Other vectors of the virus might still get you, but if the exsurgent infomorph can’t connect, it can’t infect you.
===Biological Pathogen=== 
When most people think of the victims transformed into alien monsters during the Fall, they think nanoplague. The frightening abilities of TITAN nanoswarms, coupled with the abundance of nonexsurgent nanoplagues—including many released by transhumans against each other—reinforces this belief. And while there were many genetically engineered plagues that were also rampant during the Fall, they are rarely conflated with physical transformation.
In reality, the exsurgent virus also spreads by biological vectors. In this regard, it functions much like a virion or bacterium or other organic pathogen. It can be contracted from bodily fluids, by ingestion or injection, by breathing it in, or even simple physical contact in some cases. The actual infectious organism, however, is an advanced biological nanobot. These bionanobots are similar to the wet nanotech that transhumanity uses in many medical applications, but are far, far more advanced and are capable of self-reproduction like other cells. Like a retrovirus, they will rapidly replicate throughout your body, hijack certain biological functions, and begin inserting changes into your genetic code. The exact mechanisms at play and end results depend largely on the specific strain, but they can lead to physical growths, behavioral changes, or even complete transformation of your body and/or neural framework. Like engineered viruses, they are even capable of binding and organizing inorganic materials, which can be organized into crystalline structures—in other words they can build synthetic components such as implants within a body.
Because the distinct strains are so varied, this is one of the hardest vectors to screen against. The incubation period (between infection and first symptoms) can range from a few hours to a full week, though the window period (between infection and when detection becomes possible) is usually less than a day. On average, the infected become contagious to others within about 12 hours and usually (but not in all cases) remain infectious. Medichines and toxin filter implants provide some protection and can slow the infection, but some strains have adapted to bypass medichine detection methods.
The individual bionanobots that spread this pathogen operate best within the body, but they can survive outside the body (on touched surfaces, in spilled fluids, or exhaled and floating in the air) for hours or even days. Expect them to survive for far longer in more hostile conditions than any nonextremophile microbe. Fortunately they are limited in their motility due to their size.
===Nanoplague=== 
When the exsurgent virus gets a hold of nanoswarm tech, everyone is at risk: biomorphs, pods, and synths—even simple robots and machines. Exsurgent nanoplagues work like normal nanoswarms, but they are either targeted towards biomorphs or machines. Unlike transhuman nanoswarms, they are much more adept at burrowing into a biomorph and affecting it from within or encompassing and transforming an entire synthmorph or bot. Guardian nanoswarms and nanophages protect against it, but you need a lot more guardians than exsurgents to have a chance. Get at least three hives of guardians and be ready to pop them the second you think you’ve been exposed. EMP weapons are also handy. Once the nanobots establish an internal foothold, though, you’re done.
Biomorphs infected with a nanoplague are not (usually) contagious in the same way as they would be with the biological pathogen. There are exceptions. The nanoswarms that initiate the plague remain active, however, and may move on to infect others. Destroy the swarms and cut off their access to nanofabrication tech and problem solved, right? Except nanoplagues are the most “creative” strains. They linger and replenish their strength, and they tend to more drastically remodel whatever they’ve infected. Nanoplague transformations restructure people and things from the molecular level, like engineer swarms but with construction techniques we can’t match. The sculptor strain is one of the most horrific I’ve seen. Fortunately, it hasn’t been encountered outside of Iapetus, at least so far.
===Basilisk Hack=== 
These are not myth. They are very real and very fucking scary. The TITANs reverse-engineered our minds, both biological and cyberbrain, in order to develop various methods of attack that only used sensory input to literally crash and reprogram our minds. No scientist, not the most dedicated and well-funded hypercorp R&D team or the most unrestrained exhuman terror lab, has even begun to approach that kind of capability. Just thinking about it scares me. How do you design an image or sound that will be interpreted by the mind not only as data, but as instructions that alter it? It implies an understanding of cognitive wiring far advanced of our own.
Basilisks come in all forms of sensory input: visual and audio are most common, but I’ve heard of smell triggers and even someone that was hit through a porn sim’s haptic feedback. It’s a common exsurgent tactic to transmit a basilisk on public AR layers or even hack your mesh inserts and feed it directly into your sensory processing lobes. Basilisks usually target either meat brains or hardware, but there are a few that work on both. Some people find themselves immune to certain hacks simply because of their mental architecture; others are more susceptible. We know some work only on specific uplifts, others only on humans.
Known basilisk hacks trigger an effect the instant the victim perceives the sensory input, or at most after a few seconds. There is little to be done to stop it. Thankfully most of the effects seem to be limited. Victims go catatonic, hallucinate, or have a seizure, but recover after that with no permanent side effects.
Trickier hacks—dubbed You Gotta Believe Me! (YGBM) attacks—won’t do anything obvious to their victim but plant some kind of subconscious command in their mind that activates after a certain time. You think you saw something, then forget about it, and half an hour later you are compelled to release a contained nanoswarm on your friends without even realizing what you’re doing. Evil.
The really dangerous basilisks are the ones that paralyze the victim for a time, feeding them input. Those are actually programming a strain of the virus in their brain, turning the victim into an exsurgent. If the hack can be interrupted before the reprogramming is done, then they’re usually safe.
The only thing to do about basilisk hacks is to limit your surface area for exposure. Keep your AR off or to a minimum, downgrade your sensors, and filter your sensor feeds. If you’re really worried, go full analog. If someone freezes up, do what you can to separate them from the basilisk before their head
is rewired.
There’s a variant of basilisk hacks we call “Apple of Knowledge” hacks. These work like the full mental programming hacks, except they only work on people who already have a pre-existing set of skills or knowledge. The hack takes advantage of that expertise, coercing the victim to advance the exsurgent agenda, whether that’s nanofabbing exsurgent nanoswarms or writing new exploit code for the digital virus.
==Known Strains== 
Now that we know how it’ll get you, let’s talk about what it will do to you. That all depends on the particular strain.
===Babel=== 
Babel is a tricky virus, and a very subtle one. When a victim is infected, their language-processing centers are edited so that the sound of others speaking comes across as alien, psychotic babble. It also subtly impairs their facial recognition and kinesic awareness, so that even people they know well seem off, taking on an otherworldy, uncanny-valley-esque aspect. These effects are selective at first, but rapidly escalate to the point where victims become convinced that the people around them are all alien monsters in disguise.
Compounding the matter, the virus then also changes the way the victim speaks. Whatever they attempt to say comes out in an entirely alien language. Even worse, the fear, anger, and hysteria trigger some sort of additional effect—the victim can no longer stop “speaking,” and their babbling becomes polyphonic and conveys an aural basilisk hack. Listening to the babble for long enough turns you into a babel exsurgent yourself.
One settlement on Mars was entirely wiped out by the babel strain. Patient Zero’s family didn’t recognize what they were dealing with and were all infected in hours trying to comprehend him. Every exsurgent was able to infect others by simply talking to them. The victims all acted rationally but failed to recognize the threat until it was too late. Within a day, the local mesh for the settlement had severed outbound links; everyone within the settlement was speaking the alien language. They also began fortifying their settlement for a siege. The first responders were all infected but thankfully exsurgent quarantine protocols detected the infection and kept it from spreading further. It only took 92 hours from initial infection to total eradication of the settlement. The attack was blamed on Barsoomian terrorists of course.
===Brancusi=== 
So far this strain has only been found in deep parts of Iapetus, but we might have not recognized it as a new strain until now. It’s a nanoplague that transforms its victims into immobile abstract sculpture, hence the name. The victim’s minds remains intact and fully aware, at least according to the few reports I’ve seen. This may be part of the matrioshka brain project the TITANs were pursuing. Even if they can’t move, brancusi exsurgents are still very dangerous. The reports indicate that they teem with nanoplague swarms and transmit various basilisk hacks. In essence, they are bait—victims used to lure in others and then infect them. They probably have swarm-manufacturing capabilities, but we have no detailed scans or studies of a fully transformed exsurgent, so this is speculation.
===Chrynalus=== 
The chrynalus strain first assaults it victims with terrifying hallucinations. It then infests them with mutant growths that over time erupt from the skin as spiny insectoid and crab-like limbs. These limb growths move of their own accord, and are actually parasitic creatures dubbed chrysacids. The chrysacids grow over a meter in size, eventually breaking off from the victim (usually when they die) and moving autonomously.
===Haunting=== 
The subject of countless XP melodramas and simulspace horror games, the haunting strain transforms the victim’s mind into … something else. This strain is slow-acting and subtly alters the victim’s behavior over a period of months. A steady stream of emotional swings, inexplicable urges, weird dreams, and altered states of consciousness drive the infectee to the edge of sanity, to feeling like they’ve lost control. At this point, the virus really kicks in, and the poor soul becomes acutely aware they are under the influence of some unidentified entity, but are helpless to do anything about it.
From interrogations of people succumbing to this strain, we have learned that they experience strange and alien impulses. They talk of phantom limb syndrome for appendages they can’t even describe, like tentacles or antenna, and memories of exoplanets they’ve never encountered. They lose empathy toward other humans. One described it as feeling like their mind was being put to sleep, while an amnesiac alien ego awoke to replace it.
Months after infection, they succumb to madness and fully lose control, becoming an exsurgent. This strain has likely thus enabled thousands of sleeper agents, their minds no longer their own.
===Mindstealer=== 
What we call the mindstealer virus is probably a variant of the haunting strain. It brute-force hacks a target’s mind, converting them into an exsurgent in a matter of minutes or hours, rather than months. The victim’s ego is completely subverted, though the exsurgent mind retains their knowledge and memories, but with a completely alien personality and agenda. The transition is extremely traumatic, as the infected seem to feel their mental control slipping away. Panic, screaming, breakdowns, catatonia, and even convulsions are common. A few lucky ones retain enough willpower to off themselves before it runs its course. Sometimes they go full nihilist and take others with them.
===Stockholm=== 
A fascinating variant of the xenomorph strain, stockholm subverts the minds of its victims to view fully transformed exsurgents as aspirational idols. Other exsurgents ignore stockholm-infected victims, enabling them to help hide and protect the xenomorphs. Stockholm victims eventually transform into xenomorphs, but at a much longer time frame. I have an XP of an interrogation of a stockholm victim in the early stages of the infection. He fucking loved xenomorphs and wanted to “share the love” by hacking all of the food makers in his neighborhood. That’s how he was caught. Everyone in his building was already a xenomorph, though, and the fucker deleted their uninfected backups.
===Vittrad=== 
Little is known about this variant of Watts-MacLeod, and there has only been one known victim to date: a Titanian engineer working on a remote outpost. The virus apparently enabled the victim to identify entropic effects in living and non-living things: weak points, structural flaws, material stress, and so forth. Minor biological imperfections were seen as monstrous deformities and flaws to be taken advantage of. Head spinning with hallucinations, he used the ability to dismember, eat, and slowly kill the other engineers on his work crew.
===Watts-MacLeod=== 
Considered to be the only “benevolent” strain of the exsurgent virus, Watts-MacLeod has given us the dubious privilege of adding asyncs to transhumanity’s ranks. Their abilities are incredibly useful and I am not one to discriminate against them, at least when it comes to employing them. However, they are more vulnerable to other exsurgent infections and their minds are more … fragile, to put it lightly.
Was this strain an attempt at a “bribe,” for lack of a better term? When the TITANs saw that they couldn’t easily infect all of us by brute force, did they develop this strain to entice us into accepting the virus? Is there some detrimental aspect to the strain that has yet to be revealed? Or is it simply a glitch, an aberrant yet mostly benign mutation?
The idea that Watts-MacLeod is a social engineering experiment has some merit. Asyncs are unusually susceptible to alien thoughts and sensory input. They also seem wired to understand and interact with alien artifacts and technology found on exoplanets—artifacts that are millions of years old. How did the TITANs develop a virus that could allow us to interact with this technology if they had no idea it existed at that point of time? I think this may be the strongest evidence out there to indicate that the exsurgent virus is not a product of TITAN development. Rather, the TITANs are a development of the exsurgent virus. Perhaps the TITANs found the Pandora gates and were exposed to the virus by something they found out there.
===Xenomorph=== 
This strain may be the most effective terror weapon ever associated with the TITANs. Not only does it drive the victim to madness, it physically transforms them into an alien monstrosity—an exsurgent shock trooper. Most are bestial creatures that rely on tooth and claw. They are not equal to a professional soldier in a good morph with good weapons, but that’s besides the point. Xenomorphs are psychologically devastating and unpredictable in ways that magnify their combat effectiveness. Even one loose xenomorph can destabilize a city. People panic if they think a monster is waiting in the shadows to get them. Security forces tend to rely on overwhelming firepower when dealing with them, so it’s very hard to get high quality samples for sale.
There are multiple variants of the xenomorph strain, and each transforms you into a different type of exsurgent monster. The whipper strain, for example, doesn’t touch synthmorphs, and everyone infected becomes a whipper, not a jelly or anything else. That said, xenomorph strains often seem to be targeted towards populations in which they’ll have the best effect. And while we’re very familiar with some xenomorph types, new exsurgents are popping up all the time.
==Outbreaks and Restricted Zones== 
[[image:RestrictedZones_MarcoMazzoni.png width="800" height="560" align="right"]]We have clients that will handsomely reward us for samples of the virus or even live exsurgents, so we keep on top of exsurgent activity. Most of our clients want these samples for research purposes, and who are we to deny them? Sometimes we have to deal with intermediaries who have qualms about these kinds of goods, but they are foolish. The fact that we still get exsurgent outbreaks is proof we do not have this under control. If the fear-mongers didn’t restrict research so much, we wouldn’t have to smuggle artifacts and samples out of quarantine zones. The service we provide may be helping someone to weaponize the virus, sure—but that will happen anyway, so it might as well be us that profits. And who knows, we might be helping out research that actually gives us an upper hand on this virus—research that otherwise couldn’t happen due to pesky legalities. Not that we actually want to put ourselves out of business—though I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Regardless, each outbreak and each zone produces unique variants of the exsurgent virus, strains that are extremely valuable to our clients. Gotta know the markets, right?
===Earth=== 
The biggest quarantine zone and ironically the least valuable to us now. It’s obviously entirely infested, but there’s a small industry of blockade runners that smuggle Earth artifacts out. Planetary Consortium insiders set up holes in the defense grid so smugglers can run in and out. Very expensive and risky, but oligarchs can afford it. That’s why we’re not wiping everything out with antimatter bombs. Too much profit in it.
Earth artifacts are so valuable that they’re heavily screened to ensure they aren’t counterfeit or infected. No one goes to Earth to get samples of the virus because artifact salvage is more profitable, and none of the established smuggler groups want to take the risk playing with infected goods.
This means that it’s very difficult and expensive to get any new samples out from Earth, at least as of now. The reclaimers also have some Earthside operations, but they’re not as concerned about smuggling things out, and they’d rather avoid the risk too. It is frustrating because I think there’s a lot of potential. You see wide-scale and long-term infections that we haven’t seen anywhere else. Still, if you ever find yourself in a position to go on an Earth salvage op, here’s my wish list for most interesting developments in the exsurgent home turf.
**Abidjan:** This west African city saw some heavy fighting and bombardment during the Fall. More recently, a reclaimer group claims to have encountered a new exsurgent here, described as a carapaced worm with a spiky tail.
**Fiji:** If you want a jelly exsurgent, the Fiji island of Viti Levu is the place. The exsurgents are drawn here in huge numbers, and according to the sat feeds they swarm the beaches in mass colonies at least twice a year.
**Pittsburgh:** This city was overrun by shifter and snapper exsurgents during the Fall, and many still remain. Judging by the way the former bridges keep moving and changing shape in the sat feeds, they may be massive shifters themselves.
**Tashkent:** No one’s really sure what’s going on here, but this former Uzbeki city is swarming with exsurgents of various kinds. It’s one big monster party. The city is mostly intact, and from a distance might look like it did before the Fall—until you get up close and see the occupants.
===Luna===
The exsurgents on Luna seem to still think the Fall is going on. They don’t undertake the mass construction projects we see some of them pursuing on Earth. They infect, they spread, they’re detected, and they die. There are still nanoplague swarms scattered around the Lunar surface, but they’re harder to find now, and a bit more dangerous. Lunar exsurgent outbreaks happen fairly frequently but are small and easily detected and contained. The best way to profit off the exsurgent virus is to work security. The viral outbreaks are usually caused by leftovers from the Fall and we know that playbook by now. It is dangerous to explore the surface without adequate nanoswarm protection though.
Still, the New Mumbai Containment Zone is promising. I have multiple confirmed reports of a massive async presence under the ruins of New Mumbai. Whatever it is, it can make its presence known to transhuman asyncs from over twenty kilometers from the site itself. A normal async can detect another’s presence at about eight meters at most. What kind of power can do that? There is a lot of credits in async research and I think Luna is the key to understanding asyncs.
We do know that there is a large population of whipper exsurgents still active in New Mumbai, due to various drone sightings. Some of these are quite different looking from standard whippers—sporting armored shells and sometimes tools or weapons.
Away from the zone, there’s a prominent urban legend concerning so-called “Lunar moths” that are spotted in isolated lava tubes. I’ve heard from trusted sources that Lunar authorities are actually concerned this is a new type of exsurgent, as the sightings have occurred in conjunction with rashes of disappearances. They don’t have an accurate description or read on its capabilities yet, but I’m sure some of our clients would be eager to see one.
Aside from the New Mumbai presence, we have to consider the Lost. An entire population of damaged children was exposed to the Watts-MacLeod strain and then released into the wild. A surprising number of Lost exiles have been located on Luna—almost as if something was drawing them here. So if we get any requests to track down one of these psychopaths, our best bet is to start looking for asyncs on Luna.
===Mars===
The Titan Quarantine Zone (TQZ) is the centerpiece of an entire black-market economy. Zone stalkers, smugglers, guides, and the inevitable security/containment industry all make big credits by sticking their noses in where they don’t belong. To be fair, there’s a lot of new developments in exsurgent activity that merit it. They’re not as pressured as they are on Luna, so they have more time to work on whatever alien agenda they pursue when we aren’t trying to destroy them. Fractal barrows and wastewalkers are the least of it. There’s extensive documentation on the TQZ, including some secret Planetary Consortium briefings. Again, our business depends on getting the most unique and new strains of the virus to our clients, not the common ones.
Two exciting business opportunities exist for people in our line of work: outbreaks far from the TQZ and the White Zone. Outbreaks are a perpetual opportunity. You never know when they’ll pop up next. No matter how much money they pour into cordoning off the TQZ, exsurgents will break through. Small lifeforms, wild artificials, and nanoswarms are impossible to fully screen out and they can carry the bug to settlements and cities. Most outbreaks are caught pretty quick, but lately the virus has adapted to avoid detection for longer periods of time. The babel strain took over a few isolated settlements for over a month before they were even detected. I know one client eager to get a viable sample of that strain. They want to put infected victims in a time accelerated simulspace to see how alien their culture becomes.
The heart of the TQZ, the White Zone, is home to the weirdest exsurgents on Mars, and that’s saying a lot. It’s all underground though. They’ve had to dig bunkers down deep in order to survive the comet bombardment. No one has a really good idea of what is down there but we have some clues. The exsurgents have a sophisticated power generation system, enough to run a major city. Wastewalkers congregate there and even have a settlement of sorts. I think they’re engineering some kind of alien ecosystem down there but I have little proof. Just a hunch, really. Makes sense, though. We’re trying to terraform the planet to fit our needs, and they probably want to terraform it to fit their needs. It would explain the sheer variety of organic exsurgents coming out of the TQZ. Prototypes of the new lifeforms? If you have contacts with the zone stalker community, let me know. I can be convinced to organize an expedition to explore the White Zone with unlimited funding. I would have to pull some strings, so only heavily vetted stalkers need apply.
===Iapetus===
Every major polity in the solar system loots Iapetus as much as they can. The Titanian Commonwealth is publicly above that kind of thing, but they have their own secret black-ops network and they rely on contractors like us to make it work. Officially, the Commonwealth only has a presence there to monitor the exsurgent presence and keep it contained, but they’re just as aggressive about sample acquisition as the Planetary Consortium. We dig out exsurgent samples and TITAN artifacts from the moon so they can reverse-engineer them. It’s good business for us and it’s a smart but risky decision for them. If they can figure out how to create bionanobots or any of the other secrets of exsurgent technology, they would be far ahead of the Consortium.
The brancusi strain was first discovered on Iapetus by a TITAN-buster collective. They only did a preliminary scan of the strain before destroying everything they could find. Other teams have detected it but no one has secured a sample for offworld study. It would be a huge payday for us if we were the first. The trick is finding a sample without letting any of the other factions know about it. Everyone spends as much time watching each other as they do watching the exsurgents.
Everyone thinks the TITANs abandoned Iapetus, but what if the plan is still underway? The entire structure of the moon is still changing and exsurgents are still active there. Perhaps the entire moon is undergoing a metamorphosis of some kind, another step towards the matrioshka brain.
===Elsewhere===
Wherever the TITANs went, they left the exsurgent virus. Who knows how many extrasolar colonies encountered the virus and were totally infected? Reports are sketchy, but I have collected over twenty Pandora gate addresses of colonies confirmed dead due to the virus. Most of these are in public blacklists of no-go sites, so it would be impossible to trick gatecrashers into visiting them for us, but a few are known only to certain … friends of mine. Getting samples back though may be impossible. Every gate is heavily secured against that sort of thing. The better option is to send it to another exoplanet. Every client worth working for has an offworld research lab or two. We no longer need the solar system to ply our trade. I have plans to build a permanent base on a secret exoplanet site and use that gate to look for more exsurgent samples for sale. This will help keep us out of the eyes of fearmongers, vigilantes, and intelligence agencies.
Our best lead right now is a Consortium colony currently under quarantine. They called it Cajamarca before they removed it from the list of publicly known colonies. It’s a mining colony on a rocky exoplanet, nothing too exciting. Officially, the mine just wasn’t profitable enough, so they shut it down. Unofficially, they discovered an exsurgent hive and things went bad, as they tend to do. However, several of the colonists were asyncs and somehow managed to “negotiate” with the exsurgents. They claim that the exsurgents are sticking to their side of the planet and leaving them alone. The Consortium sent in a heavily armed team of “inspectors” through to verify their claims. I don’t have the details but they haven’t blacklisted the address yet, nor have they shoved a nuke through the gate. They’re even sending in more personnel. The miners have all gotten pay raises to boot, but they aren’t allowed to leave the exoplanet. There has to be more to this story though. It would be easy to infiltrate the colony, given the number of indentured workers, mercenaries, and researchers they’re sending in. Getting out is another question.
==Exsurgent Sleepers==
**Posted by:** Skinwalker, Sentinel <**__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__**>
I love morphs. I sleeve into as many as possible, just for the experience. When [REDACTED] asked me to go undercover as a technician at Deja Nu, a morph shop in Valles-New Shanghai, I took it. Vectors had detected that several of the customers of the shop had later committed acts of corporate espionage against Pathfinder Corporation. All of them were caught but analysis of their hacks indicated that they all sent off data to the same anonymous third party. Someone was somehow manipulating the customers as pawns in an elaborate scheme against Pathfinder. I had to figure out who it was and what they wanted. 
Deja Nu was a cutting-edge shop, specializing in the most alien and exotic morphs allowable under Consortium law. Customers usually only rented morphs for short periods of time, like for vacations or special events. Each of the suspects I was investigating had purchased their morphs, though, which was weird. The bought morphs were all “pseudo-exotic,” meaning they were just exalts with a lot of implants and cosmetic mods to make them seem like aliens: extra limbs, cat eyes, fur, that kind of thing. At first I targeted the sales rep who sold all of the morphs in question, but I noticed that one of the other techs, Cecil, always sleeved in morphs with very specific eye implants and, shall we say … insectile mods? Everyone else at Deju Nu tried out new morphs on a regular basis—it was a perk of the job.
I sent word to the other agents in my server to investigate Cecil. They found out that he behaved bizarrely when he thought no one was watching. He purchased pets and living wearables like smart rats and fur coats—and then vivisected them. He kept the remains in sealed containers and hid them throughout the city. The agents retrieved one container and were nearly killed by an exsurgent inside. They told me to keep Cecil distracted while they moved into position to nab him. I was surprised to find that he already knew that I was Firewall—maybe some async power? He didn’t try to attack or infect me, though, just wanted to talk. He wasn’t quite all there, you know?
/ / BEGIN TRANSCRIPT / /
**Cecil:** I don’t know why I do the things I do. I’m like a passenger watching from the inside, sometimes.
**Skinwalker:** You still think you’re human? That it’s controlling you?
**Cecil:** I think this part of me was allowed to exist? Like it needed my dreams to keep the void out. It’s funny. I think it was uncomfortable being surrounded by sleeping people. People like you. It built the morph I’m in, a cheap replica of home. It bothers me that I think I should have mandibles. When I look at you, I see you don’t have mandibles. Humans don’t have them. But that’s wrong. We should. There are so many other things like that. Wrongness after wrongness. Please kill me now.
**Skinwalker:** What?
**Cecil:** Use that plasma cutter. Melt my stack. Destroy my body. Burn it all. The void is getting out. I can feel it.
**Skinwalker:** Look, man, if your infection isn’t complete, we can contain it, cure you—
**Cecil:** If it knew, IF IT KNEW. You don’t get it. It’s almost out, but not yet … that’s why I can talk now, but it won’t last. If you won’t …
/ / END TRANSCRIPT / /
Cecil turned the plasma cutter on his own neck. After a second, his whole morph started melting. For a brief second, the virus seemed to seize control, and it fought back, tried to escape the flames. I swear his burning form started to change as I watched, but it was too late. We made sure every trace of it was eradicated. I had to leave Mars for a while after that. Not sure where the investigation went after that, but I can say I’ve learned a few things about sleepers:
* They frequently develop split personalities to deal with transhumans. A standard exsurgent may not be capable of interacting with transhumans without revealing its true nature, so it keeps an aspect of the victim’s original ego on hand to act as a face. We’re not sure whether this alter ego is actually a remnant of the original victim, or if it is a sophisticated behavioral construct built on the original ego’s identity. The alter ego can act contrary to the exsurgent personality, but only in a limited way. It’s not something to rely upon. If the sleeper ever feels threatened, the exsurgent side comes out to play.
* Sleepers have difficulty not expressing unusual behavior—much like an async. This could mean unusual morph-sleeving habits, use of async powers, or vivisecting or disassembling things for no logical reason. They are aware that these actions jeopardize their existence, so they take great care to avoid detection, indulging their habits only when they have absolute privacy. It took four skilled agents to watch Cecil and find out what he was doing. Sleepers with more resources will be even harder to detect.
* Sleepers gravitate towards positions that help their agenda and potential to infect others, but avoid leadership roles or anything that would put them under too much scrutiny. They love working as personal aides, bodyguards, and technicians for critical infrastructure, like at sleeving facilities or life support systems. If they’re lucky, they will find a way to indulge their exsurgent habits publicly, like Cecil. He kept to the unique morph he built so he would feel more comfortable.
When you encounter a potential sleeper exsurgent agent, you need to be as careful as possible. They may have async powers beyond anyone with Watts-MacLeod has ever demonstrated. They can be incredibly manipulative, using their transhuman ego as bait to lower your guard. When Cecil killed himself, his corpse started changing into something nasty. If backup hadn't been close by, there probably would have been a nasty outbreak. If I had tried to stop him from killing himself, I probably would have been infected.
If you want to read more, you could also talk to [REDACTED] about our exsurgent-detection program. Our scanners devote a lot of CPU time to detecting sleepers and every one we catch improves our performance. You can also ask your proxy for access to these case files:
===Operation YELOW SIGNATURE===
A team of four sleepers were found on [REDACTED], a scum swarm. No one recognized their behavior as dangerous and they purposefully did not infect anyone else with the virus in order to minimize the chances of detection. They posed as actors and artists and became quite popular with their alien and provocative “art.” Eventually, the quartet tried to basilisk hack the entire swarm by weaving it into their live performances. Their trick was to divide the payload into multiple segments so that a victim had to watch all three plays in order to be affected by the hack. Firewall scanning systems that check every piece of media released for public consumption in the solar system flagged the first play. A team of sentinels on the swarm were activated, but not before the second play was uploaded. Unfortunately, the sentinels tipped off the exsurgents, resulting in a major firefight that severely damaged two ships in the swarm. All of the exsurgents were destroyed and the third play was stopped before it could be uploaded. We currently monitor a group of conspiracy theorists on the same scum swarm that refuse to believe the truth and think it was a hypercorp-sponsored assassination. They are trying to reassemble the third play. As far as we can tell, they are not exsurgents.
===Operation ARID BASTION===
We got lucky in this one. A sleeper wormed its way into position as a highly respected life-support systems tech on Oberon, building up rep. It was clearly positioning itself to earn a chance to use the Fissure Gate. The preliminary scans detected nothing abnormal and it would have taken the sleeper a few more years to call in enough favors and spend enough rep to use it. However, two visiting gatecrashers got into a fight at a bar while the sleeper was there. Some asshole detonated a HEAP grenade and shrapnel cut through the sleeper. This triggered a quarantine alert from the entire habitat because the sleeper was bleeding exsurgent nanobots. Everyone trapped in the bar with the exsurgent had to be resleeved.
Firewall investigated the tech’s background and think she might have been infected when working as a scavenger and exploring a derelict ship in Earth orbit two years earlier. It had traveled across the solar system, farcasting several times, infiltrated Oberon, and gained their trust without being detected. It was only dumb luck that stopped it. This operation is ongoing because some crows are still trying to figure out how it evaded detection for so long. We need access to certain farcasting logs kept in various habitats around the solar system. If you need some i-rep, getting them would be a nice boost.
===Operation FLUID CUTLASS===
An ultimate sentinel stationed on Kronos tipped us off that a newly transferred superior was acting oddly. It was mostly circumstantial evidence, like a different gait and secretive behavior, but this sentinel was a respected veteran. A team went in and discovered the target had created a secret death cult within the ultimates. Using charisma, lots of psychoactive drugs, and secretive use of async powers to “nudge” the ultimates under him, the officer had transformed a group of stoic ultimates into psychopathic sadists who were willing to kill anyone, even their comrades. We didn’t know what their agenda was, but the call was made to shut them down. Before the sentinels could set up an ambush, though, the cult enacted their own plan. When a long-range freighter docked, they quarantined the entire landing bay and gunned down everyone in it. The other ultimates didn’t know what to do, but the sentinels sprang into action and raided the bay. We don’t have detailed reports of what happened next. Every sentinel lost their morph and they all had killswitches installed, except for one who had an emergency farcaster. She saw the cult transferring a shipping container from one ship to another before she died. The ultimates covered everything up, but we know that two ships flew out of the landing bay. One was shot down but we lost track of the other. The shipping container had insignia that identified it as pre-Fall vintage.
The operation is still open.
==Contamination and Containment Protocols==
**Posted by:** Plasmid, Crow Genehacker <**__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__**>
First off, there are no standard protocols for avoiding exsurgent infection outside of hyper-vigilance. I say this because developing a standard protocol creates a sense of false security. The virus changes too much, too fast, for any one protocol to work. We only call it a virus because no other word fits it, but it’s really its own separate category of life. I would place it as an entirely separate domain. Every strain we’ve seen so far is probably a separate kingdom, but I digress. The only universal principle of dealing with the exsurgent virus is paranoia.
That said, these are the recommended protocols:
===1. Identify Exsurgent Threats===
You are our eyes and ears on the ground. Firewall is blind without your intel, so pass along as much as you can. There is some risk because of basilisk hacks and digital viruses, but that’s for your proxy to worry about. Use your best judgment. Normally you can’t pass on everything you experience, so send the most accurate intel you can. One way to do this is to use our threat threshold assessment system. They range from Black-1 (least dangerous) to White-9 (most dangerous). At a minimum, try to identify vectors, speed of infection, effects of the virus, and spread of contamination. Even that basic information can allow off-site Firewall assets to contain the infection more effectively.
Knowing what you’re up against will also help you on the ground. Nanodetectors, forensic digital analysis, and biological samples can help you isolate the specific strain(s) and vectors. If you’re up against a biopathogen, synthmorphs will come in handy. A nanoplague? Stock up on guardian swarms, EMP grenades, and area-effect weaponry.
===2. Isolate All Potential Infected Persons and Material===
Remember that digital and basilisk hack vectors can travel at the speed of light. Assume the virus contaminates anything it can access. In practice, this means you need to quarantine as large of an area as physically possible as soon as you learn of an infection. Ideally, the entire habitat or city is locked down. This is easier to do with a brinker habitat in the outer fringes than New Quebec, though. Disable or destroy all vehicles, major mesh nodes, and farcasting gear, and seize control of airlocks, escape pods, and life support. Spacing the entire habitat or vessel is not out of the question. Explosives, plasma weapons, and other scorched-earth tactics are preferable but not always possible.
When operating in an environment that does not allow you to properly isolate the infection, mitigation is the key. Warn others about the infection, jam the mesh network, set a fire to trigger automated safety systems, and put physical barriers between the vector and everything else. The exact response depends on too many variables to summarize. Keep in mind, most civilians and security agents will either have no idea what Firewall is or assume we are terrorists responsible for the infection. Keep this in mind before you try to work with authorities or first responders to deal with the crisis.
===3. Protect Firewall, Yourself, Your Team, and Everyone Else—In That Order===
Triage is an important skill in any outbreak. Firewall must be protected at all costs. Do not let exsurgents gain access to any agent’s ego, if at all possible, and destroy any infected agent ASAP. The Eye has systems in place to protect against the virus but it is better if they are never tested in the first place. It is also safe to assume an exsurgent agent will compromise every other agent they know.
It is a cliché to say that you cannot complete a mission if you are dead, but Firewall seems to recruit a lot of would-be martyrs. Placing an agent in the field requires a lot more effort than just the morph cost. When dealing with the virus, devise the most paranoid contingency-laden plan imaginable and then double the paranoia. Never do yourself what bots or pawns can accomplish. Never use a vibroblade when a HEAP minimissile is available. Never implicitly trust another agent who has been out of contact. Always assume the worst when it comes to the virus.
Many Firewall agents join us out of idealism. They want to save everyone. That is almost never a possibility when dealing with an outbreak. You may be called on to kill civilians before they can become exsurgents. It is tragic but sometimes unavoidable. It is a heavy burden to bear, but the consequences of not doing so can be catastrophic. On the other hand, we must only do this when it is unavoidable. Pre-emptive “cleansings” can do more damage than some exsurgent outbreaks.

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