League of Extraordinary Dadaists
The LED are believed to be, more or less, the same organization that was originally known as the League of Xtreme Communism. The LXC was the rapid-response strongarm unit of the Kore Kommudants Kommittee (KKK)1, one of a handful of flavors of Communism that we've actually had a great deal of success infiltrating, diluting, and eventually eliminating from widespread and focused operation. When it became clear to them that the KKK was, in fact, thoroughly compromised by our Close-Contact Counter-Communism Patrols (CCCCPs), the LXC quickly broke off from the rest of the organization-- taking with it the majority of the KKK's funds and accumulated material assets-- to go "indie". Within a very short period of time they went from being an occasional, but specific and fairly predictable, problem for Alpha's security, to an ever-present, highly random and arbitrary threat to operations at all levels. Part of what made them able to step up the "heat", of course, was their much-larger budget. The stolen accounts of the KKK were spent on a variety of technological upgrades to their hardware-- most especially, if rumors are to be believed, the excavation of a secret series of vacuum tunnels which thread throughout Alpha Complex like a maze within a maze, for use by the so-called XOR-I/Ent_X-Press Transbot, which supposedly allows them to move across the length, breadth, and height of Alpha without relying on our existing (traceable, monitorable) transport networks.2
The LXC then dropped out of sight during the events of the Toothpaste_Disaster and when they re-emerged, it was clear that something had changed them. The leading theory is that exposure to Lenin's_Tooth drove them insane; a competing (but less widely held) theory holds that the LXC was in some way responsible for convincing the Codemonkeys to conspire in creating the Thirty-second_Flavor, and that being so close to the catastrophe that followed drove them insane. There are several other niche theories, the details of which are unimportant. There is one thing that every theory agrees on, however: regardless of the reason for it, the entire LXC organization-- just before or during the Disaster-- was driven completely and utterly insane.
They reappeared after the Disaster, calling themselves the League of Extraordinary Dadaists, and claimed that their former commander, Lovec-R-AFT-4, had been replaced by "the divine entity HPL-X"3 during the Tuesday_Afternoon_Conspiracy. They announced that "the Beyondmost Ones" had called them to a "holy mission" which, they said, was laid out by HPL-X in the Manifesto_Out_of_Space_and_Time.4 Their choice of the word "manifesto" was surely an apt one: the MOST has proven to be at least as dangerous to its readers as the original Communist Manifesto-- if not more so! Not a single Clone who was read the entire MOST has remained recognizably sane and functional as a Citizen of Alpha Complex. Even reading fragments of it can produce strange, unorthodox, dangerous, and even treasonous notions in the minds of previously unquestiongly loyal Citizens.
There are a few fragments of the MOST that have been identified as "safe"-- that is, when read free of other context, it has been proven through observation and testing that these fragments do not inherently increase risk for Increased Mental Chaos Syndrome (IMCS), Overly Manic Gigglespeek (OMG), Self-Induced Neuro-Cascade_Failure (SINCF), or Sudden Drink From or Drown In the Xenoseptic_Fountain Urge (SDFDIXFU), all of which are disorders that are known to have befallen Citizens who unwittingly read too much of the MOST. I am including one of those safe fragments here to provide readers with some sense of what HPL-X's "mindset" must be like.
PH'NGLU1 MGLW'NAFH C7HULHU R'LY3H WGAH'NAGL FH7AGN MY 3L337 5K1LLZ R00L U D00D POK3 FUNNY-K1N3 5QU1D L1DA7 DA M'AJ1KAL M'Y573RY 70UR 1Z K0M1NG 2 7AK3 U AWAY 1 M H3 AZ U R H3 AZ U R M3 N W3 R ALL 70G37H3R 1M W17H 57UP1D 1M W17H 57UP1D 1M 7H3 W'ALRU5 G00 G00 G'J00B
This fragment in particular is especially interesting when compared with some of the data fragments that have been found floating around in the heuristic memory centers of dangerously malfunctioned bots (cf Jackobot_Brain) as well as the rather cryptic Help messages that were sent to my predecessor and Kill-U5 by (we believe) the LED themselves.6 I do not believe our unknown contact is trying to help us in anyway. Quite the opposite: I believe this is the beginning of a subtle, but very dangerous trap. I find myself tempted now to try correlating this safe fragment against a wider body of data-- to speculate about what this fragment "means"-- but I am concerned that that is exactly the trap the LED wants us to fall into. Observation of those Citizens driven insane by the MOST suggests it is precisely this impulse to correlate everything into a "big picture" that produces the inevitable mental breakdown.
-- Knok-U-OUT-6
1 As Troubleshooters are to the legitimate and civilized operation of Alpha Complex, the LXC were to the KKK.
2 So far as I know, the existence of this secret transport network has not yet been conclusively demonstrated or disproven. But hey, what do I know? I'm still pretty new at this whole ULTRAVIOLET thing.
3 At this point, experts from R&D and CPU believe it 91.7% likely that "HPL-X" is an entirely inorganic (i.e. bot) replacement that only superficially resembles former Citizen Lovec-R-AFT. The 8.3% possibility is that he is the original clone, merely cyborged to such a near-total degree that it is impossible for scanning technology to identify original human-organic components at any sort of range.
4 An HPD&MC consultant who read this document was able to quickly write a short summary of LED's "holy mission", stating it was going to be some sort of worldwide Performance_Art involving VatSlime. He then collapsed in a gibbering, writhing heap and had to be destroyed with an XTREEM-BURN_Heavy_Flamethrower.
5 I suspect more messages of this sort will be showing up in the Message Boxes of other members of the panel which it becomes clear to the LED that they have failed to affect Kill-U and me. Be careful opening your mail.
6 I note also what appears to be a possible connection to the Im_w/stupid "dance craze". Could partial onset of MOST-induced madness have been a contributing factor to the random convulsions inherent to the fad?
Refs: XOR-I/Ent_X-Press, Manifesto_Out_of_Space_and_Time
X-Refs: Lenin's_Tooth, Codemonkeys, Thirty-second_Flavor, Tuesday_Afternoon_Conspiracy, Gigglespeek, Neuro-Cascade_Failure, Xenoseptic_Fountain, Jackobot_Brain, Help, Performance_Art, VatSlime, XTREEM-BURN_Heavy_Flamethrower, Im_w/stupid
Commentary:
That fragment reminds me of something one of our INFRARED_Citizens' clones retrieved for me after interrogation. It read:
1N A.D. 2101 W4R W45 B3G1NN1NG WH47 H4PP3N? 50M380DY 537 UP U5 7H3 80M8. W3 G37 S1GN41. WH47! M41N 5CR33N 7URN 0N. 17'5 U!! H0W 4R3 U G3N7L3M3N!! 4LL UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 2 U5. UR 0N 7H3 W4Y 2 D357RUC710N. WH47 U 54Y!! U H4V3 N0 CH4NC3 70 5URV1V3 M4K3 UR 71M3 H4 H4 H4 H4 .... 74K3 0FF 3V3RY 'Z1G'!! U KN0W WH47 U D01NG. M0V3 'Z1G'. 4 GR347 JU571C3.
I suspect it is some kind of Communist code. That, or simply incomprehensible gibberish. Maybe we should authorize R&D to do more experiments on Lenin's_Tooth to see if we can discover any connection between this and Communism?
-- Omega-U-MAN-5
This does bear a strong resemblance, doesn't it? This INFRARED of yours... were they... No, see, now I'm torn in two directions. On the one hand, it seems like there must be more bits like this floating around and they might cast some much-needed light on this whole mess. I want to know more about this INFRARED of yours and the circumstances that might have driven him to say such things. Is he suffering from IMCS or some similar neurological collapse? On the other hand, I have this terrible feeling that the more of these fragments we collect... the more context we'll have... and the greater the chance one of us will end up with dangerous quantities of contextualized Manifesto content in our minds...
-- Knok-U-OUT-6
Have you tried feeding this stuff through a Verbiage_Transmogrifier? That's been known to suppress transmission of Viral_Thought_Patterns. Alternately, you could get a LinguistBot to translate it into InfoGlyphs. You'll lose the bot, of course, but I dare say that it's unlikely that any sort of brain-warping properties in the text could survive that kind of translation.
-- Jan-U-ARY-31
I suspect whatever clues are to be drawn from these fragments would be lost in the translation to InfoGlyph but the VT suggestion definitely has merit. I'll see about clearing up some time on the next available one and do some preliminary looking into it.
Oh, and Omega-U? I think we'd best be careful about letting anyone tinker with Lenin's_Tooth until we have more information on it. Hopefully someone will fill us in with an update very soon.
-- Knok-U
One source told me that my text was in an ancient dialect once used by High Programmers called "L337 5P34K," whatever that means. I'm not convinced of that report, however; there's no way an INFRARED would know such things, anyhow. In the mean time, I will wait for the reports on Lenin's_Tooth before I authorize any more studies of it. After all, I'm leaning towards thinking it might be the original source of Communism in our perfect complex, making me sorely tempted to destroy it. On the other hand, we would do well to learn more of our enemies and their weaknesses, especially since we can always use it to lure commies into traps as they try to steal it... Indeed, I'm not quite sure just what to do right now.
-- Omega-U-MAN-5
Jan-U, your suggestion regarding the Verbiage_Transmogrifier has borne somewhat unexpected fruit! I've not had luck extracting useful content from fragments of the MOST (or our mysterious messages) yet, but there's been interesting progress in other quarters.
Something that has been bothering me almost from the moment I put on the ULTRAVIOLET robes is this: after hinting a fair bit about dire plans and schemes and such, in his commentary in other entries, my predecessor then produced what appears to be a fairly straightforward entry on the Group_Assignment_Services_Exchange_Scheme_(GASES), with nary a hint of whatever information he must have accumulated at that point. As near as I can tell, he posted this entry less than an hour-- perhaps mere minutes-- before leaving his personal compound for parts unknown. Not long after that, he met his doom.
As I believe I've mentioned before, I'm surprised he gave me no indication, no hint, no evidence to work from except the early MindRoom backup, but I began to wonder if maybe the GASES entry was an encoded message of some sort-- that he may have written it with necessary information in it which I would be able to decrypt in the event of his demise. He didn't send me anything directly, I am now sure, because his lines of communication were thoroughly compromised-- as, no doubt, most or all of mine must be.
So I ran his GASES entry through a few of the decryption schemes we've used in the past, and came up with nothing. When I ran it through the Verbiage_Transmogrifier, however, some interesting patterns began to show themselves, and with a little coaxing, I was able to find what I believe was the message he hid inside this otherwise innocuous entry. Interestingly enough, it doesn't seem to have been left as a hint for me, but rather a message sent to one or more of you-- my fellow panel members! Presumably for the same reason he didn't communication directly with me, he seems to have decided to communicate with fellow panel members secretly right here in the Lexicon!
Initially I considered keeping it to myself, but on further reflection, I believe if we are to get to the bottom of all of this, the best thing to do is play it out with the punchcards on the table whenever possible, in full view, and let the microchips fall where they may:
CISAOK MISTOO NODORS AVDTHM MEETON XORXPR TONITE ELEVEN NOGUNS NOBOTS SCREWZ WMEAND IWLLMK YOUPAY
So. What to make of this...? My interpretation and consequent thoughts are as follows:
"C is A-OK. M is too."
The letters could stand for members of this panel who "Five" believed were trustworthy, who he was willing to vouch for in this communication. Unfortunately, we have three "C's" on this panel (Cee-U, Circ-U, and Costin-U) and two "M's" (Mesh-U and Make-U). I can't imagine he would be giving all five the thumbs-up. Whoever he was contacting must know which one(s) he meant. Alternately, if the letters refer to Sector identities instead of first names, perhaps he is talking about Make-U-CRY and either Costin-U-MOR or Omega-U-MAN.
"No doors. Avoid them."
This is the most unclear part of the message, I think. Is it a reference to the Room_Without_Doors...? Or perhaps he was concerned that door access records could be used (by whoever they felt could not be trusted on this panel) to locate their meeting place.
"Meet on XORXPR"
I am reasonably certain now that this is a reference to the XOR-I/Ent_X-Press, but if true, the implications are disconcerting: the X-Press is supposedly a tool of the League of Extraordinary Dadaists. Was "Five" in contact with them, via the Help messages that he and Kill-U were receiving? Is the LED not what we've been led to believe? I, for one, find it difficult to believe that my predecessor would have been mixed up with a group as insane as the League supposedly is.
"Tonight at 11."
- The clearest part of the message, this is obviously the planned time of the meeting on the X-Press. To what purpose, though? Did a subset of this commission panel meet secretly on a supposedly treasonous transport system?
"No guns, no bots."
- Typical for clandestine offline meetings. I used to tell my VIOLET peers the same thing all the time when I needed to deal with them directly outside of my zone of control.
"Screwz with me and I will make you pay."
Is his choice of the word "screwz" an artifact of the encoding method? (It very well might be.) Or is he making a joke of sorts here, because he knows Screwz-U will be reading it? Was Screwz-U the intended recipient? Either way, it's clear that it wasn't going to be all chummy camaraderie at the meeting.
So what it looks like to me is that some subset of this panel believes it cannot trust the rest-- a theory I see no reason to debate-- and that "Five" and one or more other members of this panel arranged to meet offline, presumably to form a plan of action for dealing with the situation. I don't know if that meeting took place, obviously, or who might have been in attendance. Was "Five" betrayed by the recipient of this message, killed by someone he believed he could trust? Did someone else-- someone untrusted-- decrypt the message and drop in unannounced at the meeting? We're missing other members, last I checked; perhaps the "trusted" sub-cell is no more, and "Five" was the only one who protected his legacy (i.e. me) well enough to have a successor on the panel. Or perhaps the meeting went exactly as planned, but "Five" was ambushed on the way home.
Suffice it to say, I'm not leaving my secure villa for the forseeable future.
-- Knok-U