| Item: | White Noise |
| Size: | 230 × 40 × 40 cm |
| Type: | Type Ⅳ Memetic Hazard |
| Potential/Current Hazards: | Easily communicable lethal infohazard |
| Required Wear/Weaponry: | All personnel involved in Project White Noise are to be inoculated against said Item and must wear full Sensory Exclusion Headgear and Suits when handling it. |
| Location: | Armed Base-17 |
| Reported Anomaly: | Self-Concealing Infohazard |
Usage
All information concerning the Item, including this cached file, are carriers of the Item's anomalous effect and must be destroyed unless otherwise ordered by a SCHEMA Operative. Persons accidentally exposed to the Item must be immediately terminated via destruction of the cranial cavity to prevent further spread of hazardous information.
Due to the Item's effects on all attempts to preserve data on it or its effects, all files pertaining to it must be backed up in the form of an optical signal encoding the data. This signal may not be converted into digital form except after it has been diverted by a beam splitter for reading access; optical amplifiers are to account for any potential losses. Relativistic time dilation is the only reliable way of preserving data about the Item.
Deployment for memetic warfare is at the discretion of any SCHEMA Operative of Gamma Rank or higher.
Report
The White Noise is a featureless cuboid made of talcum. It is permanently emitting an static drone of low intensity.
All means of storing data about the White Noise will see the individual information gradually becoming disordered until the data eventually converges towards a state of random static. It is of note that the anomaly can only rearrange but not erase or destroy information, effectively preserving Shannon entropy.
This effect extends to all known means of preserving information over time and my take the shape of ink bleeding in written or printed accounts, colours in photographs blending into each other and digital storage being effectively scrambled.
Sentient cognition is also subject to this corruption. Subjects perceiving and understanding information carrying the anomalous contagion will undergo an irreversible period of cognitive erosion. The length of this process depends on the subject's amount of exposure to the infohazard and may take between a few hours up to a month when completely separated from the Item after exposure.
The cognitive erosion comes with a gradual loss of mental capacities and perceptive sensitivity, coupled with vivid hallucinations regarding the Item. The phases progress as follows:
- Normal function: Subjects that had extraordinary sensitivity, like wine tasters, might experience slight issues when performing their profession; otherwise no restrictions. Difficulties of grasping complex philosophical-epistemological concepts, like the distinction between the the concepts of "Alterity" and "Difference". When given opportunity to measure the Item, subjects might describe extremely minor deviations from the shape of a perfect cuboid.
- Mostly normal function: Subjects that had extraordinary sensitivity have completely lost their above-average ability. Inability to understand some concepts of advanced mathematics, like the difference between asymmetric and antisymmetric relational structures. Subjects claim that the Item is slightly slanted.
- Minimal restrictions: Subjects experience slight loss of sensory sensitivity, like being unable to differentiate between 3-ply and 4-ply toilet tissues. Slight loss of mental abstraction, for example, an "Alpaca" may simply be identified as a "Llama". When describing the Item, subjects will describe further defects in shape.
- Medium restrictions: Subjects experience further loss of sensory sensitivity, like inability to distinguish between sounds of their own and a stranger's dog. Further loss of mental abstraction resulting in a tendency to confuse tightly related, but non-interchangeable concepts, like "slander" and "libel". Subjects claim that the Item features a noticeable surface texture, although descriptions of this surface are inconsistent.
- Elevated restrictions: Subjects can no longer perceive differences in accentuation of speech. Reduced mental abstraction sees a word like "Couch" as synonymous with "Chair". Subjects claim that the sound it emits is at the volume of an average conversation and that there are great varieties in its texture.
- Severe restrictions: Subject's sense of taste is practically reduced to differentiating between sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami; lower dexterity and increased pain resistance. Failure to comprehend most intangible concepts; inferior spatial reasoning. Subjects claim that the Item is colourful and that the volume of the sound is loud enough to drown out almost everything else.
- Completely restricted: Subjects can only judge most stimuli on a binary scale, like hot/cold or light/dark; proprioception and nociception are heavily reduced, which causes subjects to frequently harm themselves even during simple tasks like walking. Near complete loss of understanding of speech, only a few basic words like "Food" may be recognized. Subjects are interpreted to claim that the Item is in constant flux and emitting many different smells and sounds.
- Semi-vegetative: Subjects are incapable of coordinated action, but appear to be drawn to the Item, which appears to be the only thing capable of causing significant reactions from the subject.
- Vegetative: Subjects enter a state of only minimal sensory arousal as movement either ceases entirely or becomes wild twitching; continued treatment similar to coma care is required to keep the subjects alive. Exposure to the Item causes seizure-like brain activity in the Subject.
- Brain death: Complete cessation of all neurological processes.
The only known means to allow knowledge of and reasoning about the White Noise without triggering the cognitive erosion is substituting it with a a dummy concept designated as the Simulacrum, which would be a self-concealing lethal memetic agent in Insurgency possession.
Yet, contemplation of the Simulacrum itself is a potential vector of transmission of its effects, as ideation of a substitute proxy concept implies the existence of a real such anomaly and thus constitutes information about it. Only individuals with sufficiently dissonant thought-processes can develop an internalized modal meinongianistic mindset that allows for safely hypothesizing the Simulacrum without also acknowledging its implications.
SCHEMA has developed memetic inoculation to this effect, although its reliability is unknowable; it is likely that even imprinted SCHEMA Operatives have been corrupted by the White Noise in the past.
Appendix: Circumstances of Recovery
No data about the initial discovery and acquisition of the White Noise by the Insurgency exist.
It is likely that the White Noise was repeatedly lost and rediscovered within Insurgency possession, triggering a new outbreak of its effect and subsequent loss of information on it.
The most recent discovery of the White Noise was the 18th of April 2021 in an unused subterranean storage compartment of Armed Base-17 during an investigation of corrupted entries to the Arsenal Database from three years earlier. An immediate crackdown by a SCHEMAERA unit could prevent further attention from the outside being drawn to the Item. The Item was subsequently recovered under absolute communications silence.
