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image [https://i.imgur.com/HkSUXKY.png]
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Subject: All QA Staff: Immediate Attention Required
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From: Director C. Köpenhaigh
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To: All embedded QA personnel E-4 through E-6
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CC: Director B. Lumbergh, Director ⵣ. Brakken, Director S. Kishimoto, Director G. Gekko, Director D. Jones, Director L. Kube, Director B. Grishenko
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Good morning all,
While I and the rest of the Board had planned to wait until the end of the quarter to address the recent spike in Incogruity Events that we’ve been seeing, yesterday’s glaring error has made it crystal clear that that conversation simply cannot wait.
Furthermore, subsequent investigation into yesterday’s events indicates the problem runs much deeper than originally thought. So, following the Executive Committee’s recommendation, I will be initiating an immediate company-wide action plan.
(additional information to be provided over the coming days, be sure to keep regularly checking your inboxes for priority updates)
So, about yesterday:
As I’m certain everyone is already aware, at approximately 6:22am local time yesterday, a magnitude 8.65 Incogruity Event was recorded in sector BW.49-cg, focal point [-68.64, 501.6, -2.217].
As I happened to be in transit to our West Branch Offices at the time, less than a quarter gridspan from the epicenter, I witnessed this transpire personally, and let me just say, it was not subtle.
Attached is a still from my transport’s automated recording of the incident, for any of whom may have been dwelling under a rock at the time.
image [https://i.imgur.com/cHAhVVC.png]
As you can plainly see, everything south of Lowell Blvd rendered out of sync with the rest of the grid.
The mismatch was clear as day—clear as night and day rather—and the effect persisted for almost 1,800,000 frameclicks. That’s a good half hour for anyone looking up to reasonably conclude that the Endtimes were upon us.
Amazingly, we saw only negligible increases in ER visits and 911 calls during that time, and fortunately there were no fatalities, despite a marginally higher than expected incidence of attempted suicide (for which I have our analysts reviewing demographics for any predisposing factors).
After digging through the code, Records & Analytics tells me that the entire sector south of Lowell Blvd’s centerline was just shy of 21,000,000 frameclicks ahead of the rest of us, making this by far the most significant Anti-Lag Incident on record.
And as for the striking contrast in that image, the clear delineation subtending nearly 180 arc degrees of the sky? That was visible for the duration of the incident until we were able to reset the sector.
Though containment is proving less difficult than expected, we should still count ourselves extremelylucky that the affected area encompassed only a single sector, and a sparsely populated one at that. Had the circumstances of the mismatch been reversed, I’m not sure how well we’d have been able to contain it.
Doubly so had it occurred at a more inopportune time.
Imagine that instead of dealing with a few subdivision’s worth of mostly unconscious families whose nights were inexplicably cut 6 hours short, we had on our hands a whole city’s worth whose moonless night had abruptly turned to midday, or, worse, vice versa.
Explaining that away would likely prove substantially more difficult. We are fortunate that this time only a minority were directly affected and that it was during a time the majority of said minority—not to mention a majority of the actual majority—were asleep.
As it is, we expect to see talk of yesterday’s“unprecedented meteorological phenomenon” continue circulating for quite some time among the relatively few who saw it, and for numerous Alternative Theories to crop up online. Rest assured that Mitigation & Recovery is on it. In conjunction with Auditors from our PsyComp Unit, they are working round the clock to minimize longterm fallout.
Now, on to the question I know you’re all asking: what can you do when faced with such Incogruities?
Well, while few of you will have the necessary permissions to edit errors of that scale, I am emphasizing yesterday’s incident in particular because it highlights the dangers associated with the increasingly lax attitude of company personnel. We need to do better.
From System Architects and Data Integrity Analysts, to Front-End Developers and Embedded Quality Assurance Technicians, we must all hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Levels E-7 plus and E-3 minus personnel will be receiving separate instructions specific to their roles, but for all of you E-4 to E-6, the Initial Response Protocol, effective immediately, when dealing with High Magnitude Incogruity Events is as follows:
1: Report, 2: Distract, 3: Redirect
Step 1: Report
Use your personal Priority Messaging System to directly notify your remote handlers.
A simple flick of the button is sufficient, do not describe the situation to fellow embedded techs or supervisors, nor otherwise draw attention to the error or errors. Covertly alerting your remote handler is enough, they will review your livefeed and take the necessary steps on their end while you continue to step 2.
Step 2: Distract.
Again, avoid unnecessarily pointing at, staring towards, discussing, or otherwise drawing attention to any Incogruities. Your role in such a situation is to do the exact opposite, employ context-specific tactics necessary to divert attention.
In small groups or one-on-one: initiate unwanted sexual advances, act-out a mental-breakdown, make off-color jokes and offensive remarks. Be awkward.
In large crowds: make a scene. Be loud and vulgar, expose yourself, stage a fight (only with fellow embedded technicians), feign seizure or serious injury, etc.
Your supervisors will be providing you with more detailed instructions later this week on the recommended progression of distraction techniques, and we will begin conducting bi-weekly live practice workshops starting next quarter.
Step 3: Redirect.
This step might be the most crucial, for, despite the best efforts of you and your fellow QA Technicians, it is probable that any sufficiently high magnitude Incogruity Event will not remain unnoticed, it will capture the attention of the masses.
However, even in such situations, you can continue to make a difference!
After notifying your handler and initiating the appropriate distraction tactics, your task will be to maintain ignorance and incredulity as to the peculiarity of the situation.
Phrases like “I don’t see anything wrong”, “it seems fine”, “everything looks normal to me”, and “I’m not worried about it” are your friends here.
While one dissenting voice amidst the crowd will sway no one, many might, and a majority almost surely will.
At first, you will be the odd ones out, lunatics blind to the obvious right in front of your eyes, but once enough of you have been redirected by your remote handlers, your collective nonchalance will spread through the throngs of panicked and confused like wildfire until that calm indifference hits critical mass and the hordes continue on about their day, eventually recalling little more than perhaps the pleasant surprise of an unexpected solar eclipse;
or the less pleasant one of causing that fender-bender merging into a truck that they’d have sworn just appeared out of thin air;
or perhaps the mildly unsettling feeling—quickly chalked up to déjà vu—that they’d passed through the same hallway, stairwell, sidestreet, intersection, overheard the same conversation, witnessed the same interaction, observed the same pattern of pedestrian traffic, greeted the same stranger, just moments before;
or the late summer evening’s mirage that had so magnified and distorted the atmosphere that, for just a moment, they’d counted individual crows perched along the scaffolding of the downtown construction project 20 miles away;
or the picturebooks from childhood memory whose titular character’s names they’d always remembered ending ‘stein rather than ‘stain;
or perhaps far more disturbing and disorienting recollections of chronologies and topologies that simply couldn’t be—indeterminate stretches of time, fragmented, with unaccounted for gaps, a collection of moments each like a Polaroid snapshot tossed on a table and mixed in with a thousand others, jumbled, incoherent, effects preceding causes, simultaneity of disjoint events; or the self-contradicting geometries of obscene architectural impossibilities and, on occasion, the vague sense of having travelled too long to have covered a distance so short, or too quickly having covered one so great—all so conveniently explained by an LSD contaminated water supply; or the accidental inclusion of wild Datura fields in the controlled burn of invasive juniper 2 miles upwind; or perhaps the carbon monoxide leak in their basement; or any one of a dozen dozen other hardly-remarkable Official Explanations that Mitigation & Recovery decides on.
A high level overview of our standard Informational Containment & Control best practices will be made available upon request, however, you will not be expected to memorize that process flow. We have a dedicated department for determining appropriate longterm mitigation strategies, in your roles you will only be required to demonstrate competency with the Initial Response Protocols already outlined.
Again, rollout of the full suite of training courses will be completed soon, after which you should all start receiving the relevant links, but, in the meantime, I have attached some literature on the psychology of conformity and obedience. I encourage you all to review that material over lunch break (or after hours if you are a break-exempt employee):
Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In H. Guetzkow (Ed.), Groups, leadership and men; research in human relations (pp. 177–190). Carnegie Press.
Yung, B. E. (2000). Susceptibility of strongly held beliefs to bio, social, and psychopharmacological interventions. Military Psychology, 12, 220-232.
Lem-Yip, A. (1987). Differential efficacy of covert and overt coercion techniques. In M. Glynn, Sensory percepts and retrieval structures as stimulus-response cues (pp. 69–75).
Köpenhaigh, C. (2003). Auctoritas in absentia: effecting persistent compliance via sub- and supra-liminal programming. [redacted]. (pp. 383–397). [redacted].
Briugouwara, G. (1997). Malleability of moral and ethical baselines relative to homogeneity of populations. Defense Intelligence Agency, X12, SR, 71–79.
So, to summarize the Initial Response Protocol,
1: Notify - If you see something, say something (to your designated handler only)
2: Distract- Steal the spotlight and become the star of the show! For any who have dreamed of a career in Hollywood or Broadway, this is your opportunity to really shine! Hone those acting chops!
3: Redirect- Play dumb. Insist that everything is normal and encourage others to carry on about their day.
The earlier we can downplay the perceived significance of a given Incogruity, the easier any post-hoc containment efforts will be. Of course we can always covertly direct any skeptics towards whatever bespoke conspiracy-sites and fringe meet-up groups we fabricate, and then monitor them as hands-on as needed from there, but the fewer individuals requiring reconditioning, or recycling, or deletion, the better.
Remember: an ounce of Gaslight, is worth a pound of Disappearings!
Now, with that out of the way, I want to bring everyone’s attention to some of the other Incogruities documented over the past few Cycles:
image [https://i.imgur.com/lDD58r2.jpeg]
In figure 1 we seen another patently flawed lighting effect. In this case the shader cache had been corrupted. Fortunately, Mitigation was able to reset almost immediately following discovery, and due to the location and time of the incident, they estimated a negligible increase to the Compromise Quotient.
image [https://i.imgur.com/PxcyqvE.jpeg]
Incidents of texture leaching are becoming increasingly common, and though most are relatively minor, the same sloppy UV wrapping work generating these small scale errors also threatens on the more immediately obvious—and harder to hand wave away—scales.
Figure 2 shows a particularly egregious example that QA LurkerBot flagged in some amateur photographer’s camera roll during upload to their FaceSpace account.
The texture of the iron drain cap has clearly leached into the surrounding crosswalk (See figure 3 for detail).
It doesn’t take an advanced degree in chemistry to know that asphalt shouldn’t rust.
Although standard quarantine protocol was initiated and the error was resolved without incident, quite concerning is the fact that analysis of samples taken from the scene indicate that the texture was spreading.
Following an internal audit, we identified those responsible for this unacceptable standard of work, and though they have by now been reprimanded accordingly, allow me to reiterate that no matter how seemingly insignificant, we must take the utmost care with every detail. No render is too small to matter.
All it takes is one curious individual to notice a single small slip up to jeopardize the whole project.
image [https://i.imgur.com/wVHA2w1.jpeg]
Figure 4 shows us a seemingly ordinary Summer day: white clouds and blue sky over a green grassy field, with dandelions and some Rumex Crispus in the foreground.
At first glance nothing seems out of the ordinary, but closer inspection reveals several errors in the renderings.
Approaching the dandelions, one immediately sees that their proportions fall well outside acceptable tolerances:
image [https://i.imgur.com/Irb91eJ.jpeg]
Figure 5 shows the selfie sent to me by Captain Yutsyn, head of Fast Reaction Team Epsilon, after he and his squad were called to the site by the on-duty QA technician who first identified the Incogruity.
Note the scale of the thing, it’s nearly the size of his head.
(Needless to say, the object mapping specialist responsible for this blatant sizing error has been reassigned)
As acting Incident Commander at the time, Cpt. Yutsyn immediately notified Home Office and quarantined the area. Per protocol, F.R.T. Delta was deployed to assist Epsilon in their sweep, while F.R.T.s Alpha and Gamma were placed on high alert.
(I’d like to take a moment to thank the Fast Reaction Teams involved for embodying our core values of discipline, focus, commitment, and adaptability. For their efforts, each operative will be awarded 10 of our coveted kudos points. Congratulations!)
image [https://i.imgur.com/Nls4nk2.jpeg]
Turning our attention to the Rumex Crispus (see figure 6), the issues become more glaring.
Though errors of numerous severity classes were identified during the survey conducted by Epsilon and Delta, by far the most significant involved this unassuming perennial.
First of all, note the coloring. It looks quite a bit like rusted metal, no?
That’s right, we have here another clear cut case of texture leaching, except unlike the example from figure 2 and 3, there is no rusted metal in contact with this specimen.
In fact, there was no metal of any kind within half a gridspan, indicating a rather more serious issue than a simple texture mapping mishap.
Worse still, when Captain Yutsyn had a cutting of the specimen placed under magnification (see figure 7], Regression Fractaling was seen at resolutions exceeding 2.374 x 10^-67 vecs.
image [https://i.imgur.com/d6wPu6c.png]
Let that sink in: 2.374 times ten to the negative sixty seven vecs, with indication of coherent structures below even that.
Upon being notified of this fact by Dr. Satō, head of our Mobile Emergency Sampling Review Unit, Commander Yutsyn had teams Epsilon and Delta cordon off the area under the pretense of an active shooter at large while operatives from Mitigation & Recovery initiated a controlled Burn & Delete of the entire sector.
While this particular Incogruity Event was ultimately resolved without incident, it raises serious concerns regarding object rendering beyond our authorized resolution setting parameters, especially as this was not an isolated incident.
As you should all be well aware, we have local resolution set to 1.616255 x 10^-35 vecs, with maximum noclip threshold a hair over 10^-20 vecs.
Now, not only did the aforementioned samples far exceed this, on at least 3 separate other occasions, instances of Regress Fractaling have been documented that exceeded minimum resolution settings by up to six thousand orders of magnitude (see figure 8 for one such example).
image [https://i.imgur.com/3xvCxv8.png]
With the exception of the borderline phosphorescent auras that this picture no-doubt fails to do justice, figure 8 just depicts ordinary blue globethistles, right?
Wrong.
The problem cuts much deeper than a simple distorted RGB scheme.
image [https://i.imgur.com/BTi0NSI.jpeg]
Figure 9 shows one of the specimens under subsequent increasingly powerful magnification.
If one didn’t know any better, they might think that all the images in figure 9 were merely different croppings of the same image—so perfect are the latters’ replication of their formers—but that is not, in fact, the case.
Each frame shows a distinct region of the specimen at increased magnification. Now, note the level of magnification for each image. No, that’s not a typo.
The analysts initially tasked with review of this sample had actually filed almost a dozen support tickets thinking that their equipment was malfunctioning.
And indeed, those tickets had to be escalated multiple times before it was possible to confirm that the readings were accurate. And even then, I didn’t believe it myself until I had seen the results personally.
What you are looking at here are bonafide coherent structures at scales far exceeding anything we’ve ever seen.
Now, not only do these Object Mapping, Texture Leaching, and Regress Errors already shown put our whole endeavor at risk, the Regression Fractaling in particular is a colossal drain on the system, the ancillary effects of which cannot be overstated.
While I trust a comprehensive review of the material mandated during your onboarding training is unnecessary—as you all no-doubt retain the relevant practical knowledge—suffice to say:
The power required to model any one thing comes directly at the expense of modeling any other, and the greater the fidelity in which we represent something, the greater the portion of total capacity we use.
There is a limit to total capacity, which means there is a limit to the amount of stuff we can represent. And when we have maximum fidelity modeling of structures at scales so infinitesimal that there isn’t even a name for the number next to the zoom multiplier toggle, then we very quickly hit that capacity.
That infinite-surface-area-to-finite-interior-volume ratio of fractalline manifolds works decidedly against us here.
The following are just a few of the Incogruities we’ve seen resulting from the system being pushed to capacity:
image [https://i.imgur.com/UuwsarB.jpeg]
The images in figures 10 and 11 were taken during a routine audit patrol last Cycle. After cross referencing, Records & Analysis confirmed that although several residents in that particular sector owned vehicles of the same make, none owned more than one of any given model, and certainly no 2 of the exact same color, trim, year, or (confirmed during later inspection) VIN as shown in figure 11.
Now, coincidences do happen from time to time, and Mitigation played that angle hard with great success during containment & cleanup, but mere appeal to coincidence won’t placate Mr. and Mrs. Everyman when they suddenly find gunmetal grey, metallic beige, and candy apple red versions of their daily driver sitting outside, to say nothing of the commute to work when they notice every one of the last hundred cars they’ve passed has been an exact duplicate of their own.
As I’ve said before, there is a limit to capacity. If strain is not reduced, scenarios like these will continue to crop up.
The same models will continue to be pushed over and over in an attempt to avoid the prohibitively expensive process of loading afresh every time, completely messing up spawn cycles. In extremis this presents a rather serious containment threat: perhaps a dozen cumulonimbus doppelgängers would go unnoticed, but how about a hundred? Or a thousand? How about the same murder of crows arcing through the sky every hour? Every half hour? Every half minute? The parking spots of a single street downtown occupied by the same red convertible might be rationalized as a movie set or gathering of enthusiasts, but what if all the parking spot of the entire city were occupied by that same car (and onlythat car)?
These scenarios are simply not sustainable, but they are inevitable if changes are not made immediately.
Now, of course, there are some workarounds for this, which we have been implementing while we try to resolve the issue: instead of pulling up the entirety of model A, model B, model C, etcetera for a thousand different objects, the components of just a few can be pulled and reused in different locations, sufficiently recombinated, to generate a passable facsimile of variation, but at current load, even this strategy is proving inadequate.
image [https://i.imgur.com/raowSbb.png]
Your first reaction to figure 12 is probably to ask if why I included this picture of the kitsch backdrop of some high school musical production.
I didn’t.
That’s right, this is an actual residential block. This completely implausible agglomeration of styles was spotted earlier this Cycle during another routine audit patrol, and confirmed one of the Home Office’s larger concerns:
even the powersaving recombination of components is becoming too much, we can no longer trust the pieces to be assembled correctly. So great is the current strain on the system, that we are just as likely to end up with a confused hodgepodge as we are a coherent whole.
Instead of the wholly unremarkable and inconspicuous that we’d prefer, we have instead what looks like a child’s playset blown up 1:1 scale.
Just because we procedurally generate large tracts doesn’t mean that we want random neighborhoods looking like Ralph Frankenstein Lauren was nominated head of the HOA and turned loose.
But trust me when I say that mitigating the fallout from that tasteless architectural anomaly was a breeze compared to convincing people that someone actually designed this next monstrosity:
image [https://i.imgur.com/8AoZy8m.jpeg]
I needn’t say much regarding figure 13 and 14. The objects depicted are vehicles of some sort, we can tell that much, but both the make and model are indeterminate, as neither has been fully rendered.
We’ve seen an alarming increase in renders failing to complete, vehicles particularly concerning as they have high potential to be seen by so many. Fortunately the operators of both of these vehicles were detained and reconditioned without incident, and in lieu of rounding up the potential thousands of witnesses, Mitigation has opted to disseminate information of a new EV startup in town conducting tests in order to get ahead of any rumors or speculation.
While F.R.T.s Tau and Kappa have been tasked with round the clock traffic surveillance and will continue their checkpoint and detention operations until further notice, don’t be surprised at an increase in these unsightly hunks driving about town as Mitigation ramps up decoy production. In fact, some of you will likely be assigned such monstrosities as your daily drivers.
So look forward to that…
image [https://i.imgur.com/JpcUOun.jpeg]
But perhaps worse than the highways congested with convoys of the same car, weather patterns that loop every hour, the throngs of doppelgängers with the same haircut, phones, shoes, gait;
or the inexplicable blending of constituent parts, atrocious figures straight out of a surrealist piece, that no sound mind would ever intend;
or the only partially formed, objects half rendered, abominable things so clearly not meant to be;
is when certain details are omitted entirely, as we see in figure 15.
At a passing glance everything seems in order, but a closer look shows a whole portion of the image simply broken (see zoomed frame for detail).
An icon the size of someone’s thumbnail, sitting there under a blade of grass, just waiting for someone to stop and smell the roses.
Analytics was able to ascertain the image was placeholding for a small bit of chewing gum wrapper dropped a few days prior to the identification of this specimen.
And yes, from a distance, being the same general RGB pallet as the surrounding environment, it is rather inconspicuous, but once noticed, it’s not something one is likely to lose sight off, so blatantly juxtaposed that error is against its surroundings.
And what if this had happened on some surface against which the contrast was impossible to miss for all but the blind?
The leaves of an aspen in fall, or the blinking lights of a distant nighttime airliner on the boundary box, or even an entire constellation.
Of such incidents, most have been occurring at the finer granularities easily overlooked, but more and more are rearing their heads at macro scales.
We can no longer take for granted the fact that the average person bumbles their way through conscious existence glued to screens of varying sizes just trying to get their next dopamine hit, completely oblivious to anything falling outside the immediacy of their instant gratification decision tree.
Yes, the majority of people are distracted, chronically, and many: likely irreversibly, but all it takes is one person with an insufficiently contained sense of wonder and curiosity to start poking around and notice what’s been right in front of them this whole time.
Despite extensive Peak Negative Synergy Event testing having already borne out the fact that most people, even when they see the pixels, immediately rationalize, hand wave, and bury their heads—expanded consciousnesses and all—in the sand, we cannot take the risk.
There is too much at stake.
We must all hold ourselves to a higher standard.
In the coming weeks we will begin rolling out compulsory knowledge checks to verify competency with current protocols, and we will be regularly circling back to touch base as bandwidth permits.
We appreciate your patience and commitment to excellence as we continue to leverage core competencies and scale-up value-add deliverables to optimize robustness and empower you, our key players, with all the mission-critical resources necessary to mitigate contingencies and ensure smooth and seamless operations as we move the needle towards this next generation paradigm shift.
End of communication.
Best,
Director Köpenhaigh
-facilitating optimized efficiencies through tactical implementation of best practices within functional areas-
P.S.- happy Monday team!
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