The Alien Ethnographers League (AEL) had carefully prepared a case for the necessary though dangerous inclusion of certain (modified) Earth humans in the war against the Bureaucron. They placed their findings before the Proelium Sententi, a forum for decision making and action planning involving all non-infected races of the Free Mundi (universes). The work of the Proelium concerned the scanning of MultiSpace for evidence of life and the meticulous vetting of lifeforms for Bureaucron infestation.

Earth’s vetting had taken up millions of earth-years and involved many “minglings” such as the most recent one by the AEL, although remote cultural scanning had been possible once humans developed technologies such as radio and television and telephonic communication. The Proelium were amassing huge amounts of data about the history and development of the Bureaucron and whilst there were several theories that fit this data none of these gave a clear picture of its origin. The “maths” didn’t “add up” so to speak. The Bureaucron was a strange, slippery emanation that always exceeded the sum of its apparent parts. The initial conditions for its coming into existence simply couldn’t be computed accurately enough. There was always some essential element that they were failing to account for , some crucial dependent variable that escaped them. Some called this the Ultimate Explainer. Others believed that, in fact, there was no Ultimate Explainer and that the very logic of “a point of origin” was itself an ancient trace of infestation in their own genetic structures.

Despite these and other differences of opinion among Proelium members they were united in their belief that MultiSpace must be purged of this evil at all costs. Many member races harbored painful memory traces of their own pandemics long photochrons away. Earth, in all charted universes, was a definite site of infestation but there was some debate about the extent of the problem. The recent “mingling” among humans undertaken by the AEL provided new smear that strongly suggested the infestation was about to enter what was thought might be an irreversible end stage. This was being questioned by a specialist group of Cultural Diviners, known as the Bards, who felt the AEL were in danger of exaggerating the problem.

Their work was not concerned with the more radical fluidity of smear-data typical of AEL research, but with the highly processed productions of sight-dependent consciousness that took what was often referred to as “solid form” in human works of “high” art. Their analyzes of these visually experienced products involved some very complex technology and a process known as Medium-Transference to make it accessible to non-sighteds. This process, it was claimed, rendered (reduced) the concepts and emotions bound up in human artforms down to their smearessences, or “ingenuae” as they were known in the trade.

The Bards’ science, of Metacorporology, had only recently been developed in response to the growing need for intelligence in the war against the Bureaucron.It was very controversial. Its epistemology was considered by many to be flawed, and possibly even Bureaucron-prone. The AEL, for instance, who were smearers par excellence, felt that “ingenuae” could not be treated as empirical evidence of the emotive reality that produced them. It was not that solid forms of human consciousness were prone to contamination by the spuria of Medium-Transference technology, as some critics simply thought, but that they were so materially different to the smearessences they were assumed to represent for it ever to be possible to have corporeal knowledge of their smear of origin.

The Bards claimed that their research revealed evidence that Earth humans had high levels of social sincerity and moral integrity measurable by the amounts of empathetic emotions present in the “ingenuae” they’d analyzed. It was recognized that races displaying such levels of comitas were likely to have a latent genetic immunity to the Bureaucron virus which usually limited the pandemic to approximately 150 generations post-allele stage. It is currently believed that the Bureaucron virus is able to evolve in such a way that it incorporates itself into the host’s genetic code at the level of the allele, becoming an integral part of the host, infection thus being spread through host reproduction. Bureaucron infestation thus occurs in stages. The initial or “outlaw” stage, where the virus is host-independent, occurs when viral spores enter a planet’s atmosphere, though exactly how they arrive there is not fully understood.

Airborne infection (parasitic stage) of suitable hosts (i.e species with an evolving complex CNS) appears only to occur under certain specific local conditions and it is thought that such infection may actually itself be a necessary condition for the advanced socio-cultural evolution of a host-species. In fact, since no infested species has yet been found that does not display sophisticated levels of socio-cultural development, it is thought that such development and the Bureaucron’s ability to become genetically incorporated (unified stage) are inter-dependent. Many species across the multiverse have been infected but certain species appear to develop cumulative immunity over many generations and thus free themselves of the infestation. A few individual members of these species somehow had full immunity and never became infected. The AEL is made up of creatures that have full species-immunity since the Bureaucron tend to infect sighted species, or species like the Bards whose distant ancestors were sighted and whose present genetic patterns are the result of necessary minglings with other species due to cataclysmic cosmic events that destroyed their homeworlds.

It is believed that there is yet another stage, the endstage, in the Bureaucron’s evolution, that will occur in a species that has very few or no members with full/high levels of immunity. The AEL fear Earth humans are such a species since they have only found three humans in all their many minglings whose immunity is high enough for infection not to be manifest. They strongly suspect that these individuals may well be the offspring of matings between certain of their own number and three females who had low level immunity. Whilst such matings by minglers are frowned upon by the Proelium, this infraction of a rather insignificant rule may well turn out to be fortuitous for Earth’s future.

To be continued…