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.