Voidmass The setting

The Wraiths

The term Wraiths denotes the presences that a part of the crews report having perceived during warp crossings, for the most part in suspended animation. The designation arose among shipboard personnel between 2093 and 2095 and in the course of the following years spread to the transit infrastructure and to the frontier colonies. The episodes reported comprise dreams and nightmares of anomalous intensity, memories as plausible as they are impossible to place, perceptions relating to periods of unconsciousness and similar experiences among people who had had no way of communicating with one another; in the most extreme accounts there appear diaphanous figures, apparent attempts at contact and episodes of loss of control that witnesses sometimes describe as outright possessions.

Publicly these episodes remain classified among the neurological disorders associated with suspended animation and with exposure to warp fields; none of the hypotheses advanced as to their origin has found confirmation, and the research divisions of the MC, which have case series far wider than the public ones, maintain great reticence about the results collected.

The Wraith Variant

The consequences of exposure to the Wraiths take the form of the Drift and can lead to the same outcome: Somatic Discontinuity Syndrome (SDS). In subjects returning from a crossing, however, the Drift presents peculiar characteristics in its course, in the nature of its symptoms and in its terminal manifestations. For this reason, in the research circles that possess the case series this form of SDS is designated the Wraith Variant: its systematic study began in 2096, when the first verified appearances were added to the testimonies, and has been conducted largely within the research divisions of the interstellar operators.

The designation does not appear in any public classification; for ordinary medicine SDS continues to have a single recognized cause, namely the reduction of the Biological Retention Index. The distinction is in any case difficult to observe in practice, since heavily augmented subjects are particularly numerous precisely among the frontier crews, who also constitute the population most exposed to interstellar crossings; the two case series therefore overlap to a large extent, and a physician who finds themselves examining a subject with a reduced BRI affected by SDS on return from a long run already has a coherent and measurable clinical explanation, without any need to postulate a second cause.

Triggering factors

The episodes of the Wraith Variant known so far are confined to transit in warp, and the correlation with the duration of the voyage, observed from the earliest reports onwards, is today read as a correlation with the time of exposure to the warp field generated by the Alcubierre Drive. The data available further make it possible to determine that the phenomenon strikes with far greater frequency subjects in suspended animation who, besides presenting a temporarily elevated drift value, have no means of interrupting or reporting the experience.

Waking subjects are affected more rarely, and the data of the surveillance protocol indicate that this occurs above all when their value is already considerably high. Suspended animation on long runs therefore constitutes the condition of maximum exposure, and is the reason why interstellar crews represent to date almost the entirety of the case series.

Symptomatology

In the subjects analysed, characteristics analogous to those present in the other forms of drift are recognizable: the progressive loss of the perception of self and of the attribution of experience, up to the onset of SDS. The symptomatology nonetheless presents characteristics of its own: the subject does not merely doubt their own body or their own identity, but comes to call into question the very existence of the world of which they are part.

The convictions that derive from this are difficult to refute for as long as the nature of the presences remains undetermined, because there exists no shared interpretative framework permitting them to be declared false. They further present an anomalous capacity for persuasion: even when they are set out by subjects already compromised, they tend to exert upon their interlocutors a hold disproportionate to their coherence or plausibility.

Course

In subjects followed over time the manifestations succeed one another in a constant order, which the known case series today makes it possible to describe in sequential stages.

  • The first signs are perceptual and are rarely reported: indistinct images and sounds, impossible to remember or to describe, of which only a vague disquiet remains. There follow the disturbances of sleep, with dreams (nightmares) blighted by terrifying images of which, on waking, the content does not remain, but only a strong fear and the relief of having escaped it. In the days that follow, recovery from drift halts and the value reached tends to remain stable even under conditions of rest.

  • Shortly afterwards the hallucinations begin: the accounts distinguish them from those known to psychiatry because they do not consist in the perception of an absent object, but of something that does not appear to correspond to any recognizable object. They last a few minutes and compromise every activity; in a part of the documented cases, their content has moreover proved to be connected to real facts that the subject had no way of knowing.

  • In the following phase the false memories appear: the subject describes with precision episodes that never occurred, recognizing no anomaly in them, and retains the memory until it is contradicted from outside. It is the first stage to produce abundant documentation, because family and colleagues can immediately recognize the discrepancy. Here too, memories are documented containing exact details relating to facts that the subject could not have known.

  • The false memories are followed by doubt: the subject develops a conviction about the nature of reality which from that moment stably conditions their judgement. In this phase a greater resistance to psychic stress is also observed, interpreted by clinicians as a consequence of the growing distance from their own experience.

  • Immediately afterwards the contagion begins: the subject sets out their conviction to those around them with a persuasive efficacy greater than before, and a part of their interlocutors end by adopting it.

  • In the advanced stages alterations of the personality appear: the subject stably modifies their character and their preferences, developing new fears or phobias or passing through periods of apathy and marked indifference. In some cases capacities previously absent also emerge, while skills already acquired weaken or disappear.

  • The terminal stage is preceded by episodes of loss of motor control and vocalizations in unknown tongues. The phenomena generally last a few seconds, leave no memory in the subject and provoke great disquiet in witnesses. The words uttered have been recorded in several cases, without any correspondence with known languages having been identified. These vocalizations are commonly termed the language of Possession or the language of the Wraiths, since almost all of the subjects who develop SDS after such manifestations adopt behaviour that witnesses describe as consistent with possession by a non-human entity.

As in the other forms of drift, the initial stages can regress with rest and with treatment. The terminal stage is instead considered irreversible, unless a Selfmark made before the onset of SDS is available.

Recurrence, predisposition and risk factors

The most solid datum collected so far concerns the recurrence of the episodes, which in the exposed population does not appear entirely random: some subjects report only one, others experience them on every subsequent crossing and with increasing intensity. The current explanation is that an individual predisposition exists.

The available data further suggest that the incidence is not uniform across the different runs: some routes present a frequency of episodes appreciably above the average, without it having been possible to trace the difference back to the duration of the crossing, to the characteristics of the ships or to other known factors. The phenomenon is by now consistent enough to be taken into consideration by the insurers, who are assessing differentiated premiums as a function of the incidence recorded on individual runs. The criteria of eligibility for the long runs are also defined on these findings, and those who present repeated episodes are among the first to be subject to the measures of suspension and interdiction provided for by the protocol.

The confidential case series of the MC are, however, far wider than the public ones, and it is not known whether within them the recurrence of the episodes and the differing incidence across the routes find an explanation other than the one officially accepted.