NullMother

 The NullMother is a representation in lore of a portion of House Crux’s “Perimeter Agency,” faction tag. She does not represent the entirety of the tag, but rather serves as a piece of a larger puzzle.

Technically entirely outside the hierarchy of NULL Division, the NullMother is a very recent addition. During investigations of ICF Gleipnir following the STO War, a team of NULL Agents, codenamed “The Golden Claw,” was dispatched to the prison planet to assist in a secret mission. Whatever their purpose, most ultimately lost their lives, save one who was allegedly driven to insanity. They were designated Agent Eschenfrau, a mark of their covert purpose.

The Incident

Gleipnir's Depths

The rumor of insanity was only partially true. Agent Eschenfrau witnessed something in Gleipnir’s depths. Some claimed the Warden had purposefully or inadvertently shown her something as she interacted with it. Others insisted something had lain hidden in Gleipnir’s darkest shadows for centuries, perhaps even millenia, until Agent Eschenfrau rediscovered it. Whatever she saw or witnessed, the Agent was found by Crucian Cathars muttering to herself in a corner, her eyes closed but blinking as if in REM sleep as she attempted to carve something into the Yopico Rock of Gleipnir’s walls with her nails, her fingertips bleeding from the effort. 

Eschenfrau was quickly contained and transported off-world, Crux insisting to concerned Triangulum scientists that the Agent had gone insane from an abnormal interaction with the Warden. She was returned swiftly to Hiera under sedation, for fear she would attempt to carve her message into the walls of her room with her bare hands. 

Revelations on Hiera

Once back on Hiera, NULL Division employed several skilled Serpens doctors, hired directly from House Serpens for “a highly confidential matter.” While Crux paid the doctors well, rumor suggests that another agreement was made to assist the Fates themselves with some other, unknown matter in the future. Tests determined no psychic ability within Agent Eschenfrau, nor any signs of an alien presence, implanted device, or abnormal physical changes. Eschenfrau’s condition only seemed to compel her to write or etch something into the nearest surface she could find, and one of the doctor’s recommended providing her with a writing implement and paper. The hypothesis proved correct, and Eschenfrau began writing words and drawing schematics for devices and countermeasures that could be effective against the Warden’s own riot control systems. Her creations and explanations were not advanced, adaptable from Crux’s own technological level with relative ease, and often temporary solutions or complex workarounds, but Eschenfrau was clearly exhibiting an unnaturally keen understanding of advanced and pretech technology in her work. All the while, she muttered in riddles and strange, seemingly disorganized syllables. Forgotten languages? Alien madness? It was impossible to interpret, and attempts at telepathic communication only returned the same indecipherable mutterings. 

Not long after, Agent Eschenfrau was transported to NULL Central on Hiera in secret, official mission reports listing her as “killed in action,” though a body was never produced. Outside of House Crux personnel, only a single Serpens doctor and their support staff were allowed continued access to Agent Eschenfrau to ensure her health and monitor her vitals going forward. NULL Division had marked Eschenfrau as an asset that needed to be rendered absolutely confidential. Her potential was astounding in a time where advanced technologies had repeatedly proven dangerous to the Empire, and NULL commanders feared public knowledge of her abilities would make her a quick target. 

NULL Central

Eschenfrau’s name and identity, both from her life before and as a NULL agent, were utterly expunged from any record. She was retitled “The NullMother” internally and given lavish, furnished quarters deep within Null Central on Hiera. There, she now resides, not an object of worship or a tool, but an advisor who’s words and drawings hold great power over the actions of NULL Division.

Once her first drawings were completed, the NullMother briefly spoke lucidly again, but not as Agent Eschenfrau. Whether her old personality had been edited, evolved, or overtaken was unclear, but she persuaded the agents around her on the night of her “death” that she could not be allowed to fall into the hands of another Noble House. She orchestrated her own transfer to Null Central and requested the erasure of her identity herself. While NULL commanders were initially hesitant, they could not deny that whatever had happened to Agent Eschenfrau on Gleipnir had changed her, and at the very least she needed to be contained.

Abilities

NULL Division would quickly come to understand the true value of the NullMother. When presented with maltech or other examples of powerful technology, the NullMother loses the ability to communicate traditionally as her mind works to find any form of temporary disruptor or counter-tech that would be both useful to House Crux and producible by their level of technology. She draws and writes numerous diagrams and explanations, which are often helpful, though not necessarily perfect solutions. The speed with which she executes these tasks suggests her mind is literally printing information from some sort of internal repository, but no data from scans of her brain has ever indicated where such information might be coming from. The devices and thoughts she pens are often complex or unorthodox for Crux’s technical minds, but frequently prove useful in encounters with maltech and pretech. That said, the NullMother must have seen an example of a device and been given time to understand it to provide a true method of bypassing or countering it, even a temporary one. Her creations can still be useful in situations they were not initially designed for, but will not necessarily be as reliable.

The NullMother has also shown a surprising ability to detect those disguised or hidden by various forms of stealth technology, form-changing psionics, and body modifications. A NULL agent in her presence had undergone surgery to alter his appearance after a mission gone wrong, and she immediately recognized him as though he hadn’t changed at all. 

When she is not focused on her work, the NullMother becomes more lucid, but still tends to speak in riddles or allude to topics and information others don’t understand. She has proven to be somewhat predatory, often toying psychologically with Agents who visit her or holding onto whatever she might be able to use as a weapon in the room around her. She is, unusually, wholly carnivorous, refusing vegetables and fruit entirely, which has led to some concern about how she seems to think about other humans, though she has never attacked an Agent physically. Some have raised concerns that the NullMother might be playing host to some sort of undetectable alien parasite, but her value so far has outweighed this possibility enough for NULL Commanders to ignore it. 

The ramblings of the NullMother are actively recorded and archived by NULL Division operatives, but have thus far yielded no meaningful information. Unlike precognitive psychics, who glimpse visions of possible futures and may at times speak in riddled language or poetic vagaries, the NullMother grants no signs of foretelling or other psychic-like ability. That said, some believe her choice of words may not be as random as it first appears. 

A prominent hypothesis is that the NullMother’s ability to understand pretech and maltech is drawn from genetic memory, not learned by experiencing devices anew but remembered from the NullMother’s ancestry from before the Scream. The words and syllables she speaks may be vocal manifestations of particularly striking memetic triggers associated with certain devices or her ancestors who knew of them. Opponents of this theory question the likelihood of a single individual possessing a broad enough ancestry to be able to understand as many devices as the NullMother has been able to, and discount any suggestion of access to a “collective unconsciousness” on the grounds that she lacks any sort of psychic ability, which has historically been viewed as a theoretical prerequisite to such a state.

Others believe it is more likely that Agent Eschenfrau was exposed to some sort of database or pretech relic hidden within ICF Gleipnir, the device possibly absorbed or destroyed in the process of transferring its data. Less popularly, this theory has been reformulated to suggest some kind of “technological fundamentalism,” hypothesizing that all human technology derives from a continuous, subconscious predisposition for certain design practices, coded into the base genetic material of humanity as a species. If true, large amounts of technology at many different levels of complexity could theoretically be understood by knowing the fundamental, subconsciously-enforced “laws” behind it.

Excerpt From the NullMother Archives

Syllables in quotes are listed individually, though they may sometimes be strung together or given stress over their neighbors, indicating possible representations of words. Their meaning is unknown. Words in parentheses are tied to possible homophones where the NullMother’s intent is unknown. 

1. ...Light gushes aches whispers saccharine crisp as marrow sisters blissful amber octagon “ah mai go tzu” tower “ba no” umbra urgent peace (piece?) trailing smothering “za ta” susurrate conception “ma ka zu gna tsu lo” whale (wail?) infests carotid “ba lai” appetite eager disclaim inhume design “sa row tay kahl (Kahl? call?)” tesseract ingesting pouring playful nightmare “ko ze to ro lay” she “va tsa dze” sandwich pustule cadenza fermented enigma rigor “zel vah qor (kor? core?) zil” too (two? to?) “mo ti” fervent mortis sour aurora lacuna blood derides...”