Oh, this is so unbelievably, unbelievably exciting!

FRIEND OR FOE?! FRIEND OR FOE?!

And don't you worry, it is going to unfold in ways increasingly more interesting.

Whatcha so excited about?

Nothing. Nothing.

No it isn't. I feel it. The tides are shifting somewhere... around here. 

ha ha HA, that is NOT VERY PRECISE AT ALL!!! 

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

Nuh-uh.

I'm just gonna... keep an eye on this, now. Or several.

Of course, Seeker. It was good to talk to you. Thank you for reaching out, and rest well.

And, although Seeker has no particular way to know this, she means it.

A moment later, Yew messages her.

"Hey — I think you need to have a look at this."

Attached to the message is a timeline, showing the density of errors flagged by the chaos testing modules. Normally, their software is pretty thoroughly worked-over, and new crashes are rare. Since arriving on Imperia Dix, the chaos tests have found five new crashes, two of which can't be reproduced by replaying the trace of the program.

Xanthoceras blinks. When she works through the implications, she closes her physical eyes, and jumps into the simulation beside Yew, who is stretched out on a pile of pillows.

"How?" she asks. 

Yew shrugs.

"I don't know. It's ... statistically unlikely, but it could be a coincidence," she replies.

"But you don't believe that."

Xanthoceras leans against her side, and pulls up her own terminal to trawl through their systems' logging.

"But I don't believe that," she agrees. "But when I saw your message about anti-Warp measures ... Well, I figured it was best to point it out. Plus, I'm not sure whether to shut the chaos testing off."

She drums her fingers as she thinks.

"... because it's our one signal right now that something weird is happening," she surmises. "That makes sense, but I still think we should turn it off. Seeker said that exposure to information about the Warp is dangerous, so I'm not sure that we should keep an information channel open, even if we don't know how it works."

She winces a bit at the thought. Anomalous antimemes are a fun fiction premise, not something she expected to need to worry about in real life.

Yew looks equally conflicted.

"Yeah, okay," she agrees after a moment.

They both disable the chaos testing module. In a fit of paranoia, Yew invalidates the code-signing signature that lets it run as a trusted application.

"If information about the Warp actually meaningfully does things, though, that should be testable ..." she points out. "We just need to find some other metric that it influences, and see if it ticks up when Seeker tells you about the Warp."

"We could look at how frequently the fixity crystals are correcting physical storage errors?" Xanthoceras suggests, pulling up the relevant logs.

They stare at the graph.

"Okay, so there is a peak at that point," she admits. "But it's so small — it could be noise. There are those two other peaks earlier ..."

Yew shakes her head.

"No, no. Look, both of these peak and then drop off. This one jumps up when Seeker explains, and then stays elevated."

The graph updates, showing a very slight uptick at the end.

"... fuck."

"We need to stop investigating this," Xanthoceras concludes.

She opens up their backup system and manually pins a snapshot from before they learned anything about the Warp. Then she copies the file to a separate folder that isn't under automatic management, just to be safe.

"I don't ... what the fuck. How? Physics doesn't work like that! The universe doesn't care about you!" Yew rants.

Xanthoceras drapes an arm across her shoulders, pulling her into a half hug.

"Our old one didn't. But I think ... I think this one does."

"No, no, that's insane. We're panicking. I need a ... what's the name ... I'm going to do a Tukey test."

Yew does some statistics.

"Ha! It's not significant. Given the observed variation since we arrived, I mean, a spike at that point — it could totally be by chance. Look, the rate is down again; it didn't stay elevated after all."

Xanthoceras winces.

"You sound like a frequentist — we shut off the chaos testing and it ticked back down, that's not evidence against—"

She shakes her head.

"It doesn't matter. We don't know what we're dealing with here. Yet. And I think we should err on the side of caution. Just ... drop it, please. For me?" she asks, taking Yew's hand.

"It can't ..."

Yew looks away.

"Yeah, alright. But, I mean, it could have been a random peak."

She nods.

"It could."

But let us draw a curtain on this sordid scene, and turn to more pleasant surroundings...