A highly advanced, fully artificial civilization, the Ciphers are one of the great mysteries of the galaxy. Though first knowingly encountered by human explorers from the Corporate Worlds in the late twenty-third century, evidence suggests the Ciphers had been covertly observing the development of humans, virgonids, and other species for hundred or thousands of years previously. Compact scientists today believe that some of the reports of so-called UFOs and UAPs, endemic to Earth in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, were likely these Cipher probes, and that some small number of even older reports may represent the same phenomenon.
The origin of the Ciphers is wholly unknown. Logic suggests they or their antecedents must have been created by a biological intelligence at some point in the distant past. However, no information about this species, and whether that creation was intentional or accidental, has yet been uncovered. While the Ciphers have frequently communicated with the Compact and other races, they have never shared any such information.
Similarly, the precise nature of Cipher consciousness remains unknown—for example, it is unclear whether each physical Cipher platform possesses a discrete consciousness, or a network of multiple consciousness, or if all Ciphers are animated by a single hive consciousness. Despite great leaps in the field over the last few centuries, Compact and allied scientists have never succeeded in creating a fully conscious, sapient AI, certainly not in the way that the Ciphers evidently posses these traits. Captured Cipher ships, drones, simulants, and combat units reveal little in their physical architecture that could answer this great question.
The true level of Cipher technological advancement is another topic of debate within the Compact. At each stage of contact and conflict with the machines, their military technology at least seems to have been roughly on par with, or slightly ahead of, their biological adversaries. Given the now two-century history of conflict between the Ciphers and the Compact races, that would suggest that Cipher technology has advanced at roughly the same rate as, for example, humans, despite beginning with a massive head start.
The great unlikelihood of this being coincidental has resulted in a number of theories. The first, most commonly accepted, is that before encountering and warring with humans, the Ciphers had reached a technological plateau beyond which they saw no logical reason to advance. Since then, lacking imagination and innovation in the biological sense, Cipher advancement has been tied to that of humans and their allies, in some cases directly as a result of reverse engineering.
Another, less comforting theory suggests that the Ciphers have either deliberately restricted their technological development, or appeared to do so, in order to keep pace with their biological adversaries. Why they would do this, and thus expose themselves to potential defeat, is unclear—but given the Ciphers’ apparent penchant for enigmatic experimentation on the populations under their control, it cannot be ruled out.
The Compact name given to the polity controlled by the machine race known as the Ciphers. The extent of this empire is unknown; during the negotiations for the Treaty of Omega Serpentis, the Cipher representative provided the Compact with evidence of dozens of transformed machine world-based systems elsewhere in the galaxy, whose locations, if they exist, are unknown. To date, two such machine world systems, each time falsely believed to have been the Cipher capital or home system, have been destroyed by the Compact races, at the conclusion of the First Cipher War in 2314, and at the end of the Galactic War in 2485.
In addition to their machine worlds, the Ciphers control an unknown number of worlds bearing indigenous organic civilizations. Several of these were liberated during the Galactic War and now fall under Compact jurisdiction under the Articles of Protectorship. At least four more such worlds are known to exist and given the estimated interstellar scope of Cipher influence. Many more may remain undiscovered.
The Ciphers seem not to possess a government in the traditional sense, and, depending on the nature of Cipher consciousness, may not require one (see “Ciphers”). There is also little pattern to the manner in which they rule over their subject species. Each of these biological civilizations is kept at a different level of social and technological development. Some, like Byas, were maintained at an Earth Bronze Age-equivalent level, while others, like Sukat, were permitted to retain an industrial civilization. In some cases, the Ciphers seem to have used a relatively light hand, merely observing and intervening to prevent any developments they deem unacceptable, while in others, the machines interfere almost constantly and at every level, experimenting with different forms of social and cultural order, conflict, and even biology.
Ciphers have performed similar experiments on captured populations of humans and other Compact races during their wars, often with horrifying results. Populations on Cipher-occupied worlds have been culled seemingly at random, while individuals and small groups have endured everything from vivisection to forced breeding, to psychological torment by means of virtual reality environments. In other cases, as at Rāma in 2313 and Zevka in 2375, entire worlds have been wiped out. The purpose of these experiments and seemingly random massacres has never been ascertained.
Similarly, the reason for Cipher vacillation between extreme belligerence and peaceful coexistence has yet to be determined. It is now believed that, given the resources of their empire, the Ciphers were fully capable of wiping humanity from existence during the First Cipher War (2312–2314), without much difficulty. Evidently, they chose not to, instead accepting a limited defeat at the hands of the human–virgonid alliance. Why remains a mystery and has defied all preexisting human expectations regarding the behavior of a potential artificial civilization, largely based on the concept that a machine intelligence would be entirely rational. But if the machines saw humans as an existential threat, why would they not eliminate us? And if they did not, then what logical reason would they have to fight us at all, given that they precipitated the war?
The Compact may never be able to answer these questions, but many experts on the Ciphers now believe that all their conflicts with us have been one massive, interstellar experiment of some kind. Like the others, its purpose is unknown, and we are left to wonder: What happens when it is over? Will the Ciphers disappear and leave us to our own devices, or will we finally witness the full extent of their power—and if the latter, even with all the advances we have made over the last five centuries, will we have any hope of survival?
