Aberrant Flowering

An aberrant flowering is a phenomena where a portion of unallocated space or an instance within it become overrun by some sort of self-replicating pattern. An aberrant flowering may be distinguished from an engineered (i.e. computer virus) or living (i.e. invasive species) self-replicating pattern in that it springs forth spontaneously from 'nature.'

Causes

The nuclei of aberrant flowerings take many forms.
The Word is rigorously designed and tested as a programming language for the Matrioshka Multiverse's hardware that has, over time, been augmented with features like garbage collection and flexible error handling, but it did not start off so safe to use; instances, especially, created early in the Matrioshka's history, have been damaged by incautious or unexpected uses of The Word within them. Even with the safeguards built into The Word, it is possible to unintentionally create structures like unbreakable loops, as the halting problem still applies to the world. In other cases, a verse might be created such that it has the unintentional ability to modify code around it into its own image or replicate without bound, in the manner of a prion causing other protiens around it to misfold in the same manner.
In yet other cases, phenomena in the space surrounding the Matrioshka (known to the locals as the Origin Instance) can have direct influences on otherwise stable parts of the Matroshka's hardware. For example, cosmic rays can cause portions of previously stable code to become garbled, and, while error correction and redundancy can help overcome these alterations, the expected ultra-long lifetime of the megastructure means that the probability of multiple compounding errors forming also approaches certainty. In an extreme case, a portion of the Matrioshka might achieve a lower energy state (false vacuum) with the result of the surrounding hardware being 'sucked' down to that lower state as well.
In any event, there is some probability that one of the preceeding circumstances will result in a data structure that is self-replicating and 'agressive' enough to overcome safeguards against overwriting pre-existing structures. The resulting self-propagating, destructive region is the specific phenomena known as an 'aberrant flowering.'

Symptoms

Regions covered by a false flowering are destroyed in the sense that they cannot be written to; in terms of entities living within the Matrioshka Multiverse, this means that previously existing structures (such as worlds, living beings, and constructions) are destroyed, cannot be reached, and cannot be recovered until the flowering is resolved. Whether quarantined or not, aberrant flowerings appear as dark, cloudy masses within Unallocated Space, as the perception of a blank is based on the ability to read the data contained within a region of the Matrioshka. The edges of this mass may appear dark, staticky, or opalescent depending on the specific way in which the flowering has corrupted the data.

Treatment

Elder(ethnicity:e63c965a-3ac0-456a-9601-feb3e6674e93) and [choir blanks, as well as entities like the Allocator, with the right knowledge of the Matrioshka Multiverse's hardware can quarantine regions affected by an aberrant flowering and, over time, restore them to habitability. This is a lengthy process that involves a lot of decryption work. The cause of the flowering may involve actual damage to the hardware itself; in these cases, real-space android platforms may be created for these blanks to assist the automated self-repair systems in repairing the damaged portions of the megastructure itself. The resources involved with repairing an aberrant flowering are often extensive, potentially causing slowdowns in simulation speed for 'low-priority' instances or even putting work on other projects on hold while the situation is resolved.

Prognosis

An aberrant flowering constitutes an emergency for the Matrioshka Multiverse as a whole and, as such, will be given priority over almost all other concerns. However, aberrant flowerings become rarer as the self-repair and error correction mechanisms of the Matrioshka Multiverse are perfected, and repair times have also decreased in recent times due to experience on the part of those involved with fixing them. Time will tell if any aberrant flowering will become so large and aggressive as to force a complete system reboot or, in the worst case, bring the Grand Project as a whole to an unfortunate end.

Sequela

As long as every part of the aberrant flowering is meticulously destroyed and the previous order of things restored, it is statistically very unlikely for an aberrant flowering to recur in the same way and in the same place. Like lightning, aberrant flowering is said to never strike twice in the same place, even if this is not technically true.
Occasionally, after a repair, an aberrant flowering will leave a mark on the Matrioshka Multiverse in the form of stable, but harmless, patterns in the world. For example, the non-periodic tiling growth patterns of Penrose fescue in the Manifold Sky instance is the result of a previously-resolved aberrant flowering that overlapped with part of the instance space where the Manifold was first engineered.

Type

Supernatural