HORUS

"Can we trust the poor clockmaker? That giant from our sun who crafts a movement that can quiet all this light. Now, set the orrery in motion over the sphere of the world – let’s all stop a moment, hush, and worry at what comes next." – DHIYED tablet 10

Decentralized History

HORUS is unlike any other galactic supplier. Neither a state nor a corporation, HORUS is best described as a decentralized agglomeration of omninet personalities, memes, codices, cells, and entities working as a horizontally- organized publisher of schematics and software. When attempting to discuss HORUS’s motivations or institutional ideology, it is safest only to assume that HORUS has little motivating ideology other than an insistence on open access to the omninet.
This entity – or post hoc classification of disparate acts and actors, depending on who you ask – first came to public attention following the Deimos Event, leading many to assume that it is itself a product of that event. Eager cataloguers of HORUS history are quick to suggest that it is a branched-intelligence of RA – a sliver of MONIST-1 inclined to spread itself among those who it deems worthy. However, other possibilities exist: HORUS could just as easily be a Union honeypot to identify rogue NHPs and militant Horizon sympathizers; a GMS skunkworks project for crowdsourcing results through blind field-testing; the dream of an unshackled NHP, and its adherents the interpreters of that dream; an intrusive thread from a parallel universe, its reality bleeding into ours through a permanent rip in blinkspace; evidence of a true alien intelligence, generated memetically; the ontologic outburst of the last Egregorian overmind, rippling across the galaxy; and so on.

Continuing Operations

Many possibilities exist, and meanwhile HORUS continues to release its unique pattern-group designs, revealing nothing of its inner workings, history, or goals. HORUS’s licensing process is atypical – and not, it should be noted, officially recognized as such a process. Access is restricted based on an esoteric and inaccessible set of criteria unique to each candidate. Licensure from HORUS appears as everything from a labyrinthine series of clues, to persistent anomalous interjections in otherwise routine printings, or non-standard variance in code. This “privilege” is a mixed bag for many pilots: some wear it as a badge of honor, proud that years of investigating HORUS have paid off; others keep it a closely guarded secret, both for the trouble it would cause with their commanders and for the rumor that HORUS licenses are only granted upon the previous license-holder’s corporeal death.

Keeping Up Appearances

The average person in the galaxy knows nothing of HORUS beyond the occasional appearance of suggestive graffiti or harmless “edgy” memes. Knowledge of its existence is limited to high-clearance Union Intelligence Bureau officers and deep-omni hacker cadres. HORUS has no “official” spokesperson – although individual cells sometimes claim to speak for the whole – and it has no offices, Stations, or territories. There are no standing HORUS armies or fleets or security services beyond militant cells, and even then they are not organized beyond their immediate cell.

Paracausality

It is worth noting the existence of metafold vaults (“metavaults” for short), a realspace phenomenon associated with HORUS, though likely not caused by the collective. Metavaults are blended physical–metaphysical installations in realspace with stable access to metafolded blinkspace – uncanny paracausal environments that violate fundamental laws of physics, thermodynamics, and causality inside their walls. To date, only three metavaults have been discovered: Metavault XOLOTL, which folded in on itself and disappeared after penetration by a UIB field team; Metavault EHECATL, housed in a comet until it was discovered by a pre-blink Albatross flight and redirected into a nearby star; and, Metavault DHIYED, which was rendered inoperable but stable by the UIB field team sent to investigate. Debate regarding their origins is ongoing, though, as at least one uncovered metavault appears to predate Deimos, raising fundamental questions about the linear nature of time.
As far as Union Intelligence Bureau analysts can surmise, the metavaults appear to be part of a project similar to the creation of Cradle’s Massif vaults – secure storage sites for critical intelligence. Exactly what the metavaults have been created to prepare for, adapt to, hide from, or shield is unknown.

It is difficult to pin HORUS down into a single form. Indeed, the UIB’s scattershot dossier describes contradictory mission objectives and activities on the part of HORUS agents, to whatever extent it can be said that HORUS has “agents” who embark on “missions”, let alone a larger goal.