Infrastructure: Intrusion Point

Hidden throughout the world are pieces of Infrastructure, devices and structures designed to serve the occult purposes of the Machine, a universe spanning entity working to unknown purposes.

Some examples of Infrastructure however are more than tools. Some are beginnings.

Intrusion Point

In a crumbling tenement, an acrid odor wafts from a recently rented room. The graying man who rented it seemed confused, mumbling numbers and esoteric terms. He seemed a step away from the men and women camped on the front stoop, surrounded by plastic bags and dirty clothes. Not like a university professor, not one with tenure.

Inside pools of colored wax sit in a precise pattern about a large ring of electrified coils. Ozone hides the presence of other more toxic gases in the air. Equations written in chalk cover the walls and floor like a spell. A man's withered form decays in the center of the assemblage. In the closet a man made of broken glass and twisted bone lurks, waiting for midnight and the next step of the plan.

Truth

The intrusion point begins as little more than a thought experiment: an intriguing set of equations that describe an alternate reality. But they possess a memetic compulsion that drives bright minds to solve them and derive more equations, slowly unpacking an alien universe into our own. Once complete, it drives the victim into building a device or experiment, an occult matrix, that creates a servitor for the reality, the first of its Angels.

This agent takes over where the most likely deceased victim ended, constructing more Infrastructure and extending the alien reality over more and more of our world. One day that reality will be all that remains.

Unravelling this proto-occult matrix requires a brilliant mathematical mind. An extended Intelligence + Science roll at a -5 penalty (10 successes required, each roll takes a week) allows one to unpack the rules for the Intrusion Point. +1 bonus for a speciality related to higher math or physics. Partial work, if properly recorded, can serve as the basis for another person's later derivation.

As the victim works on the problem the rules of local reality shift. The value of pi changes by a few tenths of a percent, quantum effects become much more probable, and something like magic becomes possible for a few moments a day. eventually these minor alterations allow the victim to create an occult ritual which brings this alien reality into contact with our own.

Lynchpin

Physically the Intrusion point is just paper and chalk. Sometimes it inhabits audio or video recordings, other times collections of crime scene photos and blood stained canvas, and once it included a small university press print run. Absent a mind to house it, the equations hold no power.

Intercepting the current victim and erasing their memory of the equations stops the effect (or killing them), at least if the first ritual hasn't been completed. It might also be possibile to adjust the equations and thus the nature of the entity summoned. What effect that might have remains unknown.

Alternate Options

The equations that compose the intrusion points could have other interpretations:

• Mage: the Awakening: studying the equations surely would yield some Arcane experience, while unpacking them might reveal hidden rotes. Perhaps it is mental grimoire? Then again it might be an Abyssal manifestation built to tempt the unwary.
• Promethean: the Created: The equations could be a cipher, hiding the process that a demiurge used to create a Promethean. Unravelling it might reveal new Transmutations or uncover a Milestone.
• Demon: the Descent: while this is obviously a tool of the God-Machine, it might also contain secrets to summoning or creating Infrastructure and Angels. This might be the source code of the Machine, a potent tool for taking it down. Or rebuilding it.
• Trail of Cthulhu: a set of equations that allow an alien reality into our own? Clearly an odd and dangerous Mythos tome. It can't be skimmed but pouring over it grants +3 Cthulhu Mythos but you must make a Stability test Difficulty 5 (+1 per reading) or lose 1 Sanity (and eventually become a mad cultist). Otherwise treat it as a dedicated Investigative pool, refreshed by spending points of Physics and possibly Library Use. Further readings might expose all sorts of rituals and incantations spells.