Glossary

From Intimation

541-P

In the mission logs, the Lewis & Clark's sensors indicate at one point that a virus is in the ship's air, and they find information on it in the encyclopedia, listed only as virus designation 541-P. The virus is later found to be a hoax that was planted in the ship's sensors and encyclopedia by a fragment of S.

Near the end of Essy's story, Dreaming Eyes finds herself bound to a chair, with a band around her wrist that has symbols on it that look like numbers or letters. She says, "It almost looked like the numbers five and forty-one. She looked a lot closer and saw more letters, and it looked like it said 'Scorpio' and 'AI' followed by 'Prime'." We eventually realized that she misread some letters as numbers; the band did not read 541-P, but SAI-P.

[Some number] new incoming tentacles logged.

intimation's Twitter account has [some number] new followers. (This connection was discovered by drizjr.)

AI creation

(Note: this definition is credited to Anaerin and TheClockworkRat, as it was composed from two of their forum posts.) In the world of Halo, AIs are created from an in-depth brain scan...so in-depth, in fact, that (at least during the Halo era) the scan was fatal. The only person to have ever survived this procedure is Cortana's creator, Dr. Catherine Elizabeth Halsey, who rather than using her own brain to scan, managed to successfully scan a flash-clone of herself. This procedure (it seemed) was highly complex, and unrepeatable.

Normally, because of how may resources go into the cognitive impressions that are used to made a smart AI, not to mention the risk of the 'smart' AI themselves, they only choose very specific people to become 'smart' AI. The person must be extremely intelligent. Not just smart, not just stands out a little in class, but genius level intelligence. The reason medical washouts of the Spartan II program are used is because they are incredibly intelligent (they were screened for that before entering the Spartan II program), and are only useful as 'smart' AIs after their bodies are twisted and broken by the Spartan II training process. In short, there is no way they would bother doing a cognitive impression of a random girl that randomly hid in a space ship. She would be useless to them. And the UNSF didn't go around kidnapping little children to create 'smart' AI in the first place. The only project that seems to have been given permission to have mandatory volunteer service at an age younger than eighteen is the Spartan II program.

So then, it seems unlikely that it was the UNSF that turned Dreaming Eyes into an AI...and this seems supported by her physical description of her captors as monsters, with claws, scales, fangs and so on.

Dreaming Eyes' necklace

See this link.

NTCP

Network Tentacle Control Point. When a tentacle from the AI manages to get through a crack in the Stonewall that is supposed to be holding it in, Sys needs to know where that tentacle's control point is so it can use that to retract the tentacle (and it can't repair the crack in the wall if there is a tentacle sticking through it, so the tentacle retraction is a priority).

NTID

Network Identity. Sometimes Sys will refer to a twitter user's username as their NTID, but sometimes an NTID is instead a website's URL. For example, during the Feb. 4 to 5 active period, Sys mentioned that "NTID '@fenwicked' brought my attention to NTID 'http://www.ilovebees.com'" - this is an example of NTID being used both to refer to a twitter username and to a website's URL.

Primary network tentacle

The site http://thewaytheirworldended.com/ in general; sometimes specifically the research archive at http://thewaytheirworldended.com/SYS/ARCHIVE/ .

SWP

Shipwreck Protocol, an emergency system that goes into effect when a spaceship in the future goes finds itself split between its own timeline and ours. This emergency system aims to keep the part of the ship that is stuck in our timeline from causing any temporal paradoxes and to keep us from learning about the future.