Dispatcher

The Dispatcher is a Nexus parasite that carries communication for the parasites' network, stores finished organisms, reworks them to new blueprints and deploys them. It does not move. It consists of a base body, which holds its organs and the organisms it stores, a red flower resembling a chrysanthemum, which receives and transmits electromagnetic signals, and a network of tentacles underground. There are two species, the Primitive and the Adapted Dispatcher, and each develops continuously through its life; field classification divides that development into four stages, from a base body 1 to 3 metres across at stage I to one of 12 to 20 metres at stage IV.

Dispatchers carry the network's signals over any distance, from one Beckon to the next and between Earth and the Iris. Beckons direct the organisms around them chemically, and reach a Dispatcher through the root mat that joins them; through the Dispatcher they receive information and commands from anywhere the network reaches. Dispatchers learn human languages from the transmissions they receive, and no method of encryption developed since 2020 has proved fully effective against them. Armies, shipping and civil networks near infested ground have returned to runners, wired lines and radio silence. H&A intercepts Dispatcher signals and reads them with decoding models, including part of the Beast.

The first Dispatchers were identified in 2021. As of 2028 they are found wherever established Beckon growth is found.

Name

The name was given by H&A researchers in 2021, for the way the organism releases the organisms it stores. "Dispatcher network" is used for the Dispatchers of a region together with the signals they carry, and "relay network" for the whole system, including the relay ring around the Iris.

Description

Base body

The base body is roughly circular and sits low on the ground, partly sunk into the root mat it grows from. Its surface carries short tendrils. It holds the Dispatcher's internal organs and its storage chambers, and is joined to the mat by blood vessels and nerve tissue. Like a Beckon's, its tissues are built around cells that are filled with water in the Primitive Dispatcher and with sulfur hexafluoride in the Adapted.

Flower

The flower is a red structure resembling a chrysanthemum, carried above the base body on a short stalk. It has an outer cup of reflector leaves and two or three tentacle-like feed horns at its centre.

The flower works as a dish antenna. Its reflector leaves focus incoming signals onto the feed horns, which contain crystals of iron sulfide grown by the organism. The crystals convert radio signals into impulses in the Dispatcher's nerves, in the manner of the crystal detectors of early radio receivers, and the same structures transmit. The size of the flower sets the frequencies it handles best: a flower about a metre across is most sensitive at the frequencies used by mobile telephone networks and wireless data links, and larger flowers receive lower frequencies and reach further.

Tentacle network

A network of tentacles runs underground from the base body, about 40 metres from it at stage I and several hundred metres at stage IV. It senses vibration in the ground and builds maps from it, and it deploys stored organisms toward what it detects. Footsteps are its main input. It tracks a regular gait better than an irregular one: soldiers are trained to break their step on infested ground, and children, whose gait is naturally irregular, are tracked less well than trained adults.

Species

The two species of Dispatcher follow the same division as the Primitive and Adapted Beckons. Neither develops into the other.

Primitive Dispatcher

The Primitive Dispatcher is cold-blooded. The cells of its base body are filled with water, its temperature follows the air, and frost kills it. It was the first Dispatcher recorded on Earth, in 2021, on the root mats of Primitive Beckons in West Africa, and was found in South America the same year. Primitive Dispatchers on Earth rarely develop beyond stage II, and their flowers seldom exceed 2 metres. Their tissue is soft enough to be cut with hand tools, and in 2021 and 2022 they were cleared in the same operations as the Primitive Beckons around them. By the middle of the decade they had disappeared from the Americas and Europe with the Primitive Beckons, and as of 2028 they are found only where Primitive Beckons survive.

Adapted Dispatcher

The Adapted Dispatcher is warm-blooded, and the cells of its base body are pressurised with sulfur hexafluoride. It keeps its core at a steady temperature and folds its flower closed in hard frost. Through Overwinter it slows greatly, relaying less traffic and releasing fewer organisms, but does not stop. It was first recorded in 2022, alongside Adapted Beckons, and has replaced the Primitive Dispatcher across the temperate world. All Dispatchers recorded beyond stage II are Adapted.

Development

A Dispatcher develops continuously through its life, and its growth slows as it gets larger. Field manuals and H&A survey reports classify Dispatchers into four stages by the diameter of the flower, which can be measured from a distance:

A Dispatcher reaches stage II within about three months of appearing, stage III within a year, and stage IV after about two years on rich ground. The stages are markers and not distinct forms: a Dispatcher at the upper end of one stage differs little from one at the lower end of the next. Stage IV Dispatchers were first recorded in 2024, in the Amazon basin.

The stage of a Dispatcher determines what it can reach. Stage I and II Dispatchers relay between neighbouring Beckons and over tens of kilometres; stage III Dispatchers link regions; stage IV Dispatchers, and the ingrown Dispatchers of Root Beckons, carry traffic between Earth and the Iris.

Signals

The network

The parasite network works on three levels. A Beckon directs the field organisms around it chemically, through compounds released into the air and the ground that the organisms detect at close range, in the manner of the pheromones of social insects. It reaches its neighbours and its Dispatchers through its root mat, whose vessels and nerve tissue join the mats of the organisms around it. Through a Dispatcher on its mat it sends and receives signals across any distance the Dispatcher can reach, including the distance to the Iris.

Once a Dispatcher is joined to its mat, a Beckon receives information and commands from anywhere in the network; without one, it is limited to what reaches it through the ground. Commands from a Root Beckon or from the Iris reach the Beckons of a region through its Dispatchers, and the Beckons pass them to their organisms.

Dispatchers carry the revisions of the blueprints that Beckons hold in their bulbs, from which they produce organisms. Beckons with poor Dispatcher coverage receive fewer revisions and fewer directions.

Only the flower relays information. The Dispatcher Tentacles that surface from the ground push stored organisms out and carry no signal, and the Deterrents around a Dispatcher receive their signals from it through the mat. Dispatcher signals follow no fixed code and change over time.

Learning

Dispatchers learn human languages from the transmissions they receive. A Dispatcher exposed to the radio traffic of a region learns the languages used in it over months, and its emissions come to carry the structure of that traffic. H&A Hyperbiology describes the learning as statistical: the organism learns to predict the signals it receives from the signals that came before them. No evidence of understanding or awareness has been found in Dispatcher tissue.

The same learning extends to encryption. No method of encryption developed since 2020 has proved fully effective against Dispatchers, which learn each new method once it is in use. Military and commercial users replace their methods on short cycles, and treat any radio transmission within range of a Dispatcher as read.

Range

The range at which a Dispatcher can read a transmission depends on the power of the transmitter, the terrain and the size of the flower. A stage I Dispatcher reads mobile telephones at a few kilometres and military radios at tens of kilometres, and larger Dispatchers read further. The joint H&A-EF command treats all radio traffic within 30 kilometres of known Dispatcher ground as compromised, and within 80 kilometres of a stage IV Dispatcher.

Storage, upgrading and deployment

A Dispatcher connected to a Beckon's root mat takes in the organisms the Beckon produces, stores them in chambers in its base body and releases them where they are needed. Stored organisms are kept in conditions resembling stasis: they age at about a third of the normal rate and heal quickly, and organisms released after an engagement are often found to have recovered from earlier wounds.

Organisms in storage are reworked to the latest revision of their blueprint that has reached the Dispatcher. When a revision arrives, the stored organisms of that type are rebuilt in their chambers over a period of days, and are released in the revised form. The change from the Primitive to the Adapted form of the branch parasites reached many regions this way, with Adapted organisms released from Dispatchers that had taken in Primitive ones. H&A calls this upgrading. Organisms in the field are not changed until they return to storage.

Stored organisms are released through Dispatcher Tentacles, which surface anywhere within the reach of the tentacle network, and a Summoner in an engagement calls on the stores of the Dispatchers within range.

Dispatchers also produce the Deterrent organisms that surface from infested ground: the Seizer, the Kyphosis and the Sentry, as well as the Dispatcher Tentacle. Deterrents are kept in the living mat between uses and are called up by the Dispatcher that produced them, and a larger Dispatcher keeps more of them over a wider area.

Relationship with Beckons

A Beckon can produce and deploy organisms without a Dispatcher, but more slowly, and without one it is cut off from the wider network. A Dispatcher on the same root mat receives finished organisms from it, stores them and releases them where they are needed, which makes production and deployment much faster. The two organisms support each other, and neither commands the other.

Ingrown Dispatchers

Root and Supreme Beckons carry Dispatchers grown into their own bodies. On a Root Beckon the flower and its feed horns emerge from the upper trunk below the bulb, and the Dispatcher's tissue is joined to the Beckon's nerve cord. Through it the Beckon signals across its genome's range and to the Iris without relying on separate Dispatchers. Ingrown flowers are larger than those of most free-standing Dispatchers.

The Summoner, a field organism, carries a folded structure of the same leaf-like plates as a Dispatcher's flower, which opens when it calls. Dispatcher flowers also grow from the shoulders and along the spine of the 1st Vagrant.

Genome variants

Dispatchers differ between genomes in the same ways as the Beckons they serve:

• Alclidic Dispatchers, in Australia, are adapted to heat and vulnerable to cold, and carry smaller stores of gas. Their broadcast range is about 40% greater than that of other genomes, which is attributed to the dry air.
• Aridic Dispatchers, in the Sahara and Arabia, are few and widely spaced, and the Beckons around them receive less direction from the network than those of any other genome. Those that exist develop large flowers.
• Boreic Dispatchers, in Siberia, carry larger stores of gas for their size and stay fully active through Overwinter, when the Dispatchers of other genomes slow greatly.
• Humic Dispatchers, in the Amazon basin, are the largest and most numerous on Earth, and the first stage IV Dispatchers were recorded there. They hold the largest stores of organisms.
• Pontic Dispatchers, on the Black Sea coast and in Ukraine, grow within the dense clusters of Pontic Beckons, several to a shared root system.
• Sinic Dispatchers, in East Asia, learned Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean faster than any other population.
• Tethysic Dispatchers grow on coasts, shoals, islands and wrecks, and on abandoned offshore platforms, with their flowers above the water. They have learned human maritime communication systems in particular depth.
• The Dispatchers of the Knox hive answer to the 1st Vagrant, who used them to cause a sustained communications blackout across American-held North America (see below).

Effects on communications

Military

Since 2022 armies operating near infested ground have communicated by runners, wired field telephones and buried cable. The European Defence Force issues radios to its units in Canada and Europe, but radio is used near infested ground only for messages whose content is of no use to the network, such as a signal to begin an operation already planned. Orders, positions and movements go by wire or by hand. Laying and guarding field-telephone lines has become a large part of the work of signals units, and a cut line is treated as a sign of organisms on the ground nearby.

Civil

Since 2024 mobile telephone and wireless data networks within 30 kilometres of Dispatcher ground have been switched off by order of the European Federation's defence authorities. Towns in that zone use wired telephones, and public payphones and post offices have been reopened in several of them. Further from infested ground civil networks operate normally.

At sea, the convoys of H&A Logistics keep radio silence near infested coasts and within sight of Tethysic growth, and signal between ships by lamp and flag.

The Blackout

In 2027 the 1st Vagrant used the Dispatchers of the Knox hive to cause a sustained communications blackout across American-held North America. A Federation offensive launched at the height of the blackout advanced further into American-held territory than any before it (see Second World War).

Interception and decoding

H&A intercepts Dispatcher signals at listening posts along the edges of infested ground, and reads them with decoding models trained on intercepted signals paired with observers' records of what the parasites did next. The meanings the decoders return are the categories those observers recorded, and each reading is given as an estimate with a confidence figure. The largest decoder is a block of the Beast, H&A's internal model; smaller readers are licensed to other companies, among them Lumen.

In 2027 an H&A signals team tapped the Dispatcher relay network. Analysis of the signals it intercepted showed that the behaviour of the Primitive Beckons of 2020 and 2021 had been a controlled test of how people and governments respond.

Location and control

Dispatchers are located by the positions of Deterrent attacks, which surface only where a Dispatcher calls them, and by the red of the flower, which shows above most ground cover. The stage of a Dispatcher is estimated from the size of its flower. Ground where Deterrents have surfaced is marked on maps and avoided, in the same way as a minefield.

A Dispatcher whose flower is destroyed can no longer receive or relay signals, but its base body continues to hold its stored organisms and to call up its Deterrents through the mat, and the Beckons on its mat lose contact with the wider network. Clearance units destroy the flower first, from a distance, with rifle fire or RTG ammunition, and then burn the base body. Adapted Dispatchers are burned with magnesium incendiaries. Stored organisms emerge when the base body is breached, and units treat every Dispatcher as holding the largest number of organisms its stage allows. Stage III and IV Dispatchers are attacked with artillery or from the air.

The relay ring

A ring of small debris around the Iris carries Dispatcher growth, which works as a communications relay for the network, and receives the traffic of the stage IV and ingrown Dispatchers on Earth.

History

Dispatchers were first identified in 2021, in West Africa, as red flowering structures on the root mats of Primitive Beckons. Their storage of organisms was recognised the same year, after clearance teams opened base bodies and found live organisms inside.

In 2022, after the outbreak of the Second World War, H&A Hyperbiology reported that the emissions of Dispatchers near military positions carried the structure of the radio traffic around them, and that this traffic was being learned. Within the year the armed forces of the Federation had moved their communications near infested ground to wire and runners, and the American forces followed. The ineffectiveness of new encryption methods against Dispatchers was established over 2022 and 2023.

The Adapted Dispatcher was first recorded in 2022. From 2024, as Beckon growth matured across the Americas, Africa and Europe, Dispatchers became common wherever Beckons were established, and the Federation switched off civil wireless networks near infested ground. The first stage IV Dispatchers were recorded in the Amazon basin in 2024. In 2027 the H&A signals team tapped the relay network.

See also

• Beckon
• Deterrent (parasite)
• Root mat
• Root Beckon
• Summoner
• Genome (parasite)
• Dispatcher decoding
• The Beast (language model)