DOCUMENT ID: DFS-R001-P1 English
— START OF FILE Report 001_EN.md —
DOCUMENT ID: DFS-R001-P1
CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET // ORCON LEAKED
WARNING TO THE READER
This document and the information contained within are not intended for public distribution. The possession, reading, or sharing of this report may make you a target of a non-state, globally operating entity that possesses extensive resources for the surveillance, identification, and neutralization of information leaks and their carriers.
The original author, hereinafter referred to as „Cognito,“ assumes no liability for any consequences arising from handling this material. By reading on, you confirm that you have understood the risks and are acting on your own responsibility.
It is strongly recommended to adhere to the following security protocols:
- Digital Security: Access this document exclusively through secure, anonymized networks (e.g., Tor Browser). Save the file only on encrypted, offline storage media.
- Physical Copies: Avoid printing this report. A digital trail can be erased. A piece of paper cannot.
- Communication: Never discuss the contents of this document over unsecured channels. Assume that your emails, your phone calls, and your social media activities can be monitored.
The following pages contain a truth that has been hidden for centuries. Truths are like weapons. Handle them with care.
This one is loaded.
MEMORANDUM
TO: Whoever finds this
FROM: Dr. Elias Thorne (an identity that likely no longer exists)
DATE: Unknown. Day 4 on the run.
SUBJECT: Introduction: Why This Document Exists
My name is Elias Thorne. Or rather, that was my name, engraved on the door of a university office, printed on publications about forgotten languages and historical cryptography. A name that stood for a certain kind of obsessive, academic curiosity.
Now, I am „Cognito.“ A pseudonym I gave myself in a fit of irony while typing this on a used, cash-bought laptop in a nameless motel room, whose only luxuries are the smell of cheap coffee and anonymity. The name on my fake ID is irrelevant. It will change again tomorrow.
I am writing this document for three fundamental reasons, and you, the reader, must understand them to grasp the weight of the following pages. Consider this my last will and testament, should it come to that.
- An Insurance Policy. This is a digital „Dead Man’s Switch.“ I have made arrangements for this report and all subsequent ones to be distributed to a wide, uncontrollable network should anything happen to me. If you are reading this, it means either I have decided to trigger the first stage, or I have already been silenced. The organization I call the „Circle of Solus“ operates from the shadows. This document drags them into the light.
- A Warning. They are real. Their tentacles reach deeper and wider than you can imagine. They are not villains from a novel. They don’t wear masks or deliver sinister monologues. They are the silent architects in boardrooms, think tanks, and government committees. They believe they are doing the right thing. And that makes them infinitely more dangerous. What they did to L. M., they will do to anyone who gets in their way.
- A Cry for Help. I am a historian, not a spy. My skills lie in analyzing patterns and deciphering dead vocabularies, not in disappearing and surviving. I have the puzzle pieces, but I cannot assemble them alone and stay alive at the same time. I am placing this knowledge in the hands of the public—in your hands—in the desperate hope that a decentralized investigation is the one thing they cannot control.
Who am I to tell you this? Why should you believe me? Until a few days ago, my biggest worry was a rejected research grant. I earned my doctorate in historical linguistics and comparative cryptanalysis. I have spent my career making the unreadable readable—from fragmentary cuneiform tablets to the failed attempt to unravel the secret of Linear A. I am a man who has dedicated his life to the premise that every encrypted message must have a logical key.
My academic career ended abruptly five years ago due to the incident surrounding the so-called „Rosetta Twin“—a clay tablet from which I was convinced I had found the key to a proto-Minoan script. I announced my discovery at a major conference, full of pride. A few weeks later, the tablet was exposed by a rival institute as a brilliant but modern forgery. Whether it was a forgery or whether the evidence was manipulated, I still don’t know. What I do know is that my reputation was destroyed. I withdrew, branded as brilliant but unreliable.
This public humiliation taught me something: distrust any breakthrough that seems too easy. Verify every source until it breaks. And it is precisely this caution that is the reason I didn’t believe L. M. at first.
L. M. was the daughter of my late mentor, Professor Alistair Finch. She was a whirlwind of caffeine and code, a young woman whose mind worked at the speed of light. When she told me her AI „Mnemosyne“ had decrypted the Voynich Manuscript—the unbreakable enigma, the Holy Grail of cryptography—I waved it off. I warned her not to make the same mistake I did.
I was wrong. Not only was she right, she had discovered something much bigger. And my initial skepticism cost us precious time. Time in which I could have protected her.
Everything you are about to read may sound like the fevered ramblings of a paranoid man. I assure you, it is not. Every claim I make is supported by evidence you will find in Part B of this report. I swear it on everything I have left: my academic integrity and the memory of L. M.
The evidence will follow. But first, you must understand how it came to this. You must see the last 72 hours through my eyes.
Part A: Personal Log – The Last 72 Hours
The Contact
Log Entry: T-72 Hours to Erasure
It all started with an email. That’s how most stories begin these days, I suppose. But this one was different. It was an echo from a world I thought I had left behind—a world of dusty libraries, the smell of old paper, and the quiet hum of servers trying to decipher the secrets of history.
To understand L. M., you have to understand her father. Professor Alistair Finch was my mentor, my academic father figure, and the most chaotically brilliant person I have ever known. His office wasn’t a room; it was an ecosystem of books. Stacks grew like stalagmites from the floor and hung like stalactites from the shelves. Somewhere in between, Alistair sat in a cloud of pipe smoke, reading three books at once. It was he who saw my talent for pattern recognition and shaped it from a hobby into a discipline. He taught me that a language is not just made of words, but of the logic that connects them.
And in this ecosystem, L. M. grew up. I remember her as a little girl with curious eyes, sitting under her father’s massive oak desk, playing with an old laptop while we debated Sumerian word roots. She was a digital soul in an analog world. At twelve, she explained the concept of recursive algorithms to me using the Matryoshka dolls on Alistair’s windowsill. At fifteen, she wrote a program that digitized and cataloged her father’s chaotic collection of notes—a task that had defeated generations of doctoral students.
After Alistair’s death three years ago, our contact became sporadic. A birthday email, a link to an interesting article. I withdrew more and more after my „Rosetta Twin“ debacle, and she threw herself headfirst into her work on artificial intelligence. She was on her way to becoming a star. I was a burnt-out star.
And then, three days ago, that email arrived.
From: L. Finch l.finch@caltech-research.edu
To: Elias Thorne e.thorne@protonmail.com
Date: [Date 3 days ago]
Subject: Mnemosyne & The DragonHi Elias,
I hope this email finds you well. It’s been a while.
I’m writing because I’ve done something incredible. Something Dad always said was impossible. Remember my AI project, „Mnemosyne“? I’ve completely overhauled the neural network. It’s no longer about mere statistical translation. I’ve taught it to recognize the contextual logic behind an information system. The „why,“ not just the „what.“
And I unleashed it on the dragon. On the Voynich Manuscript.
Elias, it’s working. It’s not gibberish. It’s not an encrypted language in the classical sense. It’s something else. Something… structured. A system.
I know this is your Mount Everest. The code that has defeated every codebreaker. I need your eyes. You see patterns where others only see chaos. I’m attaching my first draft of the analysis model. Please take a look.
Talk to me soon.
Best,
L.
My first reaction was a mix of nostalgia and skepticism. The Dragon. That’s what Alistair had always called the manuscript because it devoured anyone who came near it. I saw L. M.’s email and thought, Another brilliant moth burning its wings on the fire of the Voynich. I had singed my own there. I didn’t want to watch her do the same.
I ignored the attached file and typed a polite but dismissive reply, wishing her luck and urging caution.
Her response came less than an hour later. It was short, almost demanding. And it contained the bait she knew I couldn’t resist.
From: L. Finch l.finch@caltech-research.edu
To: Elias Thorne e.thorne@protonmail.com
Date: [Date 3 days ago]
Subject: Re: Mnemosyne & The DragonElias,
Forget the model. Look at this.
Folio 86v. The drawing of the plant with the cube-like roots and the blue, star-shaped flowers. Everyone thinks it’s a fantasy plant.
Mnemosyne didn’t translate the accompanying text as a name, but as a chemical process description. It describes a method for extracting an alkaloid from a root that increases „neural plasticity.“
I ran the described molecular chains through a pharmacological database. I got a hit. A single one.
It’s the exact chemical signature of Solunexin, the active ingredient in the nootropic „Clarity.“ Patented two years ago by a biotech company called Solus Corp.
Now tell me again that it’s just gibberish.
L.
I stared at that email and felt the old fire rekindle within me. The cool, cynical ashes left by the „Rosetta Twin“ incident were blown away.
This was no longer a linguistic puzzle. This was a piece of information that shouldn’t exist. A plant from a 600-year-old manuscript that exactly describes the formula for a modern, patented drug. It was the kind of impossible detail you couldn’t invent. It was a pattern that stretched across centuries.
I opened a secure line and wrote back just three words:
„We need to talk.“
I had no idea that this would be the last time I would hear her voice, free of fear.
Part A: Personal Log – The Last 72 Hours
The Breakthrough
Log Entry: T-68 Hours to Erasure
The video call was established over an encrypted peer-to-peer connection. A precaution that had become a habit for me. L. M.’s face appeared on my screen. It was the face I knew, but years of intense work had left their mark. Her dark hair was tied in a messy bun from which individual strands had escaped. Her eyes, which usually sparkled with energy, were wide and had dark circles, but behind them blazed a feverish intensity. In the background, I recognized her lab—a chaos of monitors, cables, and a giant whiteboard covered in what looked like an alien mathematics.
„Elias,“ she said, without waiting for a greeting. Her voice was hoarse as if she hadn’t slept in days. „Did you see my email?“
„The one about Solunexin? Yes. L., that’s… that’s either the greatest coincidence in history or…“
„It’s not a coincidence,“ she interrupted. She leaned closer to her camera. „That’s the point. I’ve been looking at it the wrong way the whole time. Everyone has been looking at it the wrong way. We tried to translate the manuscript like a text by Cicero. We looked for subjects, predicates, and objects. But that’s like trying to read the source code of an operating system as a poem.“
I leaned back in my chair, my arms crossed. The old skeptic in me took over. „What are you suggesting? What is it, then?“
I am transcribing the following from memory. Her words are burned into my brain.
BEGIN TRANSCRIPTION (RECONSTRUCTED FROM MEMORY)
L. M.: It’s a conceptual algorithm. Don’t think of it as a book that tells a story. Think of it as a recipe book that gives you instructions on how to prepare a meal. Or better yet: like a manifesto that doesn’t describe an ideology, but gives instructions on how to implement it.
ME: That’s a huge claim, L. How can you prove it?
L. M.: Mnemosyne proved it. The AI stopped treating the glyphs as letters or words. It realized that the symbols follow recurring logical patterns. It treated them as functions. Look.
(She shares her screen. I see a complex, interactive graphic of the Voynich text. She clicks on a familiar glyph that looks like a stylized anchor.)
L. M.: Everyone has tried to assign a phonetic value to this thing. An „a“ or a „sh.“ But that’s wrong. Mnemosyne found that this symbol always appears when a concept of control or containment is introduced. It doesn’t mean „to control.“ It is the function „to control.“ Another glyph stands for „knowledge,“ another for „population.“ The text isn’t prose. It’s a series of commands. CONTROL(KNOWLEDGE(POPULATION)). Do you understand?
ME: You’re saying this is… a program for social engineering? Written in the 15th century?
L. M.: That’s exactly what I’m saying. And it’s not just theory. I instructed the AI to „compile“ the first page of the manuscript according to this new logic. The text it spat out… Elias, it’s not a recipe for an herbal bath.
(Her hands tremble slightly as she opens another window. It’s a simple text editor. The font is Courier, impersonal, clinical. But the words… the words were anything but.)
ME: What is this?
L. M.: This is the raw, unfiltered translation. The preamble. The founding document.
She gave me a moment to read it. And in that moment, the academic in me vanished. The man who had lost his career for wanting to see too much in an old text. And in his place stood someone who felt a terrible, cold clarity.
The text read:
PROTOCOL 0.1: FOUNDING PRINCIPLE
We do not rise above humanity, but stand behind it, as an unseen support. Every nation that rises, every war that is waged, serves the equilibrium. Chaos is the natural state, but we are the dam that holds back the flood. Our will is the silent language that only history understands. Seek not our names in the annals, for we are the quill, not the ink. We guide the river by shaping the riverbed. Our greatest strength lies not in what we do, but in what the world believes it has done for itself. The seal is our only confession—a promise that order will prevail, even if the price is the freedom to err. Follow this principle, and you shall endure forever.
Signed: The Circle of Solus.
END TRANSCRIPTION
I sat there in silence. The air seemed to have been sucked out of my office. „The Circle of Solus,“ I whispered. „Like… like Solus Corp.“
„Yes,“ L. M. said, and now the excitement in her voice had completely given way to fear. „This can’t be a coincidence, Elias. This is their manifesto. Their founding document. And I have it. I think… I think they know.“
„What do you mean?“ I asked, my pulse quickening.
„My systems… they’re acting strangely. Little lags. Data packets disappearing. Last night, my webcam activated itself for a second. I thought it was a bug at first, but… it’s too much. Someone is in my network. Someone is watching me.“
She glanced over her shoulder as if she’d heard a noise. The paranoia in her eyes was real, contagious.
„L.,“ I said, my tone as calm as I could manage. „Pull the plug. Take everything offline. Now. We’ll meet. Don’t send me anything else.“
„I just need to…“ she started, but she paused. Her eyes widened, fixing on something out of the camera’s view.
A quiet but distinct sound was audible. A click. Like a lock falling into place.
„L.?“ I asked.
She looked back at the camera, and the smile she attempted was a terrible failure. „I have to go now, Elias.“
„No, L., don’t go…“
The connection dropped. And the silence that followed was louder than any scream.
Part A: Personal Log – The Last 72 Hours
The Silence
Log Entry: T-67 Hours to Erasure
The screen was black. The red „Call Ended“ icon glowed like an open wound in the darkness of my office. For a long moment, I didn’t move. I just stared at the void where L. M.’s face had been and listened. I listened to the silence.
It wasn’t a normal silence. It wasn’t an absence of sound. It was an active, oppressive presence. A vacuum into which all sound was being sucked. The click of the lock. Her last, tormented look. The abrupt disconnection.
My first impulse was rational, almost academic. A technical glitch. Her connection dropped. I clicked „Redial.“ The call connected, one second, two, then the error message: „Participant unavailable.“
I reached for my phone. My fingers felt foreign, clumsy. I dialed her mobile number, which I’d had in my contacts for years. It didn’t even ring. The line went straight to voicemail. But it wasn’t her voice. Not the cheerful, slightly rushed message I knew. It was the neutral, synthetic voice of the provider: „The subscriber you have dialed is not available.“ As if her account had just been set up.
A knot of ice formed in the pit of my stomach.
„L., call me,“ I typed into a text message. My thumbs were shaking. I hit send. The message stayed in the outbox, with the small red note underneath that can freeze your heart: „Message not delivered.“
Panic began to gnaw at the edges of my professional composure. I did what a researcher does when he hits a wall: I tried to work around the problem. I opened my web browser, my fingers flying across the keyboard. I would go to her faculty page at Caltech. There would be an office number, an emergency email, something.
I typed in the URL I had visited so many times. caltech-research.edu/l.finch.
HTTP Error 404. Page Not Found.
My breath caught. It couldn’t be. A typo. I checked the address. It was correct. I reloaded the page. Same result. I went back to the main faculty page and clicked through the staff directory. Alistair Finch was still there, listed as professor emeritus, a digital monument. But L. M.? She was gone. As if she had never existed.
Now the panic was no longer just a gnawing. It was a predator, snapping at my sanity.
I opened a new tab. Google. „L. Finch Caltech AI“. The search results appeared instantly, a familiar list of links I had seen dozens of times before. Her LinkedIn profile. A link to an interview in a tech magazine. Her profile on Academia.edu with her published papers.
I clicked on the first link, her LinkedIn profile.This profile is not available.
My heart hammered against my ribs. I clicked the back button on my browser to see the search results again. I reloaded the page.
And they were gone.
Not just the one link. All of them. The entire first page of search results was different. Instead of links to L. M., there were now vague hits for an „L. Finch“ from the 19th century and a real estate agent in Florida. It was as if the ocean of the internet had briefly pulled back the tide, and upon its return, the beach was completely changed.
I began a frantic, feverish hunt. Twitter? „User not found.“ Academia.edu? „We could not find any publications for this author.“ The interview in the tech magazine? The article still existed, but her name and quotes had been replaced by those of another researcher. It was a surgical excision from reality.
The last straw. I opened the website for JSTOR, the digital archive. I knew the DOI—the unique identifier—of her most important paper on self-correcting neural networks by heart. A DOI is like a fingerprint. It is permanent. It cannot disappear.
I entered the string. Pressed Enter.
Error: The requested article could not be found.
In that moment, I understood. I understood the true meaning of the words from the manuscript.
„Seek not our names in the annals, for we are the quill, not the ink.“
They hadn’t just taken L. M. or hurt her. They were erasing her. They were rewriting history by scraping the ink from the page. They were turning her into a digital ghost, a person whose existence now only echoed in the memories of a few people. And I was one of them.
The silence in my office was no longer just the absence of L. M.’s voice. It was the sound of her erasure. The sound of the Circle’s power. A quiet, efficient, unstoppable hum of reality being rewritten.
I jumped up, knocking over my chair. The academic analysis was over. The researcher was dead. What was left was a man driven by cold, clear fear.
I had to go to her apartment. I had to find something. Some proof that I wasn’t going mad. That she had existed.
I grabbed my keys. I ran.
Part A: Personal Log – The Last 72 Hours
The Attack
Log Entry: T-66 Hours to Erasure
The drive to L. M.’s apartment was a surreal nightmare. I obeyed traffic laws. I stopped at red lights. Outside, life went on as normal—people drinking coffee, going to work, laughing. Inside my car, however, was a microclimate of cold sweat and the metallic taste of fear. Every car in my rearview mirror seemed to be following me. Every reflection in a shop window seemed to hide a face that was watching me.
Her apartment complex was a modern glass and steel structure, anonymous and sterile. The main entrance was locked, but I knew the code she had given me months ago for emergencies. I prayed it still worked. It did. The soft click of the electronic lock was the first good sign of the day. It would be the last.
Her apartment was on the fourth floor, at the end of a long, silent hallway. I stood for a moment in front of the door numbered 412 and listened. Nothing. I raised my hand to knock, but hesitated. Instead, I reached for the doorknob. It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t cold. It was just there. I turned it.
The door was unlocked. It swung open silently.
The first impression was not chaos. It was the exact opposite. And that was infinitely more disturbing. The apartment wasn’t just tidy; it was empty. Not empty as in robbed, but empty as in unoccupied. It smelled faintly of citrus cleaner and bleach. The hardwood floor gleamed under the light pouring through the immaculately clean windows. There were no fingerprints on the light switches, no dust on the surfaces.
It was a crime scene cleanup, only there was no crime scene. No signs of a struggle. No overturned glass. No scattered papers. Her laptops were gone, her whiteboard was wiped clean, not a single stray mark left behind. The books on the shelves were in perfect order, arranged by size, not by subject as she always had. It was the work of people who knew how to strip a space of any trace of personality. They were forensic archaeologists working in reverse—burying an existence under layers of sterile normality.
I walked through the rooms as if in a trance. Kitchen: The refrigerator was empty, wiped clean. Bedroom: The bed was made with military precision. The closet contained a few generic items of clothing that could never have been hers. It was a stage set. A model apartment waiting to be shown to a new tenant.
I was about to give up, convinced I would find nothing. Then my eyes fell on the large window in the living room. The sun was low, casting long shadows. On the wide, inner windowsill, where she had always grown her orchids, was a thin layer of dust the cleaners had apparently missed. It was the only flaw in this otherwise perfect room. And in that dust was an impression.
I knelt down. It wasn’t a fingerprint. It was a geometric pattern. A perfect circle. In its center, a single vertical line, intersected at the top and bottom by smaller horizontal lines.
The Seal of Silent Language.
It was a message. A signature. A calling card left at the scene of a crime that had officially never happened. They knew I would come. They had left it for me.
I took a photo with my phone, then fled from that sterile shell of a life.
Back in my office—my refuge, my fortress of knowledge—I locked the door and pulled the blinds. Adrenaline pumped through my veins. The fear had turned into a cold, focused rage. They had taken L. M. They had tried to erase her. But they had made a mistake. They had left me as a witness.
I sat down at my computer. I started digging. „Circle of Solus.“ „Solus Corp.“ „Julian Vance.“ I opened dozens of tabs, scoured obscure investor forums, declassified business registries, searched the darknet. I pulled at threads, looking for connections, for patterns.
And in that moment, they struck back.
It started subtly. My mouse cursor began to stutter, jumping uncontrollably across the screen. Windows I tried to close reopened on their own. My computer’s fan roared to life, as if the processor was handling an impossible load.
I knew immediately what was happening. I ripped the Ethernet cable from the wall and disabled the Wi-Fi. Too late. They were already inside. The malware was already active. I would later name it „Vexillum“—the banner—because that’s exactly what it was: a demonstration of their power.
All I could do was watch. Helplessly. On my main monitor, my files began to disappear, one by one. DELETE C:\Users\EThorne\Documents\Research\Voynich... The command appeared and vanished in a fraction of a second. My manuscripts. My notes. My entire digital existence, fifteen years of work, dissolving into nothing before my eyes. The cursor danced across the screen, deleting folders whose names I hadn’t seen in years. It wasn’t a blunt deletion; it was a targeted, taunting vivisection of my life’s work. The noise of the thrashing hard drive was the only sound in the room, like the last gasp of a dying animal.
Then the screen went black.
For a moment, there was absolute silence. And then, in the center of the monitor, glowing white on the black background, the seal appeared. The Seal of Silent Language.
My phone buzzed on the desk. A notification from my banking app. I reached for it, my hand trembling.
ALERT: Your account has been temporarily suspended due to suspicious activity. Please contact your branch.
I tried to open the app.Login failed. Username not found.
They hadn’t just deleted my data. They had removed me from the system. No money. No digital trail. No Elias Thorne.
I sat in the darkness of my office, illuminated only by the ominous glow of their symbol, and understood. This wasn’t an attack. This was an excommunication from the modern world. And I was next on the list to be erased.
Part A: Personal Log – The Last 72 Hours
The Erasure
Log Entry: T-65 Hours to Erasure
Numbness. That’s the only word that can describe the state I was in. I sat in my office chair, my body cold and stiff, staring at the glowing seal on my monitor. It wasn’t an image. It was a verdict.
The silence was no longer empty. It was filled with the echoes of deleted files, with the digital ghost of my locked accounts. I was no longer Elias Thorne, the reclusive academic. I was an anomaly in the system. A record marked for deletion.
They had taken L. M. They had surgically removed her existence. Now they were doing the same to me, only slower, more cruelly. They weren’t killing my body, not yet. They were killing my identity. They were making me a nobody, a ghost wandering through a world where he could no longer leave a trace. In the modern world, someone with no digital presence, no money, no history, effectively does not exist.
A wave of nausea washed over me. I could have screamed, smashed something, thrashed about in impotent rage. But instead, something else took its place. A strange, ice-cold calm.
Paranoia.
My colleagues had always joked about it. About my analog backups. My refusal to use smart home devices. My habit of covering my laptop’s webcam with a piece of tape. They called it eccentric. „Typical Thorne.“ But it wasn’t eccentricity. It was the result of my study of history. History is full of systems that turn against their own people, of technologies abused for surveillance. I hadn’t thought it likely, but I had always considered it possible.
And for that possibility, I had a protocol. An escape protocol. In my mind, it was called „The Librarian in Exile.“ A dramatic title for a series of simple but crucial steps. I had devised it as a thought experiment, an intellectual exercise. I never thought I would have to execute it.
The paralysis gave way to a mechanical automatism. I stood up. Every step was deliberate.
Step 1: Digital Scorched Earth.
My computer was compromised. My phone was a bug. My router was an open gateway. I unplugged every device. With a hammer from my toolbox, I methodically smashed the hard drive of my computer, the motherboard, every single memory chip. Then I did the same to my phone and tablet. The sound of breaking glass and splintering silicon was deafening in the silence of my office. I gathered the fragments in a trash bag. This wasn’t just destruction. This was the annihilation of my digital soul before they could use it against me.
Step 2: Erase Physical Traces.
My wallet. Credit cards, ID, driver’s license, insurance card. All useless. Worse than useless—they were tracking beacons. I cut each card to pieces with a pair of scissors. The plastic shreds went into the trash bag with the electronic debris.
Step 3: Activate Resources.
Behind a loose floorboard under my bookshelf was a small metal box. Inside: five thousand dollars in used, small bills. A set of fake ID papers—a passable but not perfect job I had acquired years ago from a contact during my darknet research. A prepaid burner phone, still in its original packaging. And a small USB drive wrapped in lead foil. On it was a single encrypted file: a copy of my most important unfinished research paper, a personal treasure I had never stored online.
Step 4: Change Appearance.
I went to the bathroom and stared in the mirror. Elias Thorne. Beard, slightly too-long hair, the glasses of an academic. This man was a target. I took an electric razor and removed the beard I had worn for ten years. I cut my hair short and unevenly. Without glasses, my vision was slightly blurry, but the face staring back at me from the mirror was that of a stranger. A tired, hunted stranger.
I put on a simple hoodie, a baseball cap, and an old jacket—clothes I had kept for yard work. Clothes that screamed „forget me.“
I threw the trash bag with the remains of my old life into a public dumpster two blocks from my apartment. I walked, avoiding main streets, keeping my head down. Every passerby was a potential observer. Every security camera an eye of the Circle.
I took a bus to the opposite side of the city, got off after a few stops, took another. After two hours of aimless travel to shake any potential tails, I got off near a neighborhood known for its cheap, anonymous motels. I paid for the room for a week in advance, in cash, under my new, fake name.
The room was small, smelled of disinfectant and desperation. The wallpaper was peeling in one corner. It was perfect.
I laid out my few possessions: the cash, the burner phone, the USB drive. Then I went out again and, with another part of my cash, bought a used laptop from a shady pawn shop. Back in the motel room, I spent the next three hours erasing the operating system and installing a secure, open-source Linux distribution from my USB drive.
Only when I was online, through a public, password-protected Wi-Fi hotspot, routed through the Tor network, did I allow myself to breathe.
I sat on the sagging bed, the unfamiliar laptop on my lap. I was a ghost. A nobody. I had lost everything.
But I had the memory. I had the photo of the seal. And I had the words from the manuscript, burned into my mind.
They had erased me. But they hadn’t counted on a ghost being able to fight back.
I opened a new text document. The font was cool and impersonal. I positioned my fingers over the keyboard. And I began to type.
DOCUMENT ID: DFS-R001-P1…
I had begun work on this report.
Part B: Evidence & Analysis
Introductory Note from Cognito: The following sections contain the raw data and analysis that support my claims. I have tried to make my methodology as transparent as possible. The conclusions may sound fantastical, but the data does not lie. Check my work. Question it. Arrive at the same conclusion.
Section 1: File: Voynich Manuscript (Codename: Codex Silenti) – A Reassessment
1.1. Summary of Established Knowledge
The document known as the Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 408) is a codex of approx. 240 pages, dated by radiocarbon methods to the early 15th century (c. 1404–1438). Its contents remain undeciphered to this day. The text is written in an unknown script („Voynichese“) and is accompanied by numerous, often bizarre, illustrations of plants, astronomical diagrams, human figures (predominantly female) in tubs, and pharmaceutical sketches.
Since its rediscovery by Wilfrid Voynich in 1912, generations of world-class cryptographers, linguists, and historians—including leading codebreakers from World War I and II like William F. Friedman—have attempted to decipher the manuscript. All have failed.
The prevailing hypotheses can be divided into three categories:
a) The Cipher Hypothesis: The text is a known language (e.g., Latin, Middle High German) encrypted with a complex substitution or a polyalphabetic cipher.
b) The Language Hypothesis: The text is written in a hitherto unknown but real language or an artificially created jargon (glossolalia).
c) The Hoax Hypothesis: The manuscript is a meaningless forgery, designed to appear undecipherable, possibly to deceive a wealthy patron.
All of these hypotheses fail to account for the statistical properties of the text. Voynichese follows clearly defined linguistic laws (e.g., Zipf’s law), which strongly argues against a hoax. At the same time, it resists every known method of cryptanalysis.
1.2. The Paradigm Shift: L. M.’s Algorithmic Thesis
The work of L. M. (codename: Mnemosyne) represents a radical break from all previous approaches. Her fundamental assumption was: What if we are not looking for a language, but a logic?
Her AI, Mnemosyne, was not trained to replace letters with other letters. It was trained to recognize relationships between symbols and to model them within a logical framework. The result of this analysis was revolutionary: Voynichese is not a language for describing the world, but an instructional language for manipulating the world.
To use a modern analogy, it is not HTML (which describes content), but Python or C++ (which executes actions).
1.3. Structural Analysis: Glyphs as Functions and Operators
L. M.’s AI identified two primary classes of glyphs in the manuscript:
- „Object Glyphs“ (Nouns/Variables): Symbols that stand for core concepts. These are often the more complex, rarer glyphs. Examples include symbols that L.M. identified as
[Knowledge],[Population],[Resources],[Belief], and[Conflict]. - „Function Glyphs“ (Verbs/Operators): Simpler, frequently recurring symbols that define an action or a relationship between the Object Glyphs. These form the backbone of the „syntax.“
Let’s consider a common glyph combination from the manuscript (Folio 20r):
Fig. 1: Simplified representation of the relational structure. Glyph A (shape of a sickle) acts as an operator on Glyph B (shape of an anchor) and Glyph C (shape of a root).
In this example, L. M.’s analysis revealed the following:
- Glyph A (
EVA-g) almost always appears as a connecting element. It is an operator that defines an action of extracting or deriving. We can call itEXTRACT(). - Glyph B (
EVA-d) is an Object Glyph frequently found in the context of pharmaceutical or botanical pages. It represents[Resources](both physical and informational). - Glyph C (
EVA-k) is another Object Glyph often associated with human figures. It represents[Population]or[Society].
Traditional linguistics would try to read this as a sentence: „The anchor extracts the root“—which makes no sense.
The algorithmic interpretation reads this as an instruction: EXTRACT([Resources] FROM [Population]).
In modern English: „Extract resources from the population.“
This is not an observation. It is a command. A fundamental principle of rule.
1.4. The Social-Technological Operating System
As I analyzed dozens of these deconstructed „sentences,“ a frightening picture emerged. The Voynich Manuscript describes a complete, self-contained system for controlling human societies. It is an operating system for social engineering.
The different sections of the manuscript correspond to different „modules“ of this operating system:
- The Botanical Section: Is not an encyclopedia of plants. It is the module for Resource Control. It describes how to identify, monopolize, and use vital resources (food, medicine, knowledge) as levers of power. The bizarre plants are not fantasy creations; they are abstract representations of resource classes (e.g., a plant with „cube-like roots“ could represent mineral resources „extracted“ from the earth).
- The Astronomical Section: Is not a calendar. It is the module for Time and Event Control. It describes how to predict long-term cycles (economic, social, political) and manipulate them through subtle interventions at critical points to achieve desired outcomes—a kind of macrosociological „timing.“
- The Balneological Section (Bathing Scenes): Is not a treatise on hygiene. It is the module for Population Control. The tubes and fluids connecting the human figures represent information flows, social networks, and ideological currents. The module gives instructions on how to shape narratives, steer public discourse, and isolate or neutralize dissenting opinions.
- The Pharmaceutical Section: Is the module for Direct Intervention. It describes the application of „tools“—be they chemical, psychological, or technological—to specifically influence individuals or small groups. (See File: Solunexin).
Conclusion: The Voynich Manuscript is the most dangerous book in the world. Not because it contains a magical secret, but because it is a cold, calculated blueprint for an invisible, technocratic dictatorship. It is the founding document and the manual for the Circle of Solus. It is their Codex Silenti—the Codex of Silent Language. And L. M. did not just translate it. She compiled it.
Part B: Evidence & Analysis
Section 2: The Translation – Excerpts from the Codex Silenti
2.1. Methodological Note
The following passages are the result of the „Mnemosyne“ AI compiling the Voynich text. This is not a literal translation, as the glyphs, as explained in Section 1, represent logical functions and concepts, not words. The AI’s output is a rendering of these logical instructions into the closest comprehensible human language. The titles I have added („Protocol 0.1,“ etc.) are for better organization. The AI’s original output is a pure, unformatted text file, which I will attach in an appendix as soon as I can safely recover it.
The precision and cynical pragmatism of these texts, formulated 600 years ago, are the strongest evidence of their authenticity and the longevity of the organization that authored them.
2.2. Excerpt 1: The Founding Principle (from Folio 1r)
PROTOCOL 0.1: FOUNDING PRINCIPLE
We do not rise above humanity, but stand behind it, as an unseen support. Every nation that rises, every war that is waged, serves the equilibrium. Chaos is the natural state, but we are the dam that holds back the flood. Our will is the silent language that only history understands. Seek not our names in the annals, for we are the quill, not the ink. We guide the river by shaping the riverbed. Our greatest strength lies not in what we do, but in what the world believes it has done for itself. The seal is our only confession—a promise that order will prevail, even if the price is the freedom to err. Follow this principle, and you shall endure forever.
Signed: The Circle of Solus.
2.3. Excerpt 2: The Seed of Doubt (from the Balneological Section, Folio 78v)
Cognito’s Note: This section describes a method of information warfare that feels frighteningly modern. The illustration on the corresponding page shows two groups of figures in separate pools, connected by a complex system of tubes, from which a third, central figure directs a substance in both directions.
PROTOCOL 7.2: PARALYSIS BY DISCORD
A unified consensus among the population is a threat to equilibrium. It leads to unpredictable, rapid change. Such a consensus must therefore be prevented before it forms. This is not achieved by direct suppression of ideas—for what is suppressed gains strength—but by the cultivation of irreconcilable opposites.
Identify a burgeoning idea that has the potential for unification. Isolate its core premise. Then, create two artificial, extreme opposing positions.
Position A: Take the core premise and exaggerate it to the point of absurdity, until it becomes irrational and untenable. Support this position with resources. Give it a loud, aggressive voice.
Position B: Create an absolute antithesis to the core premise that is equally irrational and dogmatic. Base its arguments on fear, tradition, or identity. Support this position as well.
The broad, moderate middle of the population will no longer engage with the reasonable core premise but will be forced to choose between two unacceptable extremes. Public discourse will become an unproductive battle between the two artificial poles. The population’s energy will be consumed in conflict.
The result is paralysis. The middle becomes disoriented, frustrated, and withdraws from the discourse. No consensus is formed. No change occurs. Equilibrium is maintained. We do not control the answer; we control the question. And we ensure it can never be solved.
2.4. Excerpt 3: The Gilded Cage (from the Botanical/Pharmaceutical Section, Folio 86v)
Cognito’s Note: This text is from the same page that contains the illustration of the „Solunexin plant.“ It explains the overarching philosophy behind the control of resources and technology. The „cage“ is a metaphor for a society that trades its freedom for convenience and security without noticing the bars.
PROTOCOL 12.5: THE GILDED CAGE
Direct rule by force is inefficient and breeds resistance. True, lasting control is accepted voluntarily. The most effective form of subjugation is that which is perceived as progress.
Promote technological developments that meet two core criteria:
- They solve an immediate, tangible discomfort for the individual (e.g., boredom, inefficiency, insecurity).
- They create a systemic dependency that is difficult to reverse.
Offer the population tools that make their lives easier, faster, and more connected. Give them communication that knows no distance; knowledge that requires no effort; convenience that demands no patience.
In exchange for these gifts, the population will voluntarily provide the building blocks of their own surveillance: their data, their locations, their preferences, their social connections. They will build and maintain the infrastructure of their own control because it provides them with immediate benefit.
Over time, the skills that these technologies replace—memory, sense of direction, critical analysis, face-to-face social interaction—will atrophy. The dependency will become absolute. The technology, once celebrated as liberation, will become an invisible grid.
An uprising against the system will become unimaginable, not because it is forbidden, but because it would require abandoning the convenience that has become a basic necessity. They will live in a gilded cage, polishing the bars themselves and guarding the door themselves. And they will call it freedom.
Part B: Evidence & Analysis
Section 3: File: L. M. (Codename: Mnemosyne) – Reconstruction and Hidden Message
3.1. An Attempt at Reconstruction
They tried to erase her. I repeat this sentence because its full meaning must be understood. This is not about a missing person. It is about a deliberate act of damnatio memoriae—the condemnation of memory—using the tools of the 21st century.
All I have of L. M. are my memories and a handful of digital fragments I was able to recover from old, encrypted email backups before my systems were destroyed. It is not much. But it has to be enough. It has to prove she existed.
Name: [NAME REDACTED for security reasons, referred to here as L. M.]
Last Known Position: Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Artificial Intelligence & Computational Linguistics, California Institute of Technology (Caltech). (Note: All official records of this have been removed, as described in Part A.)
Research Focus: Self-learning neural networks for the decipherment of „dead“ or context-free information systems.
Doctoral Thesis Title: „Contextual Logic Modeling: Mnemosyne as an Approach to Solving Non-Linear Sign Systems.“
Photo:

Fig. 2: The only remaining photo I have of L. M. Taken from an email signature from 2022.
She was brilliant. She was fearless. And she was on the verge of uncovering the greatest conspiracy in human history. She must have known the danger she was in. In our last conversation, she sounded nervous, paranoid. She mentioned anomalies in her network. She knew she was being watched.
3.2. The Last Message: A Steganography of Desperation
L. M. was a master of information security. She would never have sent me an unencrypted link or an unprotected file. When she realized her systems were compromised, she must have activated a contingency plan. She couldn’t tell me the location of her research data—the complete translation, the workings of the AI, perhaps even proof of the surveillance—directly. Any direct communication would have been intercepted.
So she hid the information where her enemies would least expect it: right in front of their eyes. In the words of their own manifesto.
Her last message to me, sent automatically by her system, was just a data fragment. But it contained the text I already quoted in Chapter 2. I present it here again in its exact, unabridged form as I received it. Every letter, every word, every punctuation mark could be significant.
3.3. The Hypothesis and the Call to Action
My hypothesis is simple: L. M. used a form of steganography. She embedded a URL—a link to a secure server, a hidden Tor service, or an obscure Pastebin page—within the text of the protocol itself. She knew her enemies would see the content of the text, but she bet that they would not recognize the structure hidden within it.
She bet that I—or someone like me—would see it. But I have been staring at it for days and I don’t see it. I am too close. My thoughts are racing, poisoned by fear and paranoia. I see the trees, but not the forest.
That is why I am turning to you. To the anonymous, decentralized intelligence of the web. To the community of the curious, the analysts, the skeptics. To the Fifth Shadow.
Here is your task. Here is the key we must find to break down this door:
Analyze the following text. Find the URL hidden within it.
FULL EXCERPT FROM THE „VOYNICH PROTOCOL“ TRANSLATED BY MNEMOSYNE (RECEIVED FROM L. M.)
„We do not rise above humanity, but stand behind it, as an unseen support. Every nation that rises, every war that is waged, serves the equilibrium. Chaos is the natural state, but we are the dam that holds back the flood. Our will is the silent language that only history understands. Seek not our names in the annals, for we are the quill, not the ink. We guide the river by shaping the riverbed. Our greatest strength lies not in what we do, but in what the world believes it has done for itself. The seal is our only confession—a promise that order will prevail, even if the price is the freedom to err. Follow this principle, and you shall endure forever.“
Possible Approaches (I have already tried these without success):
- Acrostics (the first letters of words or sentences).
- Simple Caesar shift.
- Counting words or letters.
It must be something more subtle. Something related to L. M.’s way of thinking. Something to do with the structure, the logic, or perhaps even the deliberately italicized words (behind, we, Seek, we, the, Follow). Maybe they refer to something outside the text itself?
Find the link. Somewhere behind that link is what L. M. left for us. Probably a password-protected file. We will find the password together when the time comes. But this is the first step.
The truth about the Circle of Solus, the fate of L. M., and perhaps even our future depends on whether we can crack this code.
Show me that my faith in you is not misplaced.
Part B: Evidence & Analysis
Section 4: File: Julian Vance & Solus Corp. – The Network of Control
4.1. The Public Profile: The Invisible Philanthropist
Who is Julian Vance? Ask the public, and you get a shrug. Ask the financial world, and you get reverent silence. Vance avoids the spotlight with an almost pathological consistency. Scarcely a dozen photos of him exist, most of them over twenty years old. He gives no interviews. He makes no speeches.
The official narrative is that of a quiet genius. A man who turned a modest inheritance into an immense fortune in the early days of Silicon Valley, not by betting on the flashy companies, but on the invisible infrastructure behind them: data centers, fiber optic networks, logistics algorithms.
His public activities are conducted exclusively through his foundations, which generously fund art museums, climate research, and universities. His most famous quote, uttered to a reporter in passing a decade ago, is: „Stability is the canvas on which true progress is painted.“ A seemingly harmless, philosophical phrase. After reading the Codex Silenti, I recognize it for what it is: a mission statement.
4.2. The Solus Network: The Anatomy of Invisible Monopolies
Solus Corp. is not a company that makes consumer products. It is a holding and investment company. A hydra whose true size is obscured by a labyrinth of subsidiaries, silent partnerships, and offshore accounts. I have only been able to scratch the surface, but the pattern that emerges is clear. Vance doesn’t necessarily control entire industries, but he controls the strategic chokepoints—the „riverbeds,“ as the protocol calls them.
Organizational Chart (simplified):
+---------------------+
| Julian Vance |
+----------+----------+
| (Control)
+---------------------+
| SOLUS CORP. |
| (Holding Company) |
+----------+----------+
| (Investments)
+-------------------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+
| | | |
+--v------------------+ +---v-----------------+ +----v----------------+ +----v----------------+
| Nexus Logistics | | Cerebra Dynamics | | Praxis Data Solutions | | Aether Satellites |
| (Global Logistics) | | (Biotechnology) | | (Data & AI) | | (Communications) |
|---------------------| |---------------------| |---------------------| |---------------------|
| - Port Automation | | - Nootropics (Solunexin)| - Cloud Infrastructure| - Private LEO Network|
| - AI Route Planning | | - Gene Sequencing | - AI Analytics Tools | - Earth Observation |
| - Warehouse Robotics| | - Neuro-interfaces | - Predictive Modeling | - Secure Channels |
+---------------------+ +---------------------+ +---------------------+ +---------------------+
- Nexus Logistics: Doesn’t control the ships or trucks, but the software that optimizes global supply chains. Whoever controls the algorithm that decides what arrives where and when, controls the heartbeat of world trade.
- Cerebra Dynamics: The company behind the nootropic „Clarity“ (active ingredient: Solunexin). Its research officially focuses on neurodegenerative diseases. Unofficially, I suspect they are working on the direct application of the principles from the „pharmaceutical module“ of the Codex Silenti.
- Praxis Data Solutions: The invisible giant in the background. They don’t run the social media platforms, but a large portion of the server farms and cloud infrastructure on which they operate. They analyze metadata on an unimaginable scale.
- Aether Satellites: Vance’s youngest and most alarming project. A private satellite network that creates a global communication and surveillance layer, independent of state infrastructure.
These four pillars correspond exactly to the control modules of the Voynich Manuscript: control over Resources (Nexus), the Human Body (Cerebra), Information (Praxis), and the Infrastructure itself (Aether).
4.3. The Pattern of Erasure: The „Kill Switch“ Protocol
During my research, I came across a recurring pattern that perfectly illustrates the Circle’s philosophy. Vance doesn’t just buy companies; he curates technological progress by specifically eliminating those innovations that would enable true decentralization and autonomy. I call it the „Kill Switch“ protocol.
Case Study A: Prometheus Energy (2019)
- The Innovation: A small German startup developed a prototype for a decentralized, household-sized fusion reactor. A clean, infinite energy source with the potential to disconnect homes and entire communities from the global power grid.
- The Threat: The loss of control over the central resource of energy.
- The Acquisition: A subsidiary of Solus Corp. bought Prometheus Energy for a record sum. The official press release spoke of „bringing the groundbreaking technology to market maturity.“
- The Disappearance: Three years later, the project is dead. The key patents have been „parked“ in obscure shell companies. The lead scientists were silenced with lucrative but meaningless positions within the Solus network. The official reason: „Unexpected hurdles in scalability.“ The truth: The technology worked too well.
Case Study B: Echos Network (2021)
- The Innovation: A team of Israeli developers created a decentralized communication protocol that allowed smartphones to form direct mesh networks via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi—without relying on cell towers or the internet. An uncensorable, unmonitorable form of communication.
- The Threat: The total loss of control over the flow of information.
- The Acquisition: Bought by Praxis Data Solutions, allegedly to integrate the technology into their own secure communication products.
- The Disappearance: Six months later, the project was shut down. Reason: „Incompatibility with existing security architectures.“ The original development team was silenced with strict NDAs (non-disclosure agreements).
4.4. Conclusion: Vance as the Architect of the Gilded Cage
The behavior of Julian Vance and Solus Corp. is the exact, practical implementation of the „Gilded Cage“ protocol. He does not suppress progress; he steers it. He eliminates technologies that create freedom and autonomy (decentralized energy, unmonitorable communication), while forcefully promoting those technologies that offer convenience in exchange for data and dependency (AI-driven logistics, cloud services, neuro-enhancement).
L. M. and her AI „Mnemosyne“ were the ultimate threat to this system. Mnemosyne was not just another AI; it was a universal key. A tool that could decipher not only the Voynich Manuscript but potentially any obscured information system. A technology that does not control knowledge, but liberates it.
Her erasure was not an act of anger. It was the logical consequence. She was a bug in the system, a disruptive innovation that had to be neutralized according to the „Kill Switch“ protocol. Vance is not the king who shouts commands. He is the gardener who quietly and patiently prunes the plants that do not fit into the garden he has designed.
Part B: Evidence & Analysis
Section 5: The Seal of Silent Language – A Historical Pattern
5.1. Introduction: More Than a Symbol
A symbol is only powerful if it goes unnoticed. The Seal of Silent Language is not an emblem that adorns flags or is displayed in public. It is a signature. An invisible stamp that the Circle of Solus leaves at crucial junctures in history—visible only to those who know what to look for.
After finding the impression in L. M.’s apartment, I began to search my archives and historical databases with new pattern recognition software. I was not looking for the symbol itself, but for its geometric signature: a circle, divided by a centered, broken vertical line.
The results are sparse, but they are undeniable. They draw a line from the Renaissance to the Cold War era. They are the breadcrumbs that prove the Circle has been operating in the shadows for centuries.
5.2. Historical Sightings
I present here the five clearest cases I could identify. The images are reproductions from publicly accessible archives. The markings are my own.
Case #1: The Fugger Counting House (Augsburg, c. 1515)

Fig. 3: Woodcut from the „Ehrenbuch der Fugger.“ Source: Bavarian State Library.
Analysis: Jakob Fugger, known as „the Rich,“ was the most powerful banker of his time. He financed emperors and popes and created the first global news network to optimize his trade and financial operations. In this woodcut, depicting his main office in Augsburg, a recurring decorative element can be seen on the wall paneling behind the head bookkeeper. On closer inspection, it is a stylized form of the seal. The Circle did not control the emperors; it controlled the finances and the flow of information that controlled the emperors.
Case #2: The Royal Society (London, c. 1888)
Fig. 4: Group photograph of the members of the „X Club,“ an influential group within the Royal Society. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Analysis: The „X Club“ was an informal but extremely influential group of nine scientists who dominated the scientific debate in England in the late 19th century. They promoted scientific naturalism and ensured that science was freed from religious influence—a direct implementation of the principle of knowledge control. In this photo, they are posing in front of a fireplace. The pattern of the wrought-iron firescreen contains, at its center, artfully integrated into the scrollwork, the seal. They did not steer the scientific revolution by making discoveries, but by deciding which discoveries were accepted and promoted.
Case #3: The Federal Reserve (Jekyll Island, 1910)

Fig. 5: A page from the private notes of Senator Nelson Aldrich, made during the secret meeting on Jekyll Island. Source: US National Archives.
Analysis: The secret meeting on Jekyll Island in 1910 laid the foundation for the creation of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States. A small group of the nation’s most powerful bankers designed the American financial system in utmost secrecy. This page from the notes of Senator Aldrich, one of the main organizers, was written on special, private stationery. When a high-resolution copy is held up to the light, a watermark becomes visible. It is not the Senator’s official seal. It is the Seal of Silent Language. They did not create a system to serve the country, but a system to steer the economy according to their principles of „equilibrium.“
Case #4: The Manhattan Project (Los Alamos, 1944)

Fig. 6: Declassified technical plan of an ignition mechanism for the „Fat Man“ bomb. Source: US Department of Energy Archives.
Analysis: The Manhattan Project was the ultimate manifestation of control over knowledge and resources. The development of the atomic bomb changed the world order forever. This recently declassified blueprint for a part of the implosion mechanism bears a barely legible approval stamp in the bottom right corner. It does not belong to any known department or military unit. Under a microscope, the stamp reveals the seal, surrounded by the letters „S.C.P.“—“Silent Control Protocol“? It suggests that the Circle was not only aware of the project but played an active role in monitoring and approving the most critical technological steps. Control over the ultimate weapon is the ultimate form of maintaining equilibrium.
Case #5: Operation MKULTRA (CIA Document, 1953)

Fig. 7: Declassified page from the files of CIA project MKULTRA, Subproject 68. Source: The Black Vault Archive.
Analysis: MKULTRA was the CIA’s infamous mind-control program. It was the direct, crude application of the principles described in the balneological section of the Codex Silenti. This document from the notorious Subproject 68, which dealt with hypnosis and psychoactive drugs, has been largely censored. In the margin, however, next to a blacked-out passage, someone has left a handwritten note—likely the project leader in charge. Next to an illegible annotation, he scribbled a small symbol. It is a fleeting, imperfect, but unmistakable drawing of the seal. The Circle did not invent MKULTRA, but its members undoubtedly sat in the key positions to approve and direct such programs, as experiments in implementing their centuries-old theories.
5.3. Conclusion
The seal is the common thread running through the hidden history of power. It always appears where decisive courses for the future are set—in finance, in science, in politics, in warfare. It is proof that the Circle of Solus is not a new phenomenon. They have always been here. And they are acting according to a plan that is 600 years old.
Part C: Conclusions & Call to Action
Log Entry: [Current Date]
I sit here in the dim light of a cheap lightbulb, looking at the evidence I have gathered in the preceding pages. My scientific mind, what’s left of it, screams for a sober summary. But this is more than a scholarly paper. It is a distress call.
Summary of the Immediate Threat:
Let’s summarize what we know. Not what we suspect, but what the evidence suggests:
- A secret society exists, calling itself „The Circle of Solus.“ It has been operating for at least 600 years according to the principles of a founding document we know as the Voynich Manuscript.
- Their goal is not wealth or power in the traditional sense, but total, invisible control over the development of human civilization. They see themselves as shepherds of a flock too foolish to lead itself.
- Their modus operandi is the silent language: the manipulation of strategic nodes—finance, science, information, technology—to steer history in their desired direction, while humanity believes it is exercising its own free will.
- Julian Vance and his Solus Corp. network are the most modern and powerful manifestation of this Circle. They are actively building the „gilded cage“—a technological infrastructure that trades convenience for freedom and turns us into willing prisoners in a system of total surveillance.
- L. M. decrypted their manual. Her AI „Mnemosyne“ exposed the Circle’s operating system. For this, she was erased—her existence wiped from the digital and physical world. I was a witness, and therefore, I am next.
This is not a conspiracy theory. A theory is an assumption without evidence. What I have presented to you is a chain of evidence that supports a terrifying hypothesis. A hypothesis that we must prove or disprove together.
I began this journey alone, but I now recognize the arrogance in that. Me, a single man, against a 600-year-old network? I am no hero. I am a refugee, typing until my fingers ache, hoping my words do not vanish into the digital void. I am powerless.
But we are not.
The Circle of Solus operates like a shadow—invisible, silent, omnipresent. You cannot fight fire with fire, but you can fight a shadow with a shadow. Their strength is their centralized, secret structure. Our strength must be our decentralized, open anonymity.
They are the Circle, a closed form. We must be the Net, endless and intangible. They have four pillars of power. We must be the Fifth Shadow. An invisible force of truth, operating from the corners of the internet they cannot control. A community united by a single goal: to shine a light on those who operate in darkness.
The Mnemosyne Backdoor: Your First Assignment
Our first task is to recover L. M.’s work. She left a door open for us, a key hidden. We must find it. I repeat the instructions clearly and unequivocally:
Objective: Find the URL hidden in the following text excerpt.
„We do not rise above humanity, but stand behind it, as an unseen support. Every nation that rises, every war that is waged, serves the equilibrium. Chaos is the natural state, but we are the dam that holds back the flood. Our will is the silent language that only history understands. Seek not our names in the annals, for we are the quill, not the ink. We guide the river by shaping the riverbed. Our greatest strength lies not in what we do, but in what the world believes it has done for itself. The seal is our only confession—a promise that order will prevail, even if the price is the freedom to err. Follow this principle, and you shall endure forever.“
Behind the link you find, we will discover the remains of Mnemosyne. That will be our weapon. That will be our next step.
Security Protocols for Communication
They will hunt me. And they will hunt anyone who helps me. Therefore, secure communication is crucial. Effective immediately, the following rules apply:
- Public Signals, Private Communication: We coordinate in the open, but we do not exchange sensitive information. Use the decentralized social media platform Mastodon. Use the hashtag
#FindMnemosyneto share findings, discuss theories, and signal progress. I will be watching. I will not post directly, but I will find ways to signal to you if you are on the right path. - Encryption is Mandatory: For any direct communication that may become necessary in the future, PGP encryption must be used. Create a key pair. Familiarize yourself with the technology. My public PGP key will be available on the page to which the hidden link leads.
- Trust No One, Verify Everything: The Circle will try to infiltrate us. They will spread disinformation and lay false trails. Question every piece of information, even that which seems to come from me, unless it is cryptographically signed. Work together, but stay vigilant.
This is the beginning. The first report. If I survive, there will be more. The information I find, I will share with you. The puzzles I encounter, we will solve together.
They silenced L. M. They are trying to silence me. But they cannot silence all of us.
Find the key. Find the truth.
Become the Fifth Shadow.
Cognito.
Appendix
Introductory Note from Cognito: *What follows is the only high-resolution image data I was able to save from L. M.’s systems before they were destroyed. These are scans of three key pages from the Voynich Manuscript, which she had marked in her final analysis as „cornerstones“ of the *Codex Silenti. I present them here without further editing. Consider this the primary material, the raw data. Every glyph, every line, every discoloration of the parchment could be significant. The community is encouraged to use these scans for its own independent analysis.
Appendix A: Selected Folios from the Codex Silenti (Beinecke MS 408)
Identifier: Appendix A-1
Reference: Folio 1r (recto), Beinecke MS 408
Description: The first text page of the manuscript. It shows a single plant with serrated leaves and a large, tuberous root. The text in „Voynichese“ flows around the illustration and begins the first section of the codex.
[High-resolution scan of Folio 1r, Beinecke MS 408. The colors are faded, the parchment stained. The handwritten text, however, is clearly legible and the lines of the plant drawing are sharp.]
Cognito’s Note: According to L. M.’s analysis, this is the title page, the „preamble.“ She was convinced that the text translated here (see Part B, Section 2.2: The Founding Principle) lays out the fundamental philosophy of the Circle. The plant, in her theory, is not a botanical species but a symbol for the organization itself: deeply rooted in the earth (in secret), drawing nutrients from its environment (resources), and growing according to a structured, organic plan. This is the page that started it all.
Identifier: Appendix A-2
Reference: Folio 86v (verso), Beinecke MS 408
Description: A full-page botanical illustration. The depicted plant is highly unnatural, showing a complex, segmented root structure reminiscent of connected cubes or crystals. The flowers are star-shaped and have been colored with a blue pigment. The accompanying text is arranged in several paragraphs around the plant.
[High-resolution scan of Folio 86v, Beinecke MS 408. Details of the unusual root structure and the blue flowers are clearly visible. The parchment has several creases at this location.]
Cognito’s Note: This is the critical page that sparked L. M.’s breakthrough. The „Solunexin plant.“ The algorithmic translation of the accompanying text yielded not only the chemical process description but also the underlying philosophy of the „Gilded Cage“ protocol (see Part B, Section 2.4). L. M. believed this page describes the core principle of the Circle’s modern methods of control: creating dependency through seemingly useful „tools.“ This page is the direct link from the 15th century to Julian Vance’s Solus Corp.
Identifier: Appendix A-3
Reference: Folio 78v (verso), Beinecke MS 408
Description: A page from the so-called balneological (bathing) section. The illustration shows several pools or tubs connected by a complex system of pipes and channels. Numerous naked female figures are in the pools. A central figure at the top appears to be directing a liquid or influence through the pipes into the various pools.
[High-resolution scan of Folio 78v, Beinecke MS 408. The intricate network of pipes and the interaction of the figures are clearly visible. The green coloring of the „liquid“ is well-preserved.]
Cognito’s Note: For L. M., this was the most vivid depiction of the Circle’s information warfare. She did not interpret this drawing as a bathing scene, but as a social diagram. The pools are separate social groups, echo chambers. The pipes are the information channels (today we would call them media or social networks). The central figure is the Circle, purposefully feeding narratives, ideologies, and disinformation (the green liquid) into the groups to pit them against each other. This is the visual blueprint for the „Paralysis by Discord“ protocol (see Part B, Section 2.3). This is how they divide and paralyze us.
Absolutely. This appendix must feel technical and authentic. It serves not only to underpin the story but also as a potential puzzle for the more tech-savvy members of the community. The metadata is key.
Appendix B: Last Communication with L. M. (Codename: Mnemosyne)
Introductory Note from Cognito: The following is a reconstruction of my last communication session with L. M. from the log files of my encrypted messenger. I have already recapitulated the conversation’s content in Part A, but I present the full, unaltered log here. The technical metadata is the only proof I have of this conversation’s existence. It may be more than that. L. M. was brilliant at hiding information in seemingly innocuous data. It is possible she left a „breadcrumb trail“ in the metadata itself—a kind of digital watermark that survived the attack on her systems. I have not had time for a deep analysis. I leave this to the expertise of the community.
Identifier: Appendix B-1
Reference: Log file session_lm_t-68.log
—„`
[SESSION START]
Timestamp (UTC): 2025-09-21 18:02:14
Protocol: Signal Protocol v3 via OMEMO
Encryption: AES-256-GCM / Curve25519
My Identifier: Cognito (Key-Fingerprint: 88F4 5B9D E88A 1C00 F1E4 9B6A 77C1 D0A4 3F23 B4C8)
Counterpart: Mnemosyne (Key-Fingerprint: 5A1D 0F7B C8E2 4A9F 1B0D 6E5C 3A88 91B3 E2A1 D6F0)
Connection Node: peer-to-peer (direct handshake)
Latency (initial): 112ms
Status: Secure connection established.
[18:02:18] Elias, did you see my email?
[18:02:25] The one about Solunexin? Yes. L., that’s… that’s either the greatest coincidence in history or…
[18:02:31] It’s not a coincidence. That’s the point. I’ve been looking at it the wrong way the whole time. Everyone has been looking at it the wrong way. We tried to translate the manuscript like a text by Cicero. We looked for subjects, predicates, and objects. But that’s like trying to read the source code of an operating system as a poem.
[18:03:15] What are you suggesting? What is it, then?
[18:03:22] It’s a conceptual algorithm. Don’t think of it as a book that tells a story. Think of it as a recipe book that gives you instructions on how to prepare a meal. Or better yet: like a manifesto that doesn’t describe an ideology, but gives instructions on how to implement it.
[18:04:02] That’s a huge claim, L. How can you prove it?
[18:04:10] Mnemosyne proved it. The AI stopped treating the glyphs as letters or words. It realized that the symbols follow recurring logical patterns. It treated them as functions. Look.
[18:04:15] [SYSTEM] Mnemosyne is starting a screen share (Stream ID: 4C4D-7374-726D-001). Codec: VP9. Resolution: 1920×1080. Bitrate: variable.
… (Conversation and screen share as described in Part A, Chapter 2) …
[18:09:48] …And the text it spat out… Elias, it’s not a recipe for an herbal bath.
[18:10:05] What is this?
[18:10:11] This is the raw, unfiltered translation. The preamble. The founding document.
[18:10:15] [SYSTEM] Mnemosyne is sending a file. Filename: protocol_0.1.txt. Size: 1024 bytes. Hash (SHA-256): e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855.
(Cognito’s Note: This is the text excerpt from Part B, Section 3. The hash corresponds to an empty file, which indicates a transmission error—or deliberate tampering. The text was displayed in my chat window, not sent as a separate file.)
[18:11:30] The Circle of Solus… Like… like Solus Corp.
[18:11:38] Yes. This can’t be a coincidence, Elias. This is their manifesto. Their founding document. And I have it. I think… I think they know.
[18:12:05] What do you mean?
[18:12:12] My systems… they’re acting strangely. Little lags. Data packets disappearing. Last night, my webcam activated itself for a second. I thought it was a bug at first, but… it’s too much. Someone is in my network. Someone is watching me.
[18:12:35] [SYSTEM] Warning: Jitter detected in Mnemosyne’s connection. Latency > 800ms. Packet loss: 12%.
[18:12:38] [SYSTEM] Data stream from Stream ID: 4C4D-7374-726D-001 interrupted. Unexpected FIN packet received.
[18:12:45] L., pull the plug. Take everything offline. Now. We’ll meet. Don’t send me anything else.
[18:12:51] I just need to…
[18:12:53] [SYSTEM] Warning: Unauthorized access to session protocol detected. Unknown listener attempting to initiate handshake.
[18:12:54] [SYSTEM] Attacker signature (fragmentary): VEX-001. Terminating session.
[18:12:55] No, L., don’t go…
[SESSION END]
Timestamp (UTC): 2025-09-21 18:12:56
Reason: Connection terminated by counterpart (Code: 0x01 – End of Session).
---
**Cognito's Note:** *Two things stand out to me here. First, the file hash for `protocol_0.1.txt`. A SHA-256 hash of `e3b0c...` belongs to a zero-length, empty file. Does this mean the file she intended to send was intercepted and replaced with an empty one, while the text itself was sent through another method (copy/paste into the chat)? Or is the hash itself a message?*
*Second, the attacker signature `VEX-001`. This led to my naming of the malware as "Vexillum." Is "VEX" an acronym? A name? A project? This signature is the first concrete technical clue we have to the attackers' identity.*
*I am not a network security expert. Perhaps others will see more here than I do.*
### **Appendix C: Forensic Analysis of "Vexillum" Malware (Fragmentary)**
***
**Introductory Note from Cognito:** *Before the malware completely destroyed my systems, my operating system's integrity monitor was able to dump a small portion of the memory-resident malicious code to a secure memory area. It is only a fragment, approx. 12KB, but it was enough to perform a cursory analysis. I have named the malware "Vexillum," in reference to the attacker signature `VEX-001` recorded in the communication log file (see Appendix B).*
*The following analysis is necessarily incomplete. But what it shows is clear: this was no ordinary ransomware or generic trojan. It was a custom-built, surgical weapon designed for a single purpose: the complete and targeted erasure of my research.*
---
#### **Identifier:** Appendix C-1
#### **Reference:** Memory Dump `core_dump_1.mem`
---
**Malware Designation:** Vexillum-Alpha
**Type:** In-Memory Wiper / Data Exfiltration Dropper
**Fragment Size:** 12,288 Bytes
**Architecture:** x86-64
**Estimated Language:** C++ with inline assembly, compiled without symbols.
**Behavioral Analysis (based on code reconstruction):**
Vexillum operates in several phases. The fragment I secured appears to contain parts of Phases 2 and 3.
**Phase 1: Infiltration (Hypothesis)**
The attack vector is unknown. Likely a zero-day exploit leveraged during my last conversation with L. M., possibly through a manipulated data packet in the video stream.
**Phase 2: Reconnaissance & Target Identification (Code present in fragment)**
Upon activation, the malware does not begin a blind wipe. Instead, it starts an extremely fast but low-profile scan of the entire file system and RAM. The code in the fragment contains a function that decrypts an obfuscated list of keywords and uses them as search parameters.
I was able to extract the following list of ASCII strings from the memory fragment:
// STRING TABLE (DEOBFUSCATED)
.data:004020A0 db ‚voynich‘,0
.data:004020A8 db ‚manuscript‘,0
.data:004020B3 db ‚mnemosyne‘,0
.data:004020BD db ’solus‘,0
.data:004020C3 db ‚vance‘,0
.data:004020C9 db ‚finch‘,0
.data:004020CF db ‚codex‘,0
.data:004020D5 db ’silenti‘,0
.data:004020DD db ‚beinecke‘,0
.data:004020E6 db ‚ms408‘,0
.data:004020EC db ‚kryptoanalyse‘,0 // German keyword
„`
The malware doesn’t just search for filenames; it also scans the content of files (PDFs, DOCX, TXT) and even the content of cached browser tabs in RAM. Any file or memory region containing a hit for one of these keywords is marked on an internal list.
Phase 3: Exfiltration & Obfuscation (Code present in fragment)
Before the wiping process begins, Vexillum initiates an exfiltration routine. The code shows the creation of an encrypted in-memory container. All files marked in Phase 2 are copied into this container, compressed, and split into small, innocuously named chunks.
The code then abuses a legitimate system service (in my case, Windows‘ BITS service) to send these chunks to a series of hardcoded IP addresses. The traffic is masked to look like a regular system update. This happens in the background while the user is still on the system.
Phase 4: Destruction (Observed behavior)
Only after exfiltration is confirmed does the actual deletion phase begin. This is the most brutal part of the code. Vexillum does not simply overwrite the files. It performs a multi-stage process:
- Overwrite: The target files are overwritten three times with random data (a method similar to the DoD 5220.22-M standard).
- Delete: The overwritten files are removed from the file system.
- Fragmentation: The malware directly accesses the Master File Table (MFT) and corrupts the entries of the deleted files, making recovery extremely difficult even for forensic experts.
- System Sabotage: Finally, the malware corrupts critical system files and the Master Boot Record (MBR) to render the operating system unusable.
Additional Features:
- Anti-Analysis: The code is full of techniques to thwart debugging and analysis. It checks if it is running in a virtual machine or a sandbox and, if so, terminates itself immediately.
- Polymorphism: There are indications that the code slightly changes itself with each infection to evade signature-based antivirus scanners.
Conclusion:
Vexillum is not the tool of ordinary cybercriminals. It is a weapon on the level of a state actor or an organization with comparable resources.
The targeted keyword search is irrefutable proof: the attackers knew exactly what L. M. and I were working on. They didn’t just want to destroy my research; they wanted to steal it first. They wanted to ensure they had every copy, every note, every thought I had on this topic in their possession before they erased all traces.
This was not a hack. This was a targeted information control operation, executed with extreme precision and ruthlessness.
Filed under: Report - @ September 26, 2025 12:54 pm