Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys

It was Thelodian who wrote, "In this era of irritating mysteries nothing was more irritating (except perhaps humanity's capacity for accepting virtually anything as normal in the shortest possible time) than the matter of the disrupters." Few of the proffered explanations for the arrival of the disrupters in those troubled final days have come close to being satisfactory. The facts are not in dispute. The disrupters appeared like the sand-worms of Herbert, apparently composed of a thirdform matter that was a full ninety degrees more unorthodox than that which made up the nothings. They came, and they chewed their way through reality. When they were gone, they left a slimetrail of intolerable hallucination that faded only as the nothings reinsinuated themselves.

The Externalists, with characteristic tunnel vision, maintained that the disrupters were simply the final form of the Draan doomsday weapon that had started by causing the nothings and came to full cycle in the Final Cataclysm. Clearly, this is nonsense. The very fact that the Thousand Years War lasted for a full thousand years seems ample proof that the forces of the Draan and those of mankind were very evenly matched. There is no possibility that in the latter days of the war the Draan were able to command forces so far beyond the understanding of human beings. As with all Externalist arguments, the primary motivation behind the theory would appear to be not so much an arrival at the truth but the absolution of the human race from responsibility for its own destruction.

The Juxtapositionists were considerably more inventive. Extending their central belief that the entire Damaged World effect was a result of the random encroachment of a neighboring extradimensional reality in the same area of actualspace, they claimed that the disrupters were merely an outside reflection of something that, although ultimately destructive to human reality, was perfectly normal in its own.

La Vortice, ever handy with the related painpattern and the Burden of Guilt, had his own gloomy and ponderous ideas. Of course, to buy the grim old Master's disrupter concept, one had also to accept his whole elegantly constructed but complex premise that humans brought it on themselves, that man was crushed by the massive monolithic burden of his monstrous history and culture and his inability to adapt when the divisions between the temporal and spiritual, the physical and the meta, became blurred and fragmented. The disrupter, according to La Vortice, was merely a product of that decay, a mutated virus in the already disease-racked body of reality. As he liked to repeat, "What could be closer to the human spirit than an entity that ate reality and shit hallucination?"

— Pressdra Vishnaria