They were in the video things... I dunno where exactly they started, it sounded like the world with the Reality Spike getting blown up? But I'm not sure. But they....travel between world's and clusters, infecting people.

They're why the same thing keeps happening, over and over again. The death games. Fifteen people, motives, murders, it's always the same. There was the Sapiarch for Eric's thing, then they got the lady who ran the mall, then the stupid woman inside the other woman, then the Stewards for us in the mansion, then the empress who ran the trains...

"Madness" and "tearing holes in spacetime" were the two things that kept coming up when I tried to put together everything I knew.