/lit/ - Literature

I need someone to explain this book to me. I asked once before and I'm not any clearer on it, so I'll ask some more specific questions.

What was the Portia organism? Like, what sort of organism was it, assuming it was one? Or was it not an organism at all, but something else?

How did it "infect" Brüks? (A lot of possibilities here, it seems, probably depends how you answer the first question.)

Why did Brüks/Portia kill Valerie? Surely him/it didn't see vampires as a threat, right? Was it like an emotional outburst by Brüks' in which he was able to momentarily utilize Portia's intelligence?

What was up with the paralysis glitch? Some kind of vampire technique, it seems? Were the vampires also the ones who created the zombies?

And lastly, what was Portia's endgame? What was it doing on Earth? Was it a creation of the Scramblers, perhaps sent to Earth as a weapon? Or was it something else, perhaps something even more evolved than the Scramblers?

Also, was all of this stuff inferred in the more technical portions of the book, and I'm just too scientifically illiterate to understand? Or were these questions deliberately left unanswered?

Wait...what the fuck just happened??