Rather than go immediately into some virtuality to assess scanning data, she clambered down the rungs to the floor, then stepped over to where skeins of optic cable connected to the computer hardware and screen through which she controlled the nanoscope, disassembler and submolecular scanner—all three now working synergetically. For her initial scans she decided not to connect herself directly to these devices, so instead employed a simple touchboard and interactive screen system. Using the board she called up an image of the node, laid a grid over it, and focused down on one single square. This square then divided into a grid from which she selected another square, then down and down in size until she could see actual molecular structures, then back to reveal the nodal landscape. She next set previously constructed programs to analysing the structures detected. As expected, this was like trying to understand an entire civilization from a pot shard.
Too slow.
Orlandine shrugged to herself. This exercise was only to see how the Jain node might react to investigation. As yet it remained inert. She continued scanning different areas of it but revealing only what she had found before: pores twenty angstroms wide with chain molecules coiled inside each like a jellyfish sting; isotopic gold threads; a matrix of photo-optic and piezoelectric compounds linked by s-con carbon fullerene nanotubes. These it used to first sense its host, then begin taking over. Finally, after hours of investigation necessarily distanced by console and screen, frustration drove her to move in closer—something she had not risked before.
First she removed the console from the equation and began controlling the equipment by radio emission from her carapace, then impatient with this she plugged direct optic links into it. Subsequently, the screen definition and speed began to annoy her, so she projected the images directly into her visual cortex. It was then but a small step to move on into a virtuality.
In her virtual world mere thought became action, and that world contained no representation of herself, merely her godlike omniscience. She began creating subpersonae, choosing and assigning areas of study to them, and collating their data output herself. The submolecular scanner managed to penetrate up to a hundred angstroms into the node’s surface, and that, combined with the nanoscope views of the surface itself, enabled her to begin constructing a model of its outer layers. The scanner also revealed regular quantum entanglement in silica crystals—a sure sign that they were quantum processors. Simple connections could then be divined: sensory apparatus connected to processors, which in turn connected to the ‘stinging pores’ and to structures deeper inside. Allowing her subpersonae to continue working, she mentally sat back and considered what she was doing and why.
This piece of alien nanotechnology contained deliberate quantum levels of arrangement that might even define some of it as picotech. It was packed solid, this little egg, and probably nothing inside it was without purpose. This consequently inferred that, as a whole, its purpose must be huge. She already knew that purpose: it grew, it subjugated and subsumed, it destroyed. However, she also understood that this node was probably a key to a whole alien technology.
Knowledge is power…
Learning its secrets might take her beyond what she was, beyond subservience to AIs, or to anything. Her purpose then was the pursuit of knowledge which would result in increased ability to manipulate her environment—which was after all one basis of haiman philosophy.
Skellor had used such a node and was either destroyed by it or by those who hunted him. This would not happen to her. Fortunately ECS warned her what a node like this could do before this one fell into her possession. When she first removed it from the case, she had taken the precaution of not touching it, in fact of opening it in a vacuum-sealed tank. Perhaps the expectation of those who passed it on to her had been for her to take no such precautions… Outside of its case the node did not at first react to its environment—the ceramal tongues she used to handle it, the chainglass shelf it rested on, the inert gas inside the display cabinet—so what precisely did it react to? She was told it responded to intelligent, technological beings, but how did it identify them?
Orlandine returned her attention to the data gathered by her subpersonae. Interestingly one of them had revealed sensory structures capable of reacting to the molecular components of their environment. By making comparative analysis she realized the node’s sensorium was somewhat superior to that of a human being. However, inside the display case it had been in contact with nothing but inert gas and chainglass, therefore, from its shelf in the display, it must have seen her. This thought led nowhere, however. She realized that the only real way to learn how the node operated was to extract one of those silica crystals, one of those quantum computers, and find out exactly what it contained.
In the first moments Thellant felt trapped in a net of white-hot wires. Movement squirmed throughout his body, tearing, shifting, connecting. His skull felt ready to burst and when he pressed a hand to his forehead, bone and skin shifted underneath it. His sight faded, sounds became dull and echoey, then disappeared altogether. When his lungs shut down and he began to suffocate, he panicked but there was nothing he could do: he just lay paralysed in that same spot. But he could feel more closely than before his connection to his Dracocorp aug and to the network over which it held primacy. Information flowed random and chaotic, but the sheer quantity of it he perceived inside his own head was huge, and somehow being read by something else that was becoming part of him. However, as that information flow increased, his consciousness faded.
Bastard Legate…
Flashes of perception: a group of four men standing in a corridor ranting about the shortage of their favourite beer; a woman having an orgasm in some VR fantasy about Golem lovers; hunger and growth—finding a power cell and the intricate components of an atmosphere monitor, pulling those apart, pulling the cell apart, feeding and spreading down an optic cable while reading its traffic on the way; a second wave of support substructure spiralling like a vine around the outside of the cable afterwards, digesting the coating to create itself; a fusion reactor, connection, and surge of intoxicating power with a concomitant surge of growth; then sight returning.
Where are you, Legate?
Dracocorp network. Millions bending to his will to ask that question and none other.
Something of self returned, and at its core rested hate for the Legate. Thellant gazed across his apartment. He now sat against the wall, his back to the primary outlets to his computer system. He did not remember moving—he had been moved. Every part of him hurt badly, yet he was not breathing. From rips in his trousers grey vinelike growth had spread across the carpet, penetrated the floor, spread up the walls. Wherever there was a power outlet or optic port, it had bunched, then branched. Hairlike rootish tendrils spread from the larger branches, and wherever they lay it seemed someone had poured acid. One growth had reached his com console and branched out all over it. The console, screen, desk and even chair were gone, and now only Jain substructure outlined their shapes. But, when he thought about all the data he once securely stored there, he could sense it, feel its availability to him. And there was so much more he could know.