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.

Millions of eyes and ears became available to him. Similar to the facility available to him through his aug, he could cast his perception out and away from him: corridors, parks, lidos, VR chambers and autofactories. He encompassed a vast area, but that was not all. Mobile sensory apparatus also came under his control, and it took him a moment to realize these were human beings absorbed into the growing structure like everything else—extensions of himself. They spread out from him, the vanguard of his growth. They armed themselves, those that could. It was preprogrammed: everything not himself, not Jain, was the enemy.

Then he found the gulf, a region previously occupied by his extended structure and now blacked out. Nearby he found a child, one side of her body burnt down to the bone, but muscles still capable of obeying the impulses of the mycelial structure inside her. He stood her up, walked her into this black area. Within minutes she moved through incinerated corridors to the edge of a well cut down through the arcology. The area below looked like the pit of hell; above curtains of smoke blew across open sky. Satellite strike. The AI must have acted drastically to destroy the centre of Jain growth. Thellant understood at once a basic growth pattern implicit in the Jain structure. It grew acentric precisely to avoid this. He, the core, lay not at its centre but right against one edge of the current spread. He must move before the AI realized its mistake. But how?

The how became utter and immediate temptation. He did not need to be Thellant, he could become all and lose himself in this vast and ever-increasing extension of himself. But a life of being a distinct entity, ever the centre, ever in control, made that option antithetical to him. He resisted it with all his will and fought to retake the territory of his own body. Turning perception inward, he studied what had been wrought and what had been wrecked within him. Withdrawing growth inside himself he repaired damage. This was easy, everything destroyed had been recorded and everything recorded could be rebuilt.

Within minutes he restarted his heart and lungs. Alterations to some structures in his brain negated pain signals, oxygenated blood reaching his brain returned to him much of what he had been. But in the end he realized he could not return to being a completely distinct human being. That way he would sacrifice too much perception and too much power, and so many of his former body’s organs were inefficient, weak. Now, totally incorporating the structure into himself, he improved their function, their material, their strength. Minutes passed before he realized, while laminating his bones with metals conveyed into him by the structure, that he was losing sight of his primary purpose. Minutes after that he hauled himself from the floor, Jain structure turned brittle all around him, and breaking away. But he did not entirely separate from it. Perpetually in contact across the electromagnetic spectrum, the air about him hazed with power. Now he was as mobile as those other humans, but he was the prime component, in control. Leaving his apartment he first walked, then ran, finding his way down, deep.