Coloron broadcast through the remaining server network, and via public screens and address systems: ‘Urgent evacuation order: a hostile alien organic technology is attempting to take over MA.’

On the screens the AI displayed scenes of what was happening. It took it a full two seconds to calculate how best its order should be carried out. Some sections could be evacuated via the runcibles, others would have to make use of the exits around the arcology perimeter. An external zone would have to be set up to quarantine MA from the rest of the planet, to prevent any physical manifestation of this invading technology from escaping, but allowing enough room to get inhabitants out of the arcology itself. Corolon assigned a submind to the vast logistical problem of moving a billion souls to safety, and knew, with mathematical certainty, that those forty thousand dead were only the start.

Ten yards above the floor, one set of her assister-frame limbs gripping a rung set into the crashfoam-covered wall behind her, Orlandine studied her latest creation. Precisely in the centre of the chamber, the yard-wide gimbals device was supported within a light scaffold of bubble-metal poles attached to the floor and ceiling. Its outer two rings served to present any facet of an inner spherical framework to three telescopic heads. One of those heads now contained plasmonic lens gear from a nanoscope she had taken apart inside the ship, another came from the nanoassembler, which could also be utilized as a disassembler, and the third was a submolecular scanner. The Jain node itself was clamped centrally in the inner framework by six equidistantly spaced chainglass points. This whole, the framework and chainglass clamps, made no physical contact with the outer rings, for it was buoyed and rotated by magnetic fields. The two outer rings were also enclosed in a shimmer-shield sphere out of which, even now, the air was being evacuated. Studying the Jain node underneath a nanoscope, she felt to be too dangerous now, for every time she drew close to it the visible activity on its surface increased. Orlandine could only suppose that inside it some additional host-identification program had come online.