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?