Earth Central Security and the AIs are parsimonious in supplying the details, but I now know that one Skellor—a biophysicist with terrorist Separatist affiliations—did somehow manage to obtain a Jain node. I will be brief here with the salient details, since I don’t know how much time I have before ECS gags me.

Aware of the node’s dangers, Skellor settled down to study it in a secret Separatist base, trying to discover how to control the resultant technology in a way safe for the host. His eventual solution was to use a crystal-matrix AI augmentation—death would be the result of a human direct-linked to such, but the Jain tech could support human life in this situation while through the aug the human could exercise strict control over that technology. However, before he finished his researches, it was a solution he was forced to use untested when ECS agents came to capture him.

Evading them on the ground, Skellor managed to board their dreadnought Occam Razor, kill its AI, and use Jain technology to seize control while the ship was in transit. He killed most aboard, but the agents themselves escaped the ship, fleeing to the out-Polity world of Masada. Skellor could not allow knowledge of what he had become to reach the Polity, so he pursued them, intent on killing all witnesses. At Masada he burnt out a cylinder world, mentally enslaved thousands, killed tens of thousands, and came close to rendering that entire world to ash. But again the agents escaped him, leading him into a trap at the smelting station of Elysium, where giant sun mirrors were used to destroy the Occam Razor.

The end? No, not really.

Skellor was tenacious, and escaping the dreadnought in its ejectable bridge pod, he again began to grow in power. He then resurrected a killer Golem called Mr Crane, and cut a bloody highway across space. ECS subsequently closed in, using improbably large forces to contain him. But perhaps it was because the Jain tech was now beginning to pursue its own final purpose, that ECS managed to finish him. Riddled with Jain nodes Skellor was finally trapped aboard an old colony ship in a decaying orbit around a brown dwarf sun, into which the vessel finally crashed.

Which goes to show that even godlike power is subject to gravity. One man, one Jain node- nearly a million dead. I’ll get more detail down later . . . I hope.

— From ‘How it Is’ by Gordon

Cormac kept his eyes closed and remained very still, expecting something to start hurting at any moment. When no pain became evident, he opened his eyes to observe the tangle of limbs and implements on the underside of a pedestal autodoc, just as it swung aside. The last he remembered, Jain technology had been crawling around inside his head, busy rewiring it, then the rest of his body had caught up with that damage by experiencing ten Gs of acceleration.

Right ...