It seems a node will only react to a living intelligent organism, which will then become both its host and its master. The nanotechnology propagating from this relationship is mycelial in nature, and capable of penetrating all our present technologies. Horribly, it seems able to take control of living beings in the same way. Godlike power, you would think, but, no, it is a poisoned chalice. Unless he manages to exercise total control, the user will end up being the used, the technology continuing to spread and destroy while he, the host, is absorbed as merely a component of it. Even managing to control it and evading such fate is not enough, since Jain tech is programmed, like an annual plant, to go to seed, and in the process tears its host apart in order to create more Jain nodes, which in turn will be spread to further hosts. The opinion of my source was that this diabolical creation serves one purpose only: genocide.

— From ‘How it Is’ by Gordon

Over the centuries, the huge Celedon station’s original shape, like a spinning top five miles across, had become shrouded by accretions. Now near the end of its journey and its useful life, it was slowing from one eighth of light speed on this particular edge of the Polity sphere because the stars here were dispersed and intergalactic space lay beyond. Its controlling artificial intelligence, Celedon, viewed those aboard through its many camera eyes. The resident and transitory populations had been dropping away for some years simply because they had come to realize there existed so little of interest out here. The usual tourists still arrived, but after taking a look around they soon departed. Various corporations still maintained offices and factories in the rim units, but their number decreased steadily and no new ones had established a foothold here in the last two decades. Even the low-grav and vacuum-adapted outlinker humans, living here from the beginning, were starting to trickle away to more lively stations. There were now many empty rooms, deserted corridors and concourses, and Celedon, having shut down three of the five runcibles aboard simply because these extra instantaneous gateways in from other destinations were no longer required, viewed with chagrin the prospect of the next two boring decades before the station reached its final destination.