Orlandine remained wary of applying the physical technology directly to herself, it being only comprehensible down to the level her studying tools could reach. Those tools, and the analytical programs she applied to what they revealed, led her to hypothesize the existence of underlying submolecular structures. It was like seeing a two-hundred-storey building, knowing there must be foundations below it, but suspecting still further floors underground.

Her attitude to the numerous programs copied from the node was different. She loaded them to her carapace—though in isolated storage, just like the ones she had used to attack Shoala. She felt she understood their purposes as individual programs, but did not yet want to include them completely in her crystal consciousness because they might reveal further purpose only in combination. However, being simply packets of information, they could be broken down to a elementary quaternary form, below which nothing could be hidden. At some point she would begin to use them in combination.

Orlandine finished her meal and dropped the compressed-fibre tableware in the recycler. Collecting a chilled glass of synthetic raki, she slumped in her seat again and continued to assess matters at the merely human level.

Something had designed this technology to kill civilizations. It procreated by taking from its first victim information relevant to wiping out that individual’s civilization. A trap for the unwary, it was also a trap for any technological investigation. She simply could not risk incorporating the physical tech without finding ways of divining the purpose of all she still could not see, since it was certainly hostile. Even atomic copies would be too risky, as they might mimic that same purpose. She therefore needed newer and better tools. The technology itself could provide her with them, but that could be dangerous too: the trap might also lie within tools based on the technology. Orlandine sighed, suddenly feeling unutterably weary. She could clear this feeling by running certain programs in the crystal part of her mind, in her carapace, to impart the benefits of sleep to her organic brain. Also, the Polity nanomachines in her body were constantly repairing cellular damage normally attended to naturally during sleep. She chose to sleep properly, however, for maybe the archaic natural process of REM sleep would give her a different perspective. Reclining the chair, she settled back, closed her eyes and used her gridlink to cue herself for lucid dreaming.

Natural, she reflected with some amusement, before turning herself off.

The spider web extended to infinity in every direction: the space-time continuum represented as a flat surface for those simple humans who could visualize only a limited number of dimensions.