D’nissan blinked, then said, ‘Pursuant on your previous exchange: it is worth noting that something made can then evolve, and that something evolved can be remade.’ He touched a finger to his crystal matrix aug then shrugged. ‘Our studies of Jain morphology, however, are building a body of evidence weighing in on the former option: Jain technology is a weapon created long ago for the single purpose of wiping out civilizations.’

While Cormac sat silently absorbing that, the door into the lounge opened yet again to admit another visitor. Catching its arrival out of the corner of his eye he suppressed an involuntary shiver. The spider-drone from Celedon station had just joined them. So soon after reliving Chaline’s memories, a drone of such a blatantly insectile shape was an unsettling thing to witness. He returned his attention to D’nissan and Mika, as the drone moved off towards the panoramic window.

‘You say it absorbs technical knowledge,’ said Cormac, ‘so what happens when it absorbs U-space tech.’

‘Unless controlled, it won’t, and without a host it would not be capable of retaining that knowledge,’ said Mika.

Cormac gazed at her queryingly, but it was D’nissan who continued: ‘Jain tech uses its acquisitions in, for example, the same way an amoeba uses the physical mechanisms of its body. It is sub-sentient—not conscious. It doesn’t understand what it is doing. It is the very nature of U-space tech that a high level of conscious understanding is required to operate it, hence the fact of runcible and ship AIs controlling it now.’

‘Those creatures ... biomechanisms, if you like’—Cormac eyed the spider drone—‘U-jumped down into that base Chaline occupied,’ he observed.

Mika replied, ‘Yes, but they were controlled by a Maker version of our friend Skellor—that being the conscious element.’

‘Some of our original U-spaceships were not controlled by AI,’ Cormac noted.

‘Apocryphal,’ said D’nissan. ‘Those ships left before the AIs won the Quiet War and took over. It suited the companies owning those vessels to define the systems controlling them as CQPs -carbon quanta processors—simple computers. In reality those systems were conscious and a damned sight more intelligent than any of the ships’ passengers, none of whom could understand U-space technology.’

Cormac shrugged, accepting that. ‘Okay, even without U-tech this shit could bring us down. We got lucky with Skellor. A little less arrogance on his part and he could have caused damage on a systems-wide scale, before seeding Jain nodes across the Polity to finish the job. So how do we stop this? How do we kill Jain technology?’