Network Effect

2.0 hesitated, suddenly appalled. If the contamination is transmitted through code, do you think ART’s still infected?

No. Because targetControlSystem got angry and deleted ART’s current version. ART must have been infected when it made the copy, but when it restarted the first thing it did was purge the processing space targetControlSystem was using. It deleted every part of targetControlSystem, treating it like killware, and it must have deleted the infected … code, or whatever it was. An alien code, in a form that didn’t make sense. Well, sort of sense. It must be using the same principle as the machine-readable code written into human DNA that was how things like augments worked, and constructs, and you could transfer malware that way if you weren’t filtering for it … Oh, shit. ART got the infection from an augmented human, like this system did. The Targets sent an infected human carrier aboard—

Two humans! 2.0 corrected. Ras and Eletra.

It was right. And they said they were injured, and ART put them on the medical platform and read the contaminated code into itself. TargetControlSystem deleted their memory of it through the implants, and maybe the contamination—

No, no, 2.0 said. They didn’t use them to transfer the contaminaton. I bet the Targets used them to transfer targetControlSystem to ART. That’s why Eletra’s memories were so messed up, it was using her neural tissue as storage space for its kernel. It added, It’s kind of like killware. That’s why we keep running into it. It’s replicating.

I stared at Central’s system box. Conclusions:

1)  The alien remnant had forced a contaminated human to bring it within range of the nearest operating system, a pre-CR central system.

2)  The infected central system had partitioned itself (compulsively? Like the humans in alien contamination incidents who built weird things and killed each other?) and created targetControlSystem, a malware-like system that was a hybrid of outdated Pre-CR tech and whatever the alien remnant was.

3)  TargetControlSystem had spread to the Adamantine systems and colonists. It made them use the Pre-CR tech, because that’s what the Pre-CR central system understood. It had them build what it wanted out of the Pre-CR tech, like the drones, and the implants. Pre-CR tech using alien code.

4)  But it was still stuck here in the colony, on the terraformed section of the planet. Then the Barish-Estranza contact group had arrived.

I’d been in the shaft with the unsealed remnant and I was in this room. I still didn’t feel infected. But then, targetControlSystem hadn’t tried to infect the SecUnits on the explorer, either, including Three, who according to 2.0 had been ordered to stand frozen and helpless in the corridor. Maybe it couldn’t affect constructs. That would be nice.

2.0 said, So who’s targetContact?

Right, the contact that had been in communication with the explorer’s instance of targetControlSystem. 2.0 had thought it was a human, or at least, not an alien. 2.0 had followed that contact’s connection to this installation, and ended up in Pre-CR Central’s network …

Oh, I had a bad feeling.

I stepped forward slowly, circling the web of connections. The only sound was my bad knee grinding and the despairing repeat of the distress signal. 2.0 said, Uh, where are we going?

I have to check something. I angled around to a break between two tables where there was a void in the connections. I eased forward and managed to fall/crouch down on the floor near the sprawled body of the human.

The thing is, I had realized there was no odor of decomp. The death had to have happened at least months ago, if not more than a planetary year, or years, if it was the incident that had kicked off the major contamination spread. But the shape of the body I could see under the white growth didn’t look all sunken and gross or dried out.