CHAPTER 4
Tiklik’al’Takas floated in the center of its quarters. Its four limbs curled loosely to its chest. Had Tarkos or Bria been there to look at the Kirt AI, they might have suspected it had fallen back into slow time, or gone catatonic. But inside Tiklik, a furious battle raged.
The AI struggled to hold back the bleeding code that reproduced furiously, spreading across Tiklik’s mind and eating up memory and its quantum computation capacity. If the code continued to spread, there would soon be nothing of Tiklik left. There would be only the virus, a dull wasteland of self-repeating noise.
The human Pala Eydis had saved Tiklik. Not just when she had intruded directly into its systems, shutting most of them down, giving Tiklik a respite from the spreading information attack. S
