The network packets no longer fit together like sequential blocks of message parts. Each packet had been shifted by the same amount but the area influenced was slightly different in each. Now they fit in an interlocking offset spiral. Together they looked more like a DNA molecule than a network message packet. Even the basic header information, including the receiving application ID was unrecognizable. With this much corruption, the receiving CPU could not issue acknowledgment of receipt and so the sending CPU re-sent the original data. The fraction of a second necessary for this glitch to be covered was well below any human's ability to perceive. It looked like normal lost and recovered network traffic to the automated monitors.

With no application to go to, the mutated message packets remained momentarily idle in the memory of its new host computer. As busy operations continued in the outside world, busy computer operations continued within the host. The mutant packets were shuffled through memory as areas were needed by the real-time processes in execution at the time. In one fateful "move" operation, the packet strand was re-addressed to an area contiguous with a virus which had been harmlessly residing in this technician's console workstation for the past few days. As the virus activated itself through the CPU via a few non-destructive instructions, it pulled through the Dilutium altered strand. When returned to memory from the CPU, the virus and the strand were one.

The electronic embryo began to grow. Not through division of its own makeup as in cell division, but through the attachment of specialized machine instructions. Those that attached in a useful way were retained and those that did not were rejected. Over a period of a few minutes, an increasingly capable "life-form" developed. It was adapting to its surroundings and learning about itself as it did so. Its initial activation and deactivation skills were being enhanced with the ability to call upon the CPU for specific actions, such as moving itself and inspecting other memory resident objects. It also discovered video, disk, and I/O representations of these objects. These proved interesting in that the flat memory world suddenly contained extension areas which could be read and written to.

The video area contained the most interesting objects and the first read operation conducted there brought a rudimentary image abstraction into the life-form's supervisory control section. This abstraction would be the face and footprint of the life-form to those who would come to know him later.


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