It was worse than he had thought–an absolute worst case scenario by all indications.
With the code shell decompiled, he was finally able to nail down the spider’s quantum log signature and make reasonable guesses about the way it had gone about its business. Its modus operandi appeared to have been a standard quick-couple and scan of incoming bits, then the rapid application of some seriously sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms, followed by a catchall keyword search-match, all perpetrated across a variety of media platforms. Most of the original source plugs and codecs were grievously outmoded–.swfs, .cags, .mngs–but there was evidence that adaptive cognition strands had been engineered in the R-ASP using rudimentary logic trees that allowed for cross-platform extrapolation. The logs indicated it had stuttered a bit while making the initial evolutionary leaps, but eventually it had adapted from text and character signifiers to corneal-cochlear-neural object phenomenalism, which had been barely an infant field of study when Gancet and Vickers Standard were pushing the far boundaries of their models.
