“Yes of course, how stupid of me.” Freyr muttered. She’d been finding it hard to focus since the news of Dr Hou’s sudden death. He had been one of her most trusted colleagues and advisors; she didn’t understand how she’d neglected to notice he was unhappy. Her nights had already been fraught before this, now they were almost unbearable. Still, there was a lot riding on this expedition; Freyr wouldn’t allow it to fail on her account.

“We could try an AI. However it’s proved a very unproductive, unethical, dangerous method in the past. They’ve always gone rogue and either disappeared into the Cradle or tried to destabilise us; going after the biosphere et cetera.. All their readouts go dead immediately upon making contact. From what we can gather, the Cradle is a little [i]too[/i] good at manipulating other machine intelligences; that’s why we had to go inside to set up shop ourselves.

Freyr turned to look at the hologram of the new object again. “We can test out the other communications packages our teams have collaborated on too. Like you say, there’s no guarantee it shares any similarities with the Cradle. I’m just going off what I know.”