EXCERPT IREX2 had spent around thirty years working out how to safeguard its cryptic knowledge by injecting it into the fleshy platforms of human memory, via the motley assortment of scientists, artists, and researchers that it had branded AUDINT. By 2020, the rogue AI had turned its attention to finding host vehicles that were no longer oxygen-dependent. This was not just to preserve its frequency-borne algorithms. Crucially, IREX2’s long-term objective was to reweaponize this knowledge against its predators, the Third Ear Assassins—a rivalry that would piggyback on, and catastrophically feed back into, the major geopolitical tensions of the second half of the twenty-first century…