Unhappily, the processing power required for this sort of technical gee-whizzery meant that according to Culture convention the suit had to be sentient. Genar-Hofoen had insisted on a model with the intelligence fixed at the lower limit of the acceptable intellectual range, but it still meant that the suit literally had a mind of its own (even if it was ‘node-distributed’, - one of those technical terms Genar-Hofoen took some pride in having no idea concerning the meaning of).
