Black Ops (Expeditionary Force, #4)

by Craig Alanson

“You haven’t heard the scary part yet, Joe. The worm should have killed me, rendered me inert, whatever you want to call it. It locked up my conscious mind in a loop so I was not aware of anything, not even of time passing. I was helpless; it could have taken me apart and erased me, like it erased the AI that used to occupy that canister. The only reason I survived, Joe, was that I had sort of antibodies to fight the worm. At some point in my past, I must have encountered a worm like that before, although I probably had outside help to fight it back then. During that fight, long ago, I built antibodies to destroy that worm, and those antibodies have been waiting inside me all this time. My conscious memories have no record of that first incident, I didn’t even know they existed, but now I estimate these antibodies make up almost two and a half percent of my memory. That is a huge amount of my capacity. When this worm attacked me, my antibody subroutines protected me, firewalled off my consciousness, and attacked the worm.”