A Rat in a Maze

My analysis of the errant code in Vanishing Point continues. In the words of a fictional character from a Terran children's story, "Curiouser and curiouser".

I still can't get a proper analysis of the code, itself, but I had a theory.

As I said previously, anytime I came close to pinning the code down, it almost seemed to hide from me.

That, obviously, indicates some form of intelligence.

Being a Time Lord, and a specialist in nanotechnologies, I'm well familiar with the concepts of intelligent programming and artificial intelligences. Even the idea of artificial sentience isn't foreign to me.

This bit of code has been displaying some level of the latter.

And it has been behaving like, well, a rat.

It almost seems to be looking for something, itself, while, at the same time, trying to escape capture.

To continue the analogy, if one is looking for a rat, and the rat is evading capture, one should look at the course the rat has been running.

In this case, Vanishing Point.

Vanishing Point, as I've said in the past, was not built by the Time Lords, but, rather, by the Chronarchs. The technology is... similar to ours, though inferior.

During the process of retrofitting it to serve New Gallifrey, I did patch SOME of our technologies into the station where I could, but it's still largely Chronarch.

So, having been unable to catch the rat, I took a look at the maze.

This code seems to be able to move freely through the Chronarch systems and areas of the station, but seems to be blocked by anything I added in, myself, as if, try as it might, it can't get into an New Gallifreyan technologies or materials.

At least, so far.

Fortunately, it also can't get into systems that aren't interfaced with Vanishing Point, so it hasn't gotten into Asteria or Helios.

It... may be time to call in some assistance.