Ambassador

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A little forensic hindsight, here: how exactly did Kali pull it off?

I'm not exactly sure. But some of Zombie's diagnostic systems run at the scale of the merely electronic, with no reliance on quantum computation. The crash didn't affect them; they were able to paint a few broad strokes in the aftermath.

The Trojan signal contained at least one set of spatial co-ordinates. The onboard would have read that as a pointer of some kind: it would have opened the navigation files to see what resided at x-y-z. A conspicuous astronomical feature, perhaps? Some common ground to compare respective visions of time and space?

Zap. Nav files gone.

Once nav was down—or maybe before, I can't tell—the invading program told Zombie to update all her backups with copies of itself. Only then, with all avenues of recovery contaminated, had it crashed the onboard. Now the whole system was frozen, every probability wave collapsed, every qubit locked into P=1.00.

It was an astonishingly beautiful assault. In the time it had taken me to say hello, Kali had grown so intimate with my ship that she'd been able to seduce it into suicide. Such a feat was beyond my capabilities, far beyond those of the haphazard beasts that built me. I'd have given anything to meet the mind behind the act, if it hadn't been trying so hard to kill me.