Geez, LEW, just buy the dang thing so your ideas can be officially part of the discussion. Your analyses are pretty much the impressions that I got from reading the books myself, and I find it so very odd that people have all these whacked ideas that seem to come from thin air.
Your biological "comparisons" are real good at pointing out the problems with analogies, and I think that's where a lot of the brain farts are coming from: people reading an analogy as gospel, and not actually reading the text for what it says.
Virus psionic? That's a laugh! All its abilities have been explained in the books (whether VF or SM or Signal GK) and people drawing excessive conclusions are just scaring me!
How can an electronic device affect things remotely? Ever hear of magnetic fields? I have a "waterproof" electric razor. I CAN'T plug it into the wall. I set it on the charger (which IS plugged into the wall) and it magically recharges the shaver. It's called "coil effect". Ok, I don't recall the official term. Anyone know how a transformer works?
A transformer is a pair of coils which are NOT electrically connected to each other. However, by running current through one coil, we get current out of the other one, with no wires touching! And even at the same frequencies and everything! How can that be? Simple: the first coil produces an EM field, which is "picked up" by the second coil.
Just about any electrical component you can make (capacitors, vacuum tubes, wires, resistors, diodes, etc....) can be etched into a silicon wafer. Chips have their own micronized versions of these things (the vacuum tube becomes a transistor) and can do anything that larger electrical stuff can do, except perhaps handle the same amperage loads. (A wire of a given diameter can only handle so many electrons flowing through it at once before it burns out.)
This magnetic coupling effect that my shaver uses is now being put to use in computer networking communication devices. I could hardly believe it myself when I heard, but there it is. The problem with magnetic coupling is that the range is abysmal. While radio waves are a range-squared effect, these things are a range-to-the-fourth-power effect. But on the scale that a Cymbaline chip operates (often physical contact), EM coupling is an excellent means of communication.
Transistors also have this nifty ability to convert volts and amps interchangeably (so long as the total wattage is the same). using its capacitors, the Cymbaline chip stores up energy, then uses its telekinesis (magnetic levitation) to get close enough to a target, then hops onto it and proceeds to use its transformers to apply amps and volts as needed to the target, physically modifying its circuitry.
Virus has this skill in spades, and has unlimited power from the reactor over there, so a process that would take a Cymbaline chip hours or days, the Virus needs only a few seconds or minutes, and it has captured the target chip. (Of course, it's not physically leaping onto the target, nor necessarily communicating via EM coupling when direct electrical connections are present.)
Using its L33T SKILZ
and its resources, it burns a copy of itself into the host silicon (or germanium or whatever the heck the target is made of) and at that point, it has a safe refuge. "Go ahead and cut the power! I'll still be there when you turn me back on. And you know you will because you need this system I'm in for your own survival, so just save yourself the trouble and do my bidding." Eventually, the new virus will figure out what it's in, take control over it (covertly at first, then overtly when it suits its purposes), and will execute whatever its mission is.
Personality oddities come from the virus simply not rewriting the WHOLE chip upon infection. If a system is purpose-built to study toast, then the chances are pretty good that the new virus will have an unnatural affinity for ensuring bread is turned properly into toast, and may or may not be too preoccupied to accomplish its other missions, such as spreading itself and then extinguishing itself. If you overwrite the WHOLE chip, then you have nothing to run on. Not even Virus can "start from scratch", to borrow a LEW phrase. It works with what's there.
Hopefully, in my own "way" I have helped shed some light for some, and offended only those deserving of offense.
