"Warning! Third high-frequency signal detected! Maximum emergency priority!"
"Signal pattern confirmed... a ninety-eight percent match with the classified distress signal automatically transmitted by our Manta-class heavy transport before its engine underwent a catastrophic fusion detonation!"
Kais abruptly strode forward and braced both hands against the command console. "Locate the distress signal immediately! Deploy rescue drone swarms!"
"Unable to comply!" The AI's voice now sounded like someone being strangled. "The audio frequency of this distress signal... has been maliciously raised by three hundred octaves... it currently sounds... sounds..."
The AI seemed to search its vast vocabulary for a suitable description. In the end, it produced a phrase that made every T'au present question reality.
"It sounds like... a human child's... squeaky rubber duck toy. Furthermore, the signal is looping indefinitely across all communications bands at the extremely high rate of twenty repetitions per second!"
"Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack..."
As the AI delivered its report, those unnerving, utterly ridiculous yet deafening "duck calls" blasted through the command center's high-fidelity sound system, hammering every T'au's eardrums at full volume.
This became the final-and deadliest-straw that broke the camel's back.
For a super-AI such as Pure Thought, whose very foundations rested on absolute rationality and the supremacy of logic, this was an unprecedented, catastrophic cognitive collapse.
It had received three pieces of "valid data" that seemed critically important and had been assigned extremely high priority by the system, yet their contents were utterly contradictory, illogical, and absurd.
One was a long, meaningless stream of nonsense about "the texture of seaweed," encrypted with the highest-level diplomatic key.
One was a suspected new type of Ork WAAAGH! field, but sounded like an enormous racket of pots and pans being smashed in a street market.
One was a distress signal transmitted with the