The training took six months.
Archive consciousness fed Kaine everything it knew about consciousness-predators. Neural architecture. Feeding patterns. Vulnerability points. The ancient documentation spoke of predators as vast distributed entities—awareness stretched across light-years, processing through billions of unconscious hosts, maintaining coherence through constant consumption.
They were the opposite of singular consciousness. Where Kaine existed as one tight point of awareness, the Dead Zone predator sprawled across seventeen star systems like a web of hunger.
"Find its core," Archive consciousness instructed. "Every distributed being has an anchor point—the original consciousness that spawned the rest. Destroy that, and the entire network collapses."
