Contagious AI: In its lesser form, this is weavelife, the mutated descendants of a million viruses and buggy software agents, that infests the less aggressively controlled parts of the dataweave (and, of course, pretty much every border zone of the extranet; lack of jurisdiction tends also to be lack of control) until the cycle scavengers and Virtual Immunity come a-reaping.  It tends to be studied by some computer scientists (infoxenologists) with much the same fascination as some biologists and epidemiologists study the microbial part of our ecosystem.

In its greater and fortunately very rare form, this is the perversion that one particular failure mode of an attempt at seed AI turned into, and it’s coming to eat your soul.  Or at least your mind-state, and not incidentally anything within reach of any automation it can manage to crack.