Who said it's only her?
Shipyard had only the chance to detect it after he attempted to heal her (Piggot) with his Alteran powers. He had no contact with anyone else from Elisburg till now.
And chances are high that if it was in Piggot, its also in everyone else who was there and unprotected during the initial outbreak, or received a wound from Nilbog's monsters- depending on the vector he used.
Wasn't the only other non-parahuman survivor of that clusterfuck Calvert? I'm pretty sure it was canonically stated that Piggot and Calvert were the only surviving PRT personnel to emerge from Nilbog's 'garden' after their parahuman support fled early in the fight, so it's entirely possible that Calvert is the only other person infected with that plague.
From its description, the plague was basically a long term 'fuck you' that would slowly and quietly kill whoever it infected by interfering with the body's natural healing, causing injuries to get worse instead of better and also accelerating the aging process, presumably due to interfering with the systems that repair DNA telomeres. So it's not something that anyone other than Panacea would notice if they didn't know what to look for, and neither Calvert nor Piggot have ever allowed Panacea to heal them: Piggot because she is biased against parahumans and would rather waste huge amounts of time and money on dialysis than allow a parahuman to help her, and Calvert because he's pretending to not be a parahuman.
Based on its effects and the apparent fact that it was not contagious, it was probably transmitted via being wounded by Nilbog's monsters, so Calvert might not be infected either as I don't remember if he was wounded as well as Piggot. Still, yeah once the plague is explained dragging Calvert in to get checked over for the plague should become a high priority, which will of course reveal his parahumanity.
Soooo...
One little issue. I don't recall Weldon doing anything about Tattletale's potential brain tumor problem...? She was placed in a medbay, but are we to merely assume it was started? I do hope he can get their powers to reactivate (and perhaps behave themselves better) in the future.
The medbay is Alteran tech, generally speaking Alteran tech is highly autonomous if not outright intelligent, so there's a 50/50 chance that it will automatically either put her into stasis, or just go ahead and fix the tumor (and any other problems it detects) all by itself.
And what's with his own power (extra-universal SI or no) that made it benign even when cut off? For that matter, just how and why is it eating the local solar system?
His Alteran physiology made the tumor benign, or more accurately his Alteran immune system recognized the tumor as a dangerous tumor and promptly started dealing with it. Because Alteran are biologically way more robust than Humans and are entirely capable of healing and regenerating brain damage all by themselves.
I have no clue why his Shard is eating the solar system, possibly it is attempting to grow up into a real Entity all on its own, possibly it's just gone batshit insane from interactions with Alteran technology, who knows. With the Alterans involved the answer could be
anything.
Also, given that constructors have been spotted around the city, are these the ones that work properly and fix things, or are they going to be a new problem and start uncontrollably replicating? Either way, let's hope Coil's base gets disassembled around his ears. He'd deserve it, especially if any of the governing AIs know who took that shot.
They should be functioning as proper Constructors and not Replicators; the Replicators only went rogue because they were built by a scared child who gave her toys the primary command of 'Replicate' and because they were Alteran tech there were no internal safety systems in the event of bad commands, because why would someone do something stupid like that?
So unless Weldon's shard has done something on its own and fucked up, the Constructors should be about as safe as any unsupervised Alteran technology is; that is to say
not very. But they won't go rogue; Alteran tech doesn't break or malfunction, it does
exactly what it is told to do, the problem arises when it is told to do something stupid by people who don't understand what they are doing.
Because the Alterans literally never envisaged the possibility that anyone could ever not know what they were doing, due to being such ridiculous geniuses that it was all but impossible for
them to not know what they were doing, and never growing up enough to realize that other people didn't think the same way that they did.
Also, how is Piggot going to react when she finds out that he has several tiers of self-replicating devices, from the ultimate Tinker worry of nanites up to the aforementioned constructors? Or for that matter, Coil, since he was also a Nilbog survivor? Perhaps when he mentions just how many times the Alterans screwed up with some variant of grey goo...?
Fear and panic, followed by table flipping
fury, most likely.
I see he's doing a very, very effective job at collecting all the potential interests. Love icosahedron, anyone?
Supposing I did ship that, I would not admit it, of course.
Sharing Dragon with Armsmaster would be kinda weird, though. Then again, if he botched that, and the original systems spawned a new one from backup, there might not be any issues there. I wonder how THAT system works with the fact that she had/has a soul?
It depends on how exactly Dragon's soul works; while the Alterans cracked soul science ages ago, they never figured out how to create souls or give them to things that did not already have them: This was actually a plot point with the Asurans who could not ascend due to not having souls, and so attempted to come up with their own method of 'digital ascension' that... didn't really work the way they wanted it to. The Entities apparently encountered a species that
did work out how to program for souls at some point in the past, so depending on how that works the backup would either generate its own new soul, or it would simply be soulless like Alteran AI's if there's more to it than just code.
