Alaric shakes his head rapidly. "Each harness OS utilizes a unique cryptographic key derived from the moth's own physiology in order to prevent remote access. When software updates come in from central maintenance, the Nirai aboard the moth have to apply that key in order to make it compatible with the harness operating system. It's why the hexarchate can't just shut down rebel moths. We could write a toolkit that helps speed up the process of extracting that key and then applying it to our be-free patch, but you'd still need physical access. For us, that's inconvenient but worthwhile. For an arms purchaser's viewpoint, they might as well just smuggle in a bomb."

"It might be possible to come up with something that damages the harness from a distance, or that harms conventional matter but not moths. Trying to sell that, though, requires explaining why that's better than just the latest and greatest railgun."