Compare: Femme Fatale × Botulus

Flavor: This slime-mold can ooze through the pores in ice, or find its way along the walls of a maze, but it cannot ooze through the walls themselves. (Not all EtR ice are Barriers, but all Barrier ice can EtR.)

Related:

• Femme Fatale: also a “subcount-taxed bypasser” (Whenever you encounter the chosen ice, you may pay [$1] for each subroutine it has. If you do, bypass it.).
• Botulus: also punishes low-subcount host-ice (and also is Virus - Trojan).
• Ika: a “Host-Sentry breaker” (Killer - Trojan).
• Savant: a “non-Barrier breaker” (Killer - Decoder).

Note that it counts subroutines (ignoring strength), and that it says is not a barrier (not is a sentry or code gate, affecting Mythic/etc ICE too).

“Femme-like Bypassing” is especially powerful against low-subcount ICE with higher strength or harsher on-encounter triggers. For example:

• You can skip “when encountered” triggers, including those adding subroutines/subtypes while only paying for the printed subroutines (e.g. bypass Starlit Knight for $2, even if you have ∞ tags; or bypass Loki for just $1, even if there's a rezzed Barrier), as well as those unbreakably punishing you (e.g. bypass Tollbooth or Funhouse for just $1).

And immobile trojans (unlike Hush) obviously synergizes with trojan-rehosting (like Spree?) or ice-exposure (like 419?) effects, as well as undermining ice-rezzers. For example:

• If a Týr has been revealed by a Jinja City Grid and/or “pre-rezzed” by a Haas-Bioroid: Architects of Tomorrow), you can “physarum it” (before even your 1st encounter with it), bypassing it for $3. Ditto Tucana’ing an iceberg.

Physarum (via Latin from Greek «φυσάριον» (physarion, “small bellows”) are slime-molds.

…

They studied slime molds and their abilities to solve mazes by placing nodes at two point separated by a maze of plastic film. The mold explored all possible paths and solves it for the shortest path.

Links:

• wiki/Physarum_cinereum
• t:ICE s!Barrier z:standard b:active