Code Of The Lifemaker

by Hogan, James

  Code of the LifemakerCode of the Lifemaker

  By James P. Hogan

  Prologue

  THE SEARCHER

  1.1 MILLION YEARS B.C.;

  1,000 LIGHT-YEARS FROM THE SOLAR SYSTEM

  HAD ENGLISH-SPEAKING HUMANS EXISTED, THEY WOULD PROBABLY have translated the

  spacecraft's designation as "searcher." Unmanned, it was almost a mile long,

  streamlined for descent through planetary atmospheres, and it operated fully

  under the control of computers. The alien civilization was an advanced one, and

  the computers were very sophisticated.

  The planet at which the searcher arrived after a voyage of many years was the

  fourth in the system of a star named after the king of a mythical race of alien

  gods, and could appropriately be called Zeus IV. It wasn't much to look at—an

  airless, lifeless ball of eroded rock formations, a lot of boulders and debris

  from ancient meteorite impacts, and vast areas of volcanic ash and dust—but the

  searcher's orbital probes and surface landers found a crust rich in titanium,

  chromium, cobalt, copper, manganese, uranium, and many other valuable elements

  concentrated by thermal-fluidic processes operating early in the planet's

  history. Such a natural abundance of metals could support large-scale production

  without extensive dependence on bulk nuclear transmutation processes—in other

  words, very economically—and that was precisely the kind of thing that the

  searcher had been designed to search for. After completing their analysis of the

  preliminary data, the control computers selected a landing site, composed and

  transmitted a message home to report their findings and announce their

  intentions, and then activated the vessel's descent routine.

  Shortly after the landing, a menagerie of surveyor robots, equipped with

  imagers, spectrometers, analyzers, chemical sensors, rock samplers, radiation

  monitors, and various manipulator appendages, emerged from the ship and

  dispersed across the surrounding terrain to investigate surface features

  selected from orbit. Their findings were transmitted back to the ship and

  processed, and shortly afterward follow-up teams of tracked, legged, and wheeled

  mining, drilling, and transportation robots went out to begin feeding ores and

  other materials back to where more machines had begun to build a fusion-powered

  pilot extraction plant. A parts-making facility was constructed next, followed

  by a parts-assembly facility, and step by step the pilot plant grew itself into

  a fully equipped, general-purpose factory, complete with its own control

  computers. The master programs from the ship's computers were copied into the

  factory's computers, which thereupon became self-sufficient and assumed control

  of surface operations. The factory then began making more robots.

  Sometimes, of course, things failed to work exactly as intended, but the alien

  engineers had created their own counterpart of Murphy and allowed for his law in

  their plans. Maintenance robots took care of breakdowns and routine wear and

  tear in the factory; troubleshooting programs tracked down causes of production

  rejects and adjusted the machines for drifting tolerances; breakdown teams

  brought in malfunctioning machines for repair; and specialized scavenging robots

  roamed the surface in search of wrecks, write-off's, discarded components, and

  any other likely sources of parts suitable for recycling.

  Time passed, the factory hummed, and the robot population grew in number and

  variety. When the population had attained a critical size, a mixed workforce

  detached itself from the main center of activity and migrated a few miles away

  to build a second factory, a replica of the first, using materials supplied

  initially from Factory One. When Factory Two became self-sustaining, Factory

  One, its primary task accomplished, switched to mass-production mode, producing

  goods and materials for eventual shipment to the alien home planet.

  While Factory Two was repeating the process by commencing work on Factory Three,

  the labor detail from Factory One picked up its tools and moved on to begin

  Factory Four. By the time Factory Four was up and running, Factories Five

  through Eight were already taking shape, Factory Two was in mass-production

  mode, and Factory Three was building the first of a fleet of cargo vessels to

  carry home the products being stockpiled. This self-replicating pattern would

  spread rapidly to transform the entire surface of Zeus IV into a totally

  automated manufacturing complex dedicated to supplying the distant alien

  civilization from local resources.

  From within the searcher's control computers, the Supervisor program gazed out

  at the scene through its data input channels and saw that its work was good.

  After a thorough overhaul and systems checkout, the searcher ship reembarked its

  primary workforce and launched itself into space to seek more worlds on which to

  repeat the cycle.

  FIFTY YEARS LATER

  Not far—as galactic distances go—from Zeus was another star, a hot, bluish white

  star with a mass of over fifteen times that of the Sun. It had formed rapidly,

  and its life span—the temporary halt of its collapse under self-gravitation by

  thermonuclear radiation pressure—had demanded such a prodigious output of energy

  as to be a brief one. In only ten million years the star, which had converted

  all the hydrogen in its outer shell to helium, resumed its collapse until the

  core temperature was high enough to bum the helium into carbon, and then, when

  the helium was exhausted, repeated the process to begin burning carbon. The

  ignition of carbon raised the core temperature higher still, which induced a

  higher rate of carbon burning, which in turn heated the core even more, and a

  thermonuclear runaway set in which in terms of stellar timescales was

  instantaneous. In mere days the star erupted into a supernova—radiating with a

  billion times the brightness of the Sun, exploding outward until its photosphere

  enclosed a radius greater than that of Uranus' orbit, and devouring its tiny

  flock of planets in the process.

  Those planets had been next on the searcher's list to investigate, and it

  happened that the ship was heading into its final approach when the star

  exploded. The radiation blast hit it head-on at three billion miles out.

  The searcher's hull survived more-or-less intact, but secondary x-rays and

  high-energy subnuclear particles—things distinctly unhealthy for

  computers—flooded its interior. With most of its primary sensors bumed out, its

  navigation system disrupted, and many of its programs obliterated or altered,

  the searcher veered away and disappeared back into the depths of interstellar

  space.

  One of the faint specks lying in the direction now ahead of the ship was a

  yellow-white dwarf star, a thousand light-years away. It too possessed a family

  of planets, and on the third of those planets the descendants of a species of

  semi-intellig
ent ape had tamed fire and were beginning to experiment with tools

  chipped laboriously from thin flakes of stone.

  Supernovas are comparatively rare events, occurring with a frequency of perhaps

  two or three per year in the average galaxy. But as with most generalizations,

  this has occasional exceptions. The supernova that almost enveloped the searcher

  turned out to be the first of a small chain that rippled through a localized

  cluster of massive stars formed at roughly the same time. Located in the middle

  of the cluster was a normal, longer-lived star which happened to be the home

  star of the aliens. The aliens had never gotten round to extending their

  civilization much beyond the limits of their own planetary system, which was

  unfortunate because that was the end of them.

  Everybody has a bad day sometimes.

  ONE MILLION YEARS B.C.

  One hundred thousand years after being scorched by the supernova, the searcher

  drifted into the outer regions of a planetary system. With its high-altitude

  surveillance instruments only partly functioning and its probes unable to deploy

  at all, the ship went directly into its descent routine over the first sizeable

  body that it encountered, a frozen ball of ice-encrusted rock about three

  thousand miles in diameter, with seas of liquid methane and an atmosphere of

  nitrogen, hydrogen, and methane vapor. The world came nowhere near meeting the

  criteria for worthwhile exploitation, but that was of no consequence since the

  computer programs responsible for surface analysis and evaluation weren't

  working.

  The programs to initiate surface activity did work, however, more or less, and

  Factory One, with all of its essential functions up and running to at least some

  degree, was duly built on a rocky shelf above an ice beach flanking an inlet of

  a shallow methane sea. The ship's master programs were copied across into the

  newly installed factory computers, which identified the commencement of work on

  Factory Two as their first assignment. Accordingly Factory One's Supervisor

  program signaled the ship's databank for a copy of the "How to Make a Factory"

  file, which included a set of subfiles on "How to Make the Machines Needed to

  Make a Factory," i.e., robots. And that was where everything really started to

  go wrong.

  The robots contained small internal processors that could be reprogramed via

  radiolink from the factory computers for each new task to be accomplished. This

  allowed the robots to proceed with their various jobs under autonomous local

  control and freed up the central computers for other work while they were

  waiting for the next "Done that—what do I do now?" signal. Hence many software

  mechanisms existed for initiating data transfers between the factory computers

  and the remote processors inside the robots.

  When the copying of the "How to Make a Factory" file from the ship to Factory

  One was attempted, the wrong software linkages were activated; instead of

  finding their way into the factory's central system, the subfiles containing the

  manufacturing information for the various robots were merely relayed through the

  factory and beamed out into the local memories of the respective robot types to

  which they pertained. No copies at all were retained in the factory databank.

  And even worse, the originals inside the ship managed to self-destruct in the

  process and were irretrievably erased. The only copies of the "How to Make a

  Fred-type Robot" subfile were the ones contained inside the Fred-types out on

  the surface. And the same was true for all the other types as well.

  So when the factory's Supervisor program ordered the Scheduler program to

  schedule more robots for manufacture, and the Scheduler lodged a request with

  the Databank Manager for the relevant subfiles, the Databank Manager found that

  it couldn't deliver. Neither could it obtain a recopy from the ship. The

  Databank Manager reported the problem to the Scheduler; the Scheduler complained

  to the Supervisor; the Supervisor blamed the Communications Manager; the

  Communications Manager demanded an explanation from the Message Handler; and

  after a lot of mutual electronic recriminations and accusations, the system

  logging and diagnostic programs determined that the missing subfiles had last

  been tracked streaming out through the transmission buffers on their way to the

  robots outside. Under a stem directive from the Supervisor, the Communications

  Manager selected a Fred from the first category of robots called for on the

  Scheduler's list, and beamed it a message telling it to send its subfile back

  again.

  But the Fred didn't have a complete copy of the subfile; its local memory simply

  hadn't been big enough to hold all of it. And for the same reason, none of the

  other Freds could return a full copy either. They had been sprayed in succession

  with the datastream like buckets being filled from a fire-hose, and all had

  ended up with different portions of the subfile; but they appeared to have

  preserved the whole subfile among them. So the Supervisor had to retrieve

  different pieces from different Freds to fit them together again in a way that

  made sense. And that was how it arrived at the version it eventually handed to

  the Scheduler for manufacture.

  Unfortunately, the instruction to store the information for future reference got

  lost somewhere, and for each batch of Freds the relevant "How to Make" subfile

  was promptly erased as soon as the Manufacturing Manager had finished with it.

  Hence when Factory One had spent some time producing parts for Factory Two and

  needed to expand its robot workforce to begin surveying sites for Factory Three,

  the Supervisor had to go through the whole rigmarole again. And the same process

  was necessary whenever a new run was scheduled to provide replacements for

  robots that had broken down or were wearing out.

  All of this took up excessive amounts of processor time, loaded up the

  communications channels, and was generally inefficient in the ways that cost

  accountants worry about. The alien programers had been suitably indoctrinated by

  the alien cost accountants who ran the business— as always—and had written the

  Supervisor as a flexible, self-modifying learning program that would detect such

  inefficiencies, grow unhappy about them, and seek ways to improve things. After

  a few trials, the Supervisor found that some of the Freds contained about half

  their respective subfiles, which meant that a complete copy could be obtained by

  interrogating just two individuals instead of many. Accordingly it made a note

  of such "matching pairs" and began selecting them as its source for repeat

  requests from the Scheduler, ignoring the others.

  Lost along with the original "How to Make a Fred" subfiles were the subsubfiles

  on "Programs to Write into a Fred to Start It Up after You've Made It." To make

  up for the deficiency, the Supervisor copied through to the Scheduler the full

  set of programs that it found already existing in the Freds selected to provide

  reproduction information, and these programs, of course, included the ones on

  how to make Freds. Thus the robots began coming off the line with one-half of

 
their "genetic" information automatically built in, and a cycle asserted itself

  whereby they in turn became the source of information to be recombined later for

  producing more Freds. The method worked, and the Supervisor never figured out

  that it could have saved itself a lot of trouble by storing the blueprints away

  once and for all in the factory databank.

  The program segments being recombined in this way frequently failed to copy

  faithfully, and the "genomes" formed from them were seldom identical, some

  having portions of code omitted while others had portions duplicated.

  Consequently Freds started taking on strange shapes and behaving in strange

  ways.

  Some didn't exhibit any behavior at all but simply fell over or failed during

  test, to be broken down into parts again and recycled. A lot were like that.

  Some, from the earlier phase, were genetically incomplete —"sterile" —and never

  called upon by the Supervisor to furnish reproductive data. They lasted until

  they broke down or wore out, and then became extinct.

  Some reproduced passively, i.e., by transmitting their half-subfiles to the

  factory when the Scheduler asked for them.

  A few, however, had inherited from the ship's software the program modules whose

  function was to lodge requests with the Scheduler to schedule more models of

  their own kind—program modules, moreover, which embodied a self-modifying

  priority structure capable of raising the urgency of their requests within the

  system until they were serviced. The robots in this category sought to reproduce

  actively: They behaved as if they experienced a compulsion to ensure that their

  half-subfiles were always included in the Scheduler's schedule of "Things to

  Make Next."

  So when Factory One switched over to mass-production mode, the robots competing

  for slots in its product list soon grabbed all of the available memory space and

  caused the factory to become dedicated to churning out nothing else. When

  Factory Two went into operation under control of programs copied from Factory

  One, the same thing happened there. And the same cycle would be propagated to

  Factory Three, construction of which had by that time begun.

  More factories appeared in a pattern spreading inland from the rocky coastal

  shelf. The instability inherent in the original parent software continued to