Code Of The Lifemaker

by Hogan, James

  manifest itself in the copies of copies of copies passed on to later

  generations, and the new factories, along with their mixed populations of robot

  progeny, diverged further in form and function.

  Material resources were scarce almost everywhere, which resulted in the

  emergence of competitive pressures that the alien system designers had never

  intended. The factory-robot communities that happened to include a balanced mix

  of surveyor, procurement, and scavenger robots with "appetites" appropriate to

  their factories' needs, and which enjoyed favorable sites on the surface,

  usually managed to survive if not flourish. Factory Ten, for example, occupied

  the center of an ancient meteorite crater twelve miles across, where the heat

  and shock of the impact had exposed metal-bearing bedrock from below the ice;

  Factory Thirteen established itself inside a deep fissure where the ice beneath

  was relatively thin, and was able to melt a shaft down to the denser core

  material; and Factory Fifteen resorted to nuclear transmutation processes to

  build heavier nuclei from lighter ones frozen in solution in the ice crust. But

  many were like Factory Nineteen, which began to take shape on an ill-chosen spot

  far out on a bleak ice field, and ground to a halt when its deep-drilling robots

  and transmutation reactors failed to function, and its supply of vital materials

  ran out.

  The scavenger and parts-salvaging robots assumed a crucial role in shaping the

  strange metabolism that was coming into being. Regardless of what the Schedulers

  in the various factories would have liked to see made, the only things that

  could be assembled readily were the ones for which parts were available, and

  that depended to a large degree on the ability of the scavengers to locate them,

  or alternatively to locate assemblies suitable for breaking down—"digesting"—and

  rebuilding into something useful. Factory Twenty-four was an extreme case.

  Unable to "metabolize" parts directly from any source of raw materials because

  of the complete failure of its materials-procurement workforce, it relied

  totally on its scavengers. Factory Thirty-two, on the other hand, could acquire

  raw materials but couldn't use them since it had been built without a processing

  facility at all. Its robots delivered instead to Forty-seven, which happened to

  produce parts for some of the scavengers being manufactured by Thirty-two, and

  the two factory-robot organisms managed to coexist happily in their bizarre form

  of symbiosis.

  The piles of assorted junk, which shouldn't have accumulated from the earlier

  phases of the process but had, were eaten up; the machines that broke down were

  eaten up; and the carcasses of defunct factories were eaten up. When those

  sources of materials had been exhausted, some of the machines began to eat each

  other.

  The scavengers had been designed, as they had to be, to discriminate between

  properly functioning machines and desirable products on the one hand and rejects

  in need of recycling on the other. However, as with everything else in the

  whole, messed-up project, this function worked well in some cases, not so well

  in others, and often not at all. Some of the models turned out to be as likely

  to attempt the dismantling of a live, walking-around Fred as of a dead,

  flat-on-its-back one. Many of the victims were indifferent to this kind of

  treatment and soon died out, but others succeeded in developing effective

  fight-or-flee responses to preserve themselves, thus marking the beginnings of

  specialized prey and predators in the form of "lithovores" and "artifactovores."

  This development was not always an advantage, especially when the loss of

  discrimination was total. Factory Fifty was consumed by its own offspring, who

  began dismantling it at its output end as soon as they came off the assembly

  line, and then proceeded proudly to deliver the pieces back to its input end.

  Its internal repair robots were unable to undo the undoings fast enough, and it

  ground to a halt to become plunder for marauders from Thirty-six and

  Fifty-three. The most successful factory-robot organisms protected themselves by

  evolving aggressive armies of "antibody" defenders, which would recognize their

  own factory and its "kind" and leave them alone, but attack and attempt to

  destroy any "foreign" models that ventured too close. This gradually became the

  dominant form of organism, usually associated with a distinct territory which

  its members cooperated in protecting collectively.

  By this time only a few holes in the ground remained at opposite ends of the

  rocky shelf to mark where Factories One and Two had once stood. They had failed

  to keep up with the times, and the area had become the domain of Factory

  Sixty-five. The only trace left of the searcher spacecraft was a long, rounded

  depression in the ice beach below, on the shore of the liquid methane sea.

  The alien engineers had designed the system to enjoy full planetary

  communications coverage by means of satellites and surface relays, but the idea

  hadn't worked too well since nothing had been put into orbit and surface relays

  tended not to last very long. This enabled some of the organisms without strong

  defenses to remain protected, for a while, from the more metal-hungry empires by

  sheer distance. But, to allow for communications blackouts and interference, the

  aliens had also provided a backup method of program and data exchange between

  robots and factories, which took the form of direct, physical, electrical

  interconnection. This was a much slower process than using radiolinks,

  naturally, since it required that the robots travel physically to the factories

  for reprograming and reporting, but in a self-sustaining operation far from home

  the method was a lot better than nothing. And it kept the accountants happy by

  protecting the return on the investment.

  With defects and deficiencies of every description appearing somewhere or other,

  it was inevitable that some of the organisms would exhibit partial or total

  communications breakdowns. Factory Seventy-three, built without radio

  facilities, was started up by programs carried overland from Sixty-six. None of

  its robots ever used anything but backup mode, and the factories that it spawned

  continued the tradition. But this very fact meant that their operating ranges

  were extended dramatically.

  So the "defect" turned out to be not so much of a defect after all. Foraging

  parties were able to roam farther afield, greatly enlarging their catchment

  areas, and they frequently picked up as prizes one or more of the territories

  previously protected by geographical remoteness. Furthermore, selective

  pressures steadily improved the autonomy of the robots that operated in this

  fashion. The autodirected types, relying on their comparatively small, local

  processors, tended to apply simple solutions to the problems they encountered,

  but their close-coupled mode of interaction with their environment meant that

  the solutions were applied quickly: They evolved efficient "reflexes." The

  teledirected types, by contrast, tied to the larger but remote central

  computers, were inclined to attempt more comprehens
ive and sophisticated

  solutions, but —as often as not—too late to do any good. Autodirection thus

  conferred a behavioral superiority and gradually asserted itself as the norm,

  while teledirection declined and survived only in a few isolated areas.

  The periodic instinct to communicate genetic half-subfiles back to their

  factories had long become a universal trait among the robots— there could be

  descendants only of ancestors who left descendants—and they responded to the

  decline of radio as a means of communication by evolving a compulsion to journey

  at intervals back to the places whence they had come, to return, as it were, to

  their "spawning grounds." But this method of reproduction had its problems and

  posed new challenges to the evolutionary process.

  The main problem was that an individual could deliver only half its genome to

  the factory, after which the Supervisor would have to store the information away

  until another robot of the same type as the first happened to show up with a

  matching half; only then could the Supervisor pass a complete copy to its

  Scheduler. If, as frequently happened, the Supervisor found itself saturated by

  a peak workload during the intervening period, it was quite likely to delete the

  half-subfile and allocate the memory space to other, more urgent things—bad news

  for the Fred that the data had come from, who would thus have enacted the whole

  reproductive ritual for nothing. The successful response to this problem came

  with the appearance of a new mode of genetic recombination, which, quite

  coincidentally, also provided the solution to an "information crisis" that had

  begun to restrict the pool of genetic variation available for competitive

  selection to draw on for further improvement.

  Some mutant forms of robot knew they were supposed to output their half-subfiles

  somewhere, but weren't all that sure, or perhaps weren't too particular, about

  what they were supposed to output it into. Anything with the right electrical

  connections and compatible internal software was good enough, which usually

  meant other robots of the same basic type. And since a robot that had completed

  its assigned tasks was in a receptive state to external reprograming, i.e.,

  ready for fresh input that would normally come from the factory system, an

  aspiring donor had little trouble in finding a cooperative acceptor, provided

  the approach was made at the right time. So to begin with, the roles adopted

  were largely a matter of circumstance and accidental temperament.

  Although the robots' local memories were becoming larger than those contained in

  their earlier ancestors, the operating programs were growing in size and

  complexity too, with the result that an acceptor still didn't possess enough

  free space to hold an entire "How to Make a Fred" subfile. The donor's half,

  therefore, could be accommodated only by overwriting some of the code already

  residing in the acceptor. How this was accomplished depended on the responses of

  the programs carried inside the various robot types.

  In some cases the incoming code from the donor was allowed to overwrite entire

  program modules inside the acceptor, with the total loss to the acceptor of the

  functions which those modules controlled. This was usually fatal, and no

  descendants came into being to repeat such mistakes. The successful alternative

  was to create space by trimming nonessential code from many modules, which

  tended to leave the acceptor robot with some degradation in performance—usually

  manifesting itself as a reduction in agility, dexterity, and defensive

  abilities— but at least still functioning. The sacrifice was only temporary

  since the acceptor robot would be reprogramed with replacement modules when it

  delivered its genetic package at the factory.

  But in return for these complications and superficial penalties came the immense

  benefit that the subfiles presented at the factories were complete ones—suitable

  for dispatch to the Schedulers without delay and the attendant risk of being

  deleted by overworked Supervisors. The new method thus solved the reliability

  problem that had plagued the formerly universal "asexual" mode of reproduction.

  The information crisis that it also solved had developed through the

  "inbreeding" caused by the various Supervisors having only the gene pools of

  their respective "tribes" available to work with, which made recombination

  difficult because of the restrictive rules imposed by the alien programers. But

  the robots swapping genes out on the surface were not always averse to

  adventuring beyond the tribal limits, knew nothing and cared less about

  programers' rules, since nothing approaching intelligence or awareness was

  operative yet in what was unfolding, and proceeded to bring half-subfiles

  together haphazardly in ways that the aliens' rules didn't permit and which the

  Supervisors would never have imagined. Most of the offspring resulting from

  these experiments didn't work and were scrapped before leaving the factories;

  but the ones that did radiated functionally outward in all directions to launch

  a whole new, qualitatively distinct phase of the evolutionary process.

  The demands of the two sexual roles reinforced minor initial physical

  differences and brought about a gradual polarization of behavioral traits. Since

  a female in a "pregnant" condition suffered the loss of some measure of

  self-sufficiency for the duration, her chances of delivering (literally!) were

  improved considerably if her mate happened to be of a disposition to stay around

  for a while and provide for the two of them generally, thus helping to protect

  their joint genetic investment. Selection tended, therefore, to favor the genes

  of this kind of male, and by the same token those of the females who mated

  preferentially with them. As a consequence a female trait emerged of being

  "choosy" in this respect, and in response the males evolved various repertoires

  of rituals, displays, and demonstrations to improve their eligibility.

  The population had thus come to exhibit genetic variability and recombination,

  competition, selection, and adaptation—all the essentials for continuing

  evolution. The form of life—for it was, wasn't it?—was admittedly somewhat

  strange by terrestrial standards, with the individuals that it comprised sharing

  common, external reproductive, digestive, and immune systems instead of

  separate, internal ones . . . and of course there were no chains of complicated

  carbon chemistry figuring anywhere in the scheme of things. ... But then, after

  all, what is there apart from chauvinism to say it shouldn't have been so?

  1

  KARL ZAMBENDORF STOOD GAZING DOWN OVER SEVENTH AVENUE from the window of his

  penthouse suite in the New York Hilton. He was a tall man in his early fifties,

  a little on the portly side but with an erect and imposing bearing, graying hair

  worn collar-length and flowing, bright, piercing eyes, and hawklike features

  rendered biblically patriarchal by a pointed beard that he bleached white for

  effect. Although the time was late in the morning, Zambendorf's breakfast tray

  on the side table beside the window had only recently been discarded, and he was

&
nbsp; still in his shirt-sleeves from sleeping in after his team's late-night return

  from its just completed Argentina tour.

  A prominent Argentine news magazine had featured him as THE AUSTRIAN

  MIRACLE-WORKER on its cover for the previous week's issue, and the hostess of

  one of the major talk shows on Buenos Aires TV had introduced him as "Perhaps

  one of the most baffling men of the twenty-first century, the scientifically

  authenticated superpsychic ..." Thus had Latin America greeted the man who was

  already a media sensation across the northern continent and Western Europe, and

  whose ability to read minds, foretell the future, influence distant events, and

  divine information inaccessible to the human senses had been proved, the public

  was assured, by repeated tests to be beyond the power of science to explain.

  "Karl, I don't like it," Otto Abaquaan said from behind him. Zam-bendorf pursed

  his lips and whistled silently to himself while he waited for Abaquaan to

  continue. The exchange had become a ritual over the years they had worked

  together. Abaquaan would voice all the reasons why they shouldn't get involved

  and couldn't afford the risks, and Zam-bendorf would explain all the reasons why

  they didn't have any choice. Abaquaan would then reconsider, and eventually,

  grudgingly, he would concede. Having disposed of the academic issues, they would

  then proceed somehow to resolve the crisis. It happened that way about once a

  week. Abaquaan went on, "We'd be out of our minds to get mixed up in it. The

  whole situation would involve too much of the wrong kind of exposure. We don't

  need risks like that."

  Zambendorf turned away from the window and thrust out his chin. "It was reported

  as if it were our idea in the first place, and it received a lot of news

  coverage," he said. "We can't afford to be seen to back down now. On top of

  that, it would destroy our credibility not only with a lot of the public, but

  with GSEC . . . and GSEC can do us a lot of good, Otto. So the situation didn't

  work out as we expected. What's new? We're stuck with it, but we can handle it."

  Otto Abaquaan, a handsomely lean and swarthy Armenian with black hair, a droopy

  mustache, and deep brown, liquid eyes, rubbed his nose with a knuckle while he

  considered the statement, then shook his head and sighed. "Why the hell did you