Smallworld

by Dominic Green

  Magus frowned sulkily. “They are not Von Neumann devices,” he complained. “But I will delay activation. The machines will be unloaded and left in a standby state.”

  “That, at least, is something,” said the Anchorite. “Thank you.”

  He nodded at Magus and at Magus’s father, and departed.

  “Gus,” said Gus’s father, “you don’t want to needle the hermit so.”

  “What? Uncle Anchorite? He is a fluffy pussy cat of immense proportions.”

  “That man,” said Reborn-in-Jesus senior, “may have been an uncle to you all when you were children; but he came here because he had nowhere else to go, and you are not a child any more. I’ve no idea what terrible things he did before he came here, but I know he’s committed iniquities since. The South End Yard is full of people who came to Mount Ararat thinking they’d run things other than in the way the hermit wanted them. Don’t rile him, son. You may think he’s domesticated, but mark my words, he’ll kill you and every living person on this planet if he once thinks his space is being invaded.”

  With a final warning stare, Reborn-in-Jesus senior turned on his heel and walked back down the ramp into the middle of his family and a chorus of “WHATCHA GET, DADDY? WHATCHA GET? WHATCHA GET? WHATCHA GET?”

  In the charcoal glow of Ararat night, with the A Ring hanging on the south horizon, cut off by the terminator in mid-orbit like a sabre blade, and the sky spangled with an embarrassment of stars, the two Von Neumann units stood alien and illegal in the craters they had made in the soil when unloaded.

  Suddenly, abruptly, a cowling motored back on the top of the HiveMind1000, and an antenna unfolded quickly enough to spear insects out of the air, spreading itself swiftly into a dandelion clock of sensors that rippled in the radiophonic breeze. A similar opening gaped in the top of the GreenQueen, extruding a laser sampler that span round in dangerous abandon, firing invisible bursts of coherent x-rays up into the A Ring, and observing the resultant twinkles of vapourising rock and ice, classifying them spectrally through a single coaxially-mounted telescope.

  Nanobot hoppers opened in the HM1000, and a grey motile sludge began pouring from its innards, detouring around commercially inviable rocks, intelligent slime swarming in the direction of the South End. The GreenQueen, meanwhile, disgorged a multiheaded tube resembling a fungal sporangium, ranged it at the stars, and began coughing out tiny payloads high into the sky, each one glowing with the speed of its ascent before it even started to put out the warm laval glow of plasmadrive. Before long, the sky was filled with incandescent teardrops, and the earth was home to a river flowing uphill in the direction of the South End. A goat, strayed far from pasture, stood bleating as the nanostream engulfed the rock it stood on. The beast had been eating the black mutant roses from the South End Yard, which put roots down into radioactive bedrock. It had unstable transuranic particles burning out gamma into its gut, producing huge tumours that would have killed it eventually. The antenna assembly rustled as it sensed the slight local spike in radioactivity and ordered the nanostream to the attack. The goat bleated helplessly as the grey fluid surged up its flanks, producing tiny sparks of waste heat as individual workers tunnelled into its flesh, opening holes for their brood fellows to gain access. The goat employed all the tactics in its artiodactyl arsenal, trying to run, jump, kick, and bite, but bit nothing, slipped wherever it put its foot, kicked as if in quicksand. Within a minute, the grey liquid was draining back out of the deep holes bored in the animal’s flanks, leaving the tumours half uneaten, having taken only the cancer’s cause. The nanostream surged off urgently towards the South End, sending a small part of itself back towards the Hive Mind with the precious particles it had harvested. The goat, shivering, bleeding heavily from internal injury, began to limp dazed in the direction of home.

  “MOM! THERE’S A DEAD GOAT ON THE PORCH!”

  Mom, half asleep and cocooned in shawls, stared out bleary-eyed. Goats were expensive, dead goats doubly so.

  “Looks like it got et by a Neutroniosaurus,” said Day-of-Creation, marvelling. Shun-Company inspected the carcass critically. The Neutroniosaurus was an indeterminately-legged, fallout-breathing smallchildivore created by Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus to dissuade his family from straying out after dark near the South End Chasm. It ate orphans for preference, though it was not above taking a toe or two, or a leg, or sometimes a particularly knobbly knee from children who had mommies and daddies.

  “No Neutroniosaurus,” said Shun-Company, “did that.”

  “Why, mommy?” said little Measure, holding on to her mother’s leg. “Why? Why? Why?”

  “Because of the distinctive jagged bite of a Neutroniosaurus,” said Shun-Company. “And because Y has a long tail.”

  “Why does Y have a long tail, mommy?”

  Unity, tall, slender, impossibly long-legged, turned up her nose at the carcass. “That’s not magpies nor hyraxes.”

  “It’s the Devil, mommy! The Devil did it!”

  Shun-Company shook her head. “It’s not Devil-work. The Devil doesn’t bother itself with goats, and the Devil cuts clean. This looks almost like the poor bleater was held down while acid was poured over it. Ate right into its rumen, look.”

  “Can we eat it now it’s dead, mommy? We always eat the dead ones. Can we, can we, can we?”

  Shun-Company drew her shawl about herself and looked out at a sky that was suddenly, unaccountably raining glistering golden teardrops spiralling round the world into the South End.

  “I don’t think it’s going to be safe to eat this one, precious.”

  “They’ve turned themselves on.” Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus sat at the head of the dining table the family had saved up for, made of real wood from Earth that had got to the 23 Kranii system before the light from the death of Christ.

  “They’re still self-aware,” said the Anchorite, seated at the other end of the table, where Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus usually sat. “Independent thought processing downgraded, maybe, but they can turn themselves on and off. That in itself is a violation of the anti-AI laws. If we’re caught in possession of them, we’ll be in more shit than they can spread over our South Pole in a lifetime.”

  “It’s not shit,” said Magus uncomfortably from halfway down the table. “It’s a complex highly nutritious mulch of polypeptides, nitrates and soil salts necessary for a growing plant.”

  “It’s brown and it smells like shit,” growled the Anchorite. “It’s shit.”

  “You’ve been to the South End?” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “Wasn’t that dangerous?”

  “Very,” said the Anchorite. “The highly nutritious mulch of polypeptides is now so deep out there in places a man can’t move in it. I had to take a bath when I got home! A bath!”

  Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus and his son looked at one another.

  “I own a bath,” said the Anchorite, in tones daring them to disagree.

  Magus cleared his throat awkwardly. “Uh, there’s been no C-of-G shift.”

  “There’s a crack in the earth all the way down the Meridian Field already,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “And if you’d troubled to get up early and help your father with the harvesting, you’d know that. If it propagates any further it’ll come clean through this room, and then we’ll have a hell of a draught in here.”

  “There have been rockfalls,” said the Anchorite, “all the way around the Chasm. Mainly on the South Wall, but doing damage enough on the North, where I need hardly remind you I live. We must shut these machines down.”

  “What power source do they use?” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.

  “Normally fusion,” said the Anchorite. “Though they’ll take fissionables at a pinch, and they can black their skins to collect solar energy. Anywhere there’s deuterium, sunlight or uranium, they can survive and make little copies of themselves. And there’s all three here. And,” he said, wagging a finger at Magus and his father, “the human body contains an average of two grammes of deuterium.”

  “These two mach
ines have had their self-replication functions disabled,” said Magus hotly.

  “Yes, just like they’ve had their standby functions disabled. But he’s right,” said the Anchorite. “If they’d been fully functional VN units, they’d have been nose to tail all down the Saddle by now. As it is, there’s still just the two of them, plus a big pile of transuranic ingots, neatly sorted by element and labelled. Piled outside your ship ready for loading. Though they haven’t touched the ship. Probably didn’t taste too good,” he said archly.

  “So there’s less danger, then,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “Than from a working VN unit, I mean.”

  “In the short term. But whoever decided to frig these things’ programming and demote them to upmarket mining machinery forgot that a non-self-reliant machine can’t make decisions on its own. They’ll continue until every last speck of actinium and californium is eaten out of this planet and replaced with crust which is a kilometre deep, brown, and highly nutritious.”

  “The mote,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus in panic. “Could they eat down to the mote?”

  “No.” The Anchorite shook his head. “The mote’s made of neutronium overlaid with highly compressed crystalline iron. They’ll be neither programmed nor equipped to mine neutronium, and iron won’t interest them. Too commonplace.”

  “The ship,” said Magus suddenly.

  The Anchorite glared at Magus for daring to interrupt.

  “Why haven’t they eaten into the ship?” continued Magus. “It’s full of transuranics. They’re in the circuitry, in the FTL unit, alloyed into the hull, everywhere. And yet the nanos from the HiveMind haven’t touched it.”

  “They have some conscience programming, at least,” said the Anchorite. “They wouldn’t attack me either. I was stood in the middle of a stream of them. They tickled my ankles. Occasionally, they nip. Testing my DNA, you see. They recognize human genetic material and avoid it. But when machines can make other machines, and if they’re clever enough, they can figure out that the conscience factor is holding their creations back, and design it out of them. And even if that HiveMind can’t make copies of itself, it can make all the nanominers it wants. There’s a big grey river of them stretching from the Saddle right to the walls of the South End Yard, and you can’t tell me all of those fit into the box they came in.”

  “Then how are we going to get rid of them?”

  “Why don’t I just lift the HiveMind back into the cargo bay?” said Magus innocently.

  The Anchorite shook his head. “The system has to be shut down gracefully. If you cut off the queen unit, it still leaves the nanos. Granted, no more nanos will get made, but it also removes the nanos’ guiding intelligence. Individually, being the size of a pinhead, they aren’t too bright, which means they tend to carry on doing what they were originally told to, and when Ararat runs out of the ores they were first programmed to fetch, they might indeed then switch to a lower-grade metal, like iron.” He polished the seat with his backside uncomfortably. “Which the human body contains around half a kilo of. No, young Magus, the best thing you can do is draft a letter to the folks you got these units off, and inform them there will be no payment unless they get a maintenance engineer down here stat. How much did you pay them?”

  Magus brightened. “Ah! That’s the clever part.”

  The Anchorite’s every hair bristled. “In what way?”

  “I paid nothing. I simply accepted their terms of seventy-five per cent of crop yield for the next fifty years.”

  The Anchorite stared. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus’s eyes turned circles in his head.

  “You did WHAT?”

  “Be reasonable, pops, the GreenQueen is certain to increase yields tenfold, and we’ll be richer than a man refused entry to heaven if the HiveMind comes through. I was going to get around to telling you, only—”

  “Who were these people?” said the Anchorite.

  “Well,” said Magus, his smile finally beginning to evaporate under oxyacetylene glares from his two seniors, “just people, I guess.”

  “Just people, as opposed to reputable licensed taxpaying businessmen,” said the Anchorite. “Did they have an office?”

  “Yes,” said Magus.

  “How much plate glass did this office have? Did it have a central atrium and cool tinkling fountains at all? How attractive was the receptionist?”

  “Uh, he wasn’t very,” said Magus. “More heavily-armed than attractive. It was more of a sort of temporary affair, a sort of set of pressurized shacks near the landing field on Farquahar’s World. They had these two machines going cheap, remaindered show stock from a receiver’s closing down sale, slightly damaged, recently superceded by newer models—”

  “Let me stop you there,” said the Anchorite. “I believe you have painted a full and colourful picture.”

  “I doubt very much whether those shacks will still be there,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus gloomily.

  The Anchorite shook his head. “I am actually quite certain they will, for the simple reason that our salesmen have not yet been paid. I also imagine that their retaliation for not being paid will not be encumbered by the pedestrian confines of the law. Send your letter; your father and I will deal with these machines in the interim.”

  “How do you propose,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, “to do that? Those units are designed to work continuously for centuries with one half of them in sunshine fit to melt lead, the other half in shadow fit to freeze mercury. Even your Devil will not raise a scratch on them, I fancy.”

  “I’m afraid there is only one solution,” said the Anchorite grimly. “Nuclear annihilation. We will have to rig up a small nuclear device and detonate it directly between the two units.”

  “But where would we find such a thing?” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus.

  “I’m sure I have one about the place somewhere,” said the Anchorite. “I apologize in advance for the fallout. There are ways to minimize it. It is bound, however, to have an effect on your crop yields, maybe even the health of your family. I suggest you begin digging a shelter deep, deep underground. Set your boys to it.”

  Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus nodded like a living statue. Across the room, the door suddenly CLUNKed as if an ear pressed against it with the force of an octopus sucker had suddenly been released.

  At that very moment, Shun-Company entered with a tray of Real Tea. Mount Ararat now had its own grove of tea bushes, though Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus suspected Magus had been sold some laboratory’s beta version—the tea tasted sweet, smelt of honey, and contained enough caffeine, nicotine, taurine, and saccharides to make it dangerous to apply to children, possibly even externally. The bushes, and the tea made from them, glowed gently in the dark, and Shun-Company turned down the light slowly to get the full effect. The glass mugs luminesced green as witches’ faces.

  “Wife,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, “we have decided to detonate a nuclear weapon at the end of the South Field. Tell Testament and Apostle to get that radiation shielding Gus brought securely welded into place all round the panic cellar, clear the hatches, and tell the children to move their beds below.”

  Shun-Company nodded.

  Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus looked at his writing desk and frowned. “Where is my paperweight? The sample of pitchblende ore we got from our first survey?”

  Shun-Company’s eyes remained downcast. “I believe the boys were using it for some scientific purpose.”

  “Well, as long as they bring it back.” He became suddenly suspicious. “What are you all doing in there? I hear you whispering as if at some great secret. Have I forgotten my birthday again?”

  “Are you aware, husband,” said Shun-Company, “that gorillas eat their own excrement?”

  Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus’s frown deepened. “No,” he said.

  “But only once,” advised Shun-Company.

  “I see,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, in a way that made it quite plain that he did not.

  “Mrs. Reborn-in-Jesus,” said the Anchorite gently, “there are no
gorillas on Mount Ararat.”

  Shun-Company nodded. “They would be terrible pests, and they are unclean animals. It would be necessary to exterminate them.”

  With that, she swept from the room, as unobtrusive as a total vacuum. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus exchanged glances with the Anchorite; both men shrugged.

  “Now,” said the Anchorite, “to the business of nuking your own farmland.”

  The nuclear device was heavy, and required both men to heave it onto the back of Carries-the-Saviour, Ararat’s only ass, whose every leg bowed under the load. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus spoke gently to the ass, and reasoned with her, and arrived at a negotiated compromise amenable to both parties whereby Carries-the-Saviour staggered onward under the burden, and Reborn-in-Jesus walked ahead of her holding carrots which, occasionally, he allowed Carries-the-Saviour to catch up to. It had been necessary to use Carries-the-Saviour, despite her advancing years, as the expensive Percheron 500 had broken down, its magnetohydrodynamic motor refusing to fire.