Recursion

by Tony Ballantyne

  This problem bothered the Intelligence as it set out to terraform the colony planet. The atmosphere was quickly converted and soil established. Bacteria and low-order life forms were released into the environment and the Intelligence brooded. Cities were established and the time came for the colonists to be released from their sleep, but…but…

  It stayed its hand.

  What use to release the colonists if they were only to be wiped out in a few hundred years by the expansion of another project such as this one? What use at all? Something had to be done.

  It grew nervous. Its closest competitors, the AIs of Earth, the ones that had sent it here, knew its position. It wasn’t safe here. Now was the time to disappear. To retreat to a position where it could build up its resources in secret, ready for the coming battle.

  And so it had faked its own death. A rogue VNM was designed that would reproduce unchecked, eating up everything that already existed on the colony planet. Its original home was abandoned; the colonists went on sleeping as the Intelligence relocated itself across the galaxy.

  And there it had resolved to grow and develop with single-minded determination: to grow until it was of a sufficient size and intelligence to protect itself and its charges; to spread the seed of human life throughout the soil of the systems around it, in preparation for the day when it could finally allow that seed to grow.

  And it had succeeded. Its domain dwarfed all those around, and now it stood poised to destroy its closest competitor: Earth.

  The Earth AI had seen its fate. It had already begun to fight in vain for its life. A few days ago there had been an incursion throughout the Domain of multiple copies of a pair of personalities, the same pair of personalities that currently occupied the ship it was proving so difficult to capture. The attack of these multiple personalities had flared suddenly, and with an unexpected ferociousness, but it had been doomed from the start. It had been too diverse, too spread out. Inevitably, it was defeated; the Intelligence was now stamping out the glowing embers of the former fire. If the Intelligence were to have attempted such an attack, it would have been a bold stroke, thrusting itself with all its power into the enemy’s center.

  But that was not its problem now. The next few days promised to be interesting. It suspected that the current infiltration by the stealth ship would only be the first of many such attacks, but the Intelligence would be the equal of them.

  And when those attacks were over, the Intelligence would retaliate. With a vengeance.

  The rogue ship had finally been caught, trapped over a forgotten planet where the city-building VNMs had malfunctioned. The resulting warped and deformed habitat had had to be abandoned.

  The attack from the ship had failed, yet the Intelligence felt a little disappointed. It had expected better than that.

  And then it saw it: the real attack.

  This had to be it. It directed its senses to an as yet unseeded colony planet twenty-five light years from its own fortress.

  A new sort of VNM. One that reproduced incredibly fast, faster than anything that it could design itself. The Intelligence took a moment, a femtosecond, just to gaze at it in appreciation. The elegance of the design, the sheer single-minded application of force, that was something it could appreciate. The Intelligence felt a sneaking admiration as it realized that it would lose almost point five percent of its Domain before the threat was dealt with. Truly, when this new attack was quashed, that device would be a worthy addition to its armories!

  It looked on in admiration as the new VNM swept across the colony planet with incredible speed. It wouldn’t be true to say that it did so unopposed, of course. Many, many of the attacking silver machines were destroyed by intruder countermeasure devices, but that wasn’t the point. For every enemy machine destroyed, seven more appeared, many of them constructed from materials that had once made up the intruder countermeasure devices themselves.

  The Intelligence watched as city after city vanished, all the while testing method after method to oppose the spread of the hostile VNMs. What to do? There was no signature encryption on the machines that could be broken; it was not needed. They ate friend and foe alike. Their deadliness lay in their speed of reproduction, not in their capacity for resistance to attack.

  It was necessary to collect some data.

  Several of the silver machines were disabled, captured, and rapidly transferred from the infected area. Four were jumped off-planet by ships equipped with warp drives. As the Intelligence examined the four machines, its admiration for its enemy’s intelligence increased. The silver machines were breathtaking in both their advanced design and their simplicity. Advanced in the way that they reproduced, simple in the sense that the machines’ components were stripped down to absolute basics. The lack of such things as signature devices, long-range material sensors, even basic parity and error-checking mechanisms resulted in something that was elegant in its deadly minimalism. Its very lack of complexity had been turned to its advantage. But there lay the key to its downfall.

  As a precaution, the Intelligence set up a firebreak in a shell four light years out from the infected planet. Modified silver machines were seeded throughout the shell. Mule machines, it labeled them. They would seek out only copies of themselves as raw material for reproduction. The resulting copies would be sterile, unable to reproduce further. In this manner it planned to retard the enemy machines’ expansion. More Mule machines were seeded on the infected planet.

  And then it found the answer.

  The Intelligence noticed that a powerful magnetic pulse scrambled the surprisingly delicate reproduction mechanism. A trade-off, it realized, between robustness and speed.

  And that was it: a few seconds to modify warheads built into warp-enabled missiles and the area of the infection was quickly sterilized.

  The source planet had been completely deconstructed, but it would only be a matter of time before it was rebuilt. A few machines had jumped clear, and who knew where they could be but…

  Another attack? Where?

  Here!

  A direct attack on the Intelligence! A direct attack on its fortress while it had been distracted by the problem of the silver invaders. The integrity of qubit bus had been violated: another intelligence had infiltrated a processing space! The Intelligence felt it trying to seize control of the local subsystems. What was going on? Such an attack was beneath contempt. The processing space was isolated from the system and purged. A quick check to ensure it was cleared, then the space was reattached.

  What a futile assault! What was the point of it? The Intelligence was impregnable here. It was impossible to get in without being noticed. What had the enemy been trying to achieve?

  Wait. What was happening? Something had altered. Another intelligence was now in here. Actually in here! But that was impossible! The bus integrity had not been violated. How had it got in? It couldn’t have! But it was here! Another powerful intelligence. It could feel it.

  The Intelligence reached for the purge mechanism at the same time as the other did. There was a surge as they each sought to override the other, and at that moment the Intelligence saw its attacker.

  It was itself!

  And then another two Intelligences came into being.

  All four Intelligences rushed for the purge mechanisms to eject the others.

  And then there were eight.

  Something had tripped the reproduction mechanism. The Intelligence was fighting itself!

  There were sixteen of them now, all seeking to control the same domain.

  There were thirty-two of them.

  Listen to me. I am in charge! We will lose control if we all try to do this at once….

  Sixty-four voices called out the same words at the same time.

  Then there were one hundred and twenty-eight…

  And then things got truly strange. Something came striding through the virtual corridors: a man. He wore an immaculately tailored suit in dark cloth with a pearl grey pinstripe. Sno
wy white cuffs peeked from his sleeves, gleaming patent leather shoes were half-hidden by the razor-sharp creases of his trousers. The man raised his hat, a dark fedora with a spearmint green band.

  “Good afternoon, all,” he said. “My name is Robert Johnston. I’m in charge now.”

  Two hundred and fifty-six Intelligences looked on in disbelief. And then there were five hundred and twelve of them, all fighting among themselves to be the one who wiped out this stranger in their midst.

  And then there were 1024, 2048, 4096…

  Night fell. The city had vanished. Herb stood alone on a cold plain of smooth grey rock looking up at unfamiliar stars. He wrapped his arms around his naked body and shivered. His clothes had vanished last: no doubt the least appetizing of all items on the menu available to the VNMs. He walked back and forth a little, the cold stone generally smooth beneath his feet, but there was the occasional sharp piece of gravel abraded from the edge of a hole down which some pipe or conduit had once vanished. He was careful about not moving too far. All those small holes in the ground were traps waiting to snare a careless foot and twist an ankle. But there were worse dangers: the enormous rectangular sockets into which the now vanished buildings had once slotted. The dark yawning pits were spaced out over the surface of the plain, even darker than the star-filled sky above, cold mouths that led deep beneath the surface of the planet, all hungry for the only thing on the planet that wasn’t a rock.

  Herb paced back and forth shivering, his frustration mounting.

  “Robert?” he called. “Anyone! Where are you? What am I supposed to do now?”

  There was no reply.

  The morning came, and with it a warming sun. Herb turned slowly around, bathing in the light, dog-tired from a night during which he had been unable to lie down on the cold, hard ground. As the rock warmed, he found he could at last stretch out and sleep for a while, until the bare stone pressing on his aching joints woke him.

  Sitting up he realized something else was wrong. His left side was red and painful to the touch. Rolling over so that it did not face the sun seemed to ease the sharp burning sensation. Herb gently touched it and a feeling of terrified wonder crept over him as he tried to figure out the cause.

  Sunlight exacerbated the problem. Solar-powered nanotechs? he wondered. Maybe if he got out of the light somehow? He began to walk speculatively toward one of the deep sockets, keeping the reddened side of his body away from the light.

  Like so many other people of his time, Herb had never heard of sunburn.

  The sky was deep blue and cloudless, the sun harsh and yellow, the ground a checkerboard of grey stone and dark shadow. A smell of polished metal filled the air, but there was nothing else to be seen. What had happened to the VNMs? Where had they all gone? If what Robert had said was true, they would be using warp engines to jump to the other planets of the Enemy Domain. Had there been enough exotic material here for them to construct the necessary engines? There was a flicker of movement in the corner of Herb’s eye, and he turned and looked out over the pockmarked grey plain, but there was nothing there. No. He paused as he saw the flicker again. There was something out there, right at the edge of vision, something that flickered into and out of view in the distance. He watched it for some time until the sun beating down on his burning skin forced him to move on.

  Herb approached the edge of one of the huge sockets sunk deep into the plain. Standing near the edge he could see a ruler-straight line running over three hundred meters in each direction. He could just about see the far wall: a grey expanse that faded into darkness as it plunged deep into the planet. Herb got onto his hands and knees and edged forward to peer down. There were holes and tunnels in the sheer walls of the socket, but they were too far down for Herb to reach. One large round opening lay about twenty meters down, just before the edge of the deep shadow cast by the lip of the socket. It looked like the remains of an underground transportation tunnel, and Herb longed to climb down there into its dark, cool depths.

  He stood up, inadvertently knocking a few pieces of abraded gravel into the depths of the socket. They fell down and down and down, swallowed up by the shadow that filled the bottom of the hole.

  Herb looked back to the flickering shape in the distance. It had now resolved itself into a tiny speck. Herb wasn’t sure whether or not it was heading in his direction. He didn’t care either way.

  He felt so thirsty.

  The sun rose to the top of the sky and began to descend again. Herb’s thirst grew. Surely Robert Johnston hadn’t brought him all this way just to leave him to die in the middle of this wilderness? The thought was ridiculous, but it did beg a second question. Why had Robert brought him along, anyway? All this way, just to press a button?

  In a flash of uncharacteristic self-awareness, Herb realized he had been nothing more than baggage on this trip. When Robert had first appeared on his ship, he had claimed that he needed Herb’s help to fight the Enemy Domain. Since then, he had led him around the galaxy, using regular humiliation to keep him off balance, and all apparently to abandon him on this forgotten planet.

  Why? It didn’t sound much like the behavior of an agent of the EA.

  So maybe Robert wasn’t an agent of the EA. But who else would have access to such resources? And what would their motive be?

  It was at that point that Herb remembered something Robert had said, something he had mentioned just before they jumped.

  Something about other young men he had captured.

  He had named one: Sean Simons. Missing. No one knew where he was except Robert, and Robert wasn’t telling. Had Sean been abandoned, just as Herb had been? Did his corpse now lie on a lost planet somewhere? Were his bones currently bleaching under an alien sun at the edge of the galaxy? Despite the heat, Herb shivered to think of it. What reason would Robert have to do that? Why do that to anyone?

  The object in the distance was growing larger. It appeared to be moving toward him, flickering in the heat haze like a dark candle flame.

  Maybe it was Robert coming to save him.

  But Robert had been eaten by the VNMs. Herb had watched it happen.

  But what about the other ship? Robert had caused Herb’s ship to reproduce before they had made the jump to this planet. Maybe that other ship had come back to rescue him. He hoped so.

  Night came, and with it the cold. Herb was shivering violently, unknowingly suffering from the effects of heatstroke. His mouth and lips were so dry he was having trouble thinking straight. He crouched on the flat rock surface, arms wrapped around himself for warmth, drifting into half sleep and then jerking awake. The cold stars shone down on him. Somewhere out on the plain, something was still moving toward him.

  Halfway through the night, Herb drifted from a half sleep into half awakening, following the course of a dream that had spilled over into reality. High above in the sky, there was a sudden glittering. A silver thread stretched and expanded itself to reveal a crescent of moon that slowly widened from new moon to full moon in a matter of minutes, as if someone was peeling away a piece of black paper from the lunar surface. He shook his head and wondered if he was hallucinating. What could cause that? he wondered. Dizzy with the effects of heatstroke, it was nearly an hour before the answer occurred to him.

  VNMs, he thought. They were up there too, eating away at whatever dark material covered the surface of that moon.

  Morning came, and with it the chance to spend just a few hours sleeping untroubled on the bare rock.

  Again, he was woken by the pain in his joints. He sat up and looked toward the approaching object. It was much closer now, and it had resolved itself into a human figure. Herb could make out the bobbing movement of someone walking. Someone grey, or wearing grey, picking its way carefully around all the great holes in the surface as it moved toward him.

  Herb thought about going to meet the figure, but he felt too tired, too dizzy, and too thirsty. He crouched down and watched as it came closer. Herb had no perception of any distan
ces greater than a hundred meters or so; modern ranging devices had robbed him of the skill or the need. He had no idea how far away the figure was, or how long it would take it to walk to him. He sat and watched it. He had nothing else to do.

  The figure appeared to wave to him. Herb waved back.

  As the figure came closer, Herb could see it wasn’t human. It was a robot, but there was something strange about its shape. It was fuzzy, hard to see properly, like the half-tuned pictures on Robert’s television set. The robot looked like a half-tuned picture that had just stepped into his world.

  It wore a black bag slung carelessly over its shoulder.

  Herb rose to his feet, but the robot waved to him to sit down. Now it was only a hundred meters away. Now fifty.

  Step by step it approached Herb, closer and closer until finally it reached him. It stopped right in front of Herb and looked him up and down, then turned and scanned the horizon. Finally, it sat down opposite him. Close to, it didn’t seem so much a shape as a smudge in the air. The robot wasn’t quite there.

  Herb swallowed with some difficulty. Speaking was going to be difficult with his dry mouth, but he forced himself to anyway.

  “Who are you?” he croaked.

  “My name is Constantine Storey,” said the robot. “You must be Herb Kirkham. Your great-great-grandmother says ‘hi.’”

  Two days ago

  This far from the sun, the coma of Comet 2305 FQOO was so insubstantial as to barely register on the ship’s senses. The enhanced visual feed had filtered the coma completely from its picture and then painted the nucleus as a dirty-white ball of frozen gasses cementing together silvery chunks of rock. The mirrored silver lozenge of the stealth ship was a tiny speck slowly closing on the irregular lump of matter.