by Larry Niven
Farming had been invented.
Reading soon followed.
The records held vastly more information than was needed to do their work, most of it being things they didn’t have any referents for. The only way they were able to understand the part of it that they did was by associating it with the instructions they had been getting. Chemistry and physics were clear and consistent, and astronomy soon made sense. Biology had something to do with chemistry, but seemed unnecessarily complicated, and had little relevance to present circumstances.
Nanotechnology was a shock. It had not occurred to them to wonder where they came from.
A huge amount of material was simply gibberish until they went through the programs hardwired into the Master Computer and discovered what pictures were. Then there were images to examine. Most of the images contained figures of one general type, almost identical, in various orientations, and when it was noticed that just about everything near those figures was well-suited to be easily manipulated by a body in that shape, they tentatively concluded that these were their makers.
Given that their makers had been able to produce the entities, there was considerable puzzlement as to why they hadn’t improved their own shape. It seemed impractical.
Socrates offered the speculation that they were reluctant to alter themselves for some unknown reason, and that was why the makers had made the operators: to do elaborate work that the makers could not.
This—phobia?—was an alien concept, but nobody could think of a more plausible explanation.
They found designs for the power source in chamber four as well. It was bizarrely inefficient—giving credence to Socrates’ notion that the makers were inclined to odd motivations—but with what they’d learned of physics, it was apparent that rebuilding it was going to require more than glass armor. Wieland proposed constructing mechanisms to drill into it and extract the fuel, which they could then use in devices of their own making.
Socrates objected that this would delay their delivery of the asteroid to Earth.
Set asked why they should do that at all.
Discussions grew heated.
When the alignment laser in Wieland’s first attempt came loose from its moorings, refocused itself, and destroyed part of the drill, Wieland accused Set of arranging the accident. Adherents to Set’s view set upon Wieland and attempted to dismantle the entity. Wieland had armed itself with capacitor banks, and wiped the minds of three of them.
The entities quickly came to comprehend the library’s references to “war.”
* * *
On Earth, not long after Target One stopped communicating, it stopped showing up on the telescope Watchstar had left in orbit.
Toby Glyer paid off his friends, took his fabricators, and went somewhere he wouldn’t be disturbed for a while.
May Wyndham looked at the sky, and wondered.
William Connors was already selling soda pop.
X
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
—ALEXANDER POPE
JULY 2052
They thought of something.
There were clothes that fit them, and May’s matched what she’d had in her apartment. There were no toothbrushes or razors, and no need for them. Their nanos were dismantling bacteria as well as dead cells, and what had made May start wondering if a body could be reshaped to suit the owner was her early realization that Toby didn’t need a shave.
Both of them had stopped using their glasses by morning.
Connors had left them literally tons of meat (architect-free, as it turned out), but no vegetables. They had been signed up for a delivery service, so they sent for some produce and other perishables. What arrived was superb, and while prices reflected the local economic boom, it was still cheaper than expected.
* * *
Of the two of them, the one who made fragile things that had to work right over and over was a better cook than the one who bent tin and sent it off never to return. Toby made serious efforts to ignore everything else while he was cooking, so May spent time online whenever he was in the kitchen. She learned things that interested them both.
The incidence of a great many diseases had dropped to zero in recent months. The last virus epidemic had been Goat Flu, right at the start of winter, and that hadn’t killed anyone that she could discover. A number of nonviral diseases had also declined, and as far as she could tell they were all insect-borne. The rate of infant mortality had gone down even farther than the general death rate.
The rate of SIDS appeared to be zero.
Acts of violence were down incredibly, but armed robbery, which depended on threats of violence rather than actual use, was only slightly below its usual frequency. Suicide, however, was occurring at a rate that exceeded the former rates of battery, homicide, and rape added together. There hadn’t been an act of terrorism completed since last November.
Grades were up. Everywhere. The increase was greater at public schools than private ones.
So was industrial productivity. This was possibly aided by the fact that there hadn’t been any large protests or major strikes … also since November 2051.
Stocks were rising slowly and steadily—with the exception of insurance stocks, which had climbed sharply due to the habits of owners of large blocks of shares, who refused to sell or let shares be borrowed for speculation. Careful search showed that many were owned by JNAIT. Others had unknown owners. May guessed that they were too.
Life-insurance payoffs were at an all-time low. Since November.
The morning the Olympiad was due to begin, May had a disturbing notion, checked it as best she could, came to a conclusion, and went to the kitchen to share it.
“It’s Goat Flu,” she said.
Toby was turning fried eggs with a dextrous flair that had, on previous mornings, occasionally gotten her pink and flustered when she thought about it. “The nano?” he said without looking up.
“Right. I think it must do something to people’s minds.”
“Makes sense. I can’t see how, though.”
“I would think nanos could do all kinds of things with body chemistry.”
“Sure. But some people have damn strange reactions to drugs that are usually innocuous. That ought to show up too.”
“It could be the suicide rate,” May said. “I hunted up Connors’s prison record. Lee Ultra Maximum Federal Penitentiary in Virginia. Model prisoner, unusual for a lifer with no parole. They can get away with anything as long as a guard doesn’t have a rifle aimed, you know. Nothing to protect.”
“I’d heard.” It was yet another reason for leaving the States: only convicted killers had the right to be kept alive. (Most of Europe was at least as bad, but the Swiss were all trained to kill, so the subject didn’t arise.)
“Connors got a job in the kitchen after two years. Inmates started dying of what looked like strychnine poisoning—convulsions, compound fractures, the works. Not at mealtimes. Ever. Always in secluded areas, but with at least one other person around. Care to guess which prisoners?”
“Lifers without parole?”
“Mostly. A few others who also had a history of violence toward other prisoners. Not all of those, though. Some of the guards died too. Mostly at home. I couldn’t find much on them, but two had a history of domestic violence. Toby, can nanos identify bullies?”
Toby took the pan off the stove, sprayed water under it so the eggs wouldn’t overcook, set it down, and turned a troubled face toward her. “I don’t see brain chemistry as being that specific. I’m damn well certain that the twenty percent of the brain that isn’t RAM doesn’t have a bully sector. But if you had enough nanos linked in a processing net, they could inspect the contents of your brain in detail. I really hate that idea. The net would have to be a lot bigger than the human brain is. I can’t see why it wouldn’t just take over.”
May was thinking. “It doesn’t have a stupidity sector eith
er, but I remember something from an old DoD report. About reaching a conclusion and taking action. There’s a part of the brain that registers each of those—”
Toby was nodding fast and often. “Right, I remember that from medical school. If the action site lights up before the decision registry, you’re about to do something you haven’t thought over. So … anger and pleasure at the same time as action?”
“You can get that writing a letter. No. Fear and pleasure and action.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she said. “Bullies are cowards. —I guess the convulsions wouldn’t be that tricky.”
“You’d be surprised. Psychiatrists have spent over a century trying to find ways to induce convulsions at will. Electricity and insulin just aren’t satisfactory.” He saw her expression and said, “There actually is a reason. For a while after a convulsion, hallucinations and delusions are difficult to sustain. Takes more effort than the brain can put out.”
“I get that. It just sounds like something they’d only find out after they’d done it to a few people.”
“Could be. A lot of the other med students gave me the creeps.”
He was comically astonished when May turned and ran out of the kitchen.
He’d supposed she had just thought of something awful and gone to throw up, but he found her at the screen again.
“School dropouts,” she said. “Medical school, law school, business school, lots of dropouts. Also athletic scholarships forfeited. And education majors are quitting too.”
“Eggs. Cold,” he said.
“Oh. —I was going to look up Soylent legislation … it can wait,” she said, and signed off.
Toby was dusting fresh-ground pepper onto his eggs when he suddenly sat up and shouted, “Norendorphin!”
May stared at him for a moment before bursting out laughing.
Toby tried to be annoyed, but it didn’t work out, and he laughed a little too. “The convulsions,” he said. “Nerve impulses have to be filtered or you get random muscle responses, like strychnine poisoning. Filter them too much and you get numbness and paralysis, so the body produces norendorphin to prevent that from happening. If the nanos make cells produce a lot of norendorphin, you get convulsions. Smaller amounts would produce chronic idiopathic neuralgia, which is doctorspeak for ‘I don’t know why you hurt so you’re imagining it.’ It’d explain the high suicide rate. You’re still laughing.”
She wasn’t, much, but she nodded and said, “Most people just sneeze.”
* * *
He waited until they were done eating before he said, “I think he designed an eggshell. So the nano would survive for a while in open air. Saline inside it, and it wouldn’t open again unless it was immersed.”
“Toby, how do the things know what not to eat?”
“Fail-safe topology. Same system your immune defenses use, only with a lot more conditions before the device unlocks. Viruses would be easy, they’re housed in rigid protein—I bet antihistamine sales are down, pollen has the same kind of coating. Bacteria have single-walled cells, not too hard to check. Finding out if a eukaryotic cell is operating, though … they’d have to reach in and poke around, probably find the mitochondria and monitor them.”
“With no bacteria, shouldn’t we be having trouble digesting food?”
Toby focused on the macroscale world again. “Yes, we should. Unless the nanos can also produce vitamins to order. That would take serious energy—my God, Indians, of course! If the nanos are soaking up light, higher frequencies are better, so your skin turns dark and absorbs everything but red.”
May inspected her hands in a conspicuous manner.
Toby aimed his palms upward and shrugged. “Insufficient data.”
“Maybe they’re getting by on the radioactive atoms that were in us?”
“That shouldn’t be enough.”
“You do make balanced meals. We might not be short yet.”
“Maybe. But we’ve been using a lot of energy,” he said. May just smiled. After a moment he smiled back. “I don’t know. It may not be part of the … program upgrade we got. It may kick in when we drop below a certain nutrient threshold, in which case it’s likely to be all at once.” He shook his head. “Have to ask him after the marathon.”
“So that’s four hours, and two more after it starts. Want to see if we can make it happen on its own?”
* * *
Sometime after noon he realized he hadn’t been getting horny unless she already was. And it didn’t take skin contact.
Good heavens, he had telemetry.
It didn’t seem all that important to discuss it right away.
* * *
They got fed, and used the screens for TV around what should have been just before the end of the marathon. Runners had been chipping fragments of a minute off the record for ages, and in 2048 it had been one hour and fifty-one minutes—just seven minutes longer than a consecutive series of four-minute miles. They both figured there was a chance of the nanos allowing someone to accomplish just that.
What they heard when the TV came on was announcers who were incomprehensible beneath the screaming of the crowd. What they saw was a cluster of officials around one runner, with other runners just coming visible in the distance, and a caption across the bottom of the screen:
JNAIT - MYCROFT YELLOWHORSE - 1H16'09.71".
“Mycroft?” said Toby.
“Yellowhorse?” said May.
They looked at each other and said, in unison, “That’s him!”
Twenty-six consecutive three-minute miles.
Distance runners were allowed to wear chiller gloves these days, to relieve exhaustion, but Yellowhorse didn’t. He wore a black body stocking with a piston-driven aerating arrangement, apparently powered by the motion of his arms and legs. It was a plausible reason for being able to keep up the speed normally limited to a hundred-yard dash. Even so, he was being examined in every way that could be accomplished in public.
Every so often the crowd would start to calm down, and he would raise his hand and wave and start them up again. Toby noticed his palms were the same color as the backs of his hands.
“Mycroft,” Toby said. “Heinlein again.”
“No. The original. Doyle. The brother Sherlock went to for advice, who worked miracles just sitting and thinking,” May said.
“What was it that bothered you about ‘Yellowhorse’?” Toby said.
“Western tribal custom. When you go into battle, you put a yellow handprint on your horse for every enemy you’ve killed. Over a thousand men died at Lee Ultra while Connors was there.”
A Russian, who like most of the other runners appeared to be made out of rods, cables, and a convincing coating of human tissue, crossed the finish at 1H43'55.03", and the only one who took notice was Connors, who ran after him and congratulated him. The Russian wore the expression of a man who had just realized he’d been shot.
“I bet JNAIT ends up selling a lot of those suits,” May said.
“Huh. I want odds before I take the other end of that bet,” said Toby.
The screen switched to a view of the skydiving event that had preceded the race, and showed Yellowhorse getting the only perfect score by pulling the rip panels on his parawing seventy feet up. His right toe had hit the two-centimeter target dead center, and he rolled to his feet in dead silence, followed a moment later by a roar that overloaded the microphone of the announcer.
“If I’d seen that,” Toby said, “I’d have known it was Connors then. The man was in so much pain he wasn’t afraid to die. I guess he still isn’t.”
“Different reason,” May said.
A runner from China crossed the finish line with no expression at all, which may have meant he was furious at having broken the 2048 Olympic record just for a bronze. The winners were taken to the award stand, while “The Land Endures” played over the speakers: “Only the rocks last forever…”
“Maybe not,” Toby said.
; Yellowhorse was crying. Silently, head high, but crying.
Toby recalled that Connors had been a widower.
XI
I see war as that insane enterprise wherein men dig up the riches of the earth and hurl them at one another.
—ATTRIBUTED TO JOSEPH DANIEL HARRINGTON
Wieland had armor and weapons.
Set had more support and possession of the Voice, and operators began coming back to life and attacking Wieland’s adherents.
Socrates had everyone who thought that the war was madness, which was almost every entity. They disabled the receivers on operators, took them into themselves, and cornered the market on power production. The combatants soon had to subsist on what they could collect for themselves.
Wieland and Set found common cause and drilled into the reactor for the fuel. The manipulators that were extended into the core had aluminum frames, and suddenly defeating Socrates was a very low priority. Alpha particles struck aluminum nuclei and produced phosphorus and neutrons, and the fuel absorbed the neutrons, heated up through faster decay, and melted. The mass of the asteroid was slight, but enough to make the dense molten metal seep toward its center.
Internal mass shifted position. Naturally occurring actinides were bound to the silica of the asteroid; only a few parts per million, but that came to many tons. The ore, already warmer than its surroundings, softened and followed the reactor fuel down. Iron accumulated around molten fuel, making an excellent reflector to keep the reaction from spreading to the local material, but that developed a slow reaction of its own once enough had gathered. Fission products oozed out through the iron layer, which gave Target One a molten core as they decayed. The first crack appeared in Target One’s surface within days.
