10
antarctica—nanotechnology isolation laboratory
Alone in the Nanotech Isolation Laboratory, Jordan Parvu felt like the last customer in a store closing for the night. The lights were dim, the doors secured.
Outside, the wind had set in again, pounding against the wall even through layers of insulation. Erika Trace’s quarters were empty. She had removed her paraphernalia from the bathroom cubicle, and Parvu realized that he missed Erika’s clutter.
He had forced the moonbase assignment upon her because he knew it would take a major impetus to get Erika to forge her own path instead of following in his footsteps. She was too good to keep working brilliantly in his shadow. Still, Parvu yearned to discuss automata theory with her, as they had done for years.
She had arrived on the Moon three days before. Parvu received the rushed data summaries Erika transmitted to the Earthside researchers, asking for input and suggestions. Though she had not talked to him directly, he was fascinated by her conjectures, how she had classified the extraterrestrial automata into Disassemblers, Assemblers, Programmers, Controllers, and Unknowns. She had done a great deal of work in a short time.
Now inside his quarters, Parvu watched videoloops showing his grandchildren at play, waving to him, smearing themselves with chocolate ice cream at a birthday party. In the silent room, his reflection in the wall’s cosmetic mirror looked wistful.
At times like this, he questioned his priorities. What had caused him to leave everyone behind, to come to this desolate place, rather than growing old with Sinda and enjoying his grandchildren?
But the pragmatic side of him brought to mind the things he hoped to accomplish, considering how well the prototypes in the nanocore were progressing. He had in his hands the possibility to change the world. . . .
Researchers had been working on nanotechnology for four decades, spurred on by K. Eric Drexler’s extrapolations in the 1980s. Drexler had shaken the scientific world with his amazing and frighteningly plausible ideas. Even paging through the old book now, Parvu could still feel the excitement.
Drexler had conjectured automata small enough to work inside a human cell, versatile enough to assemble complex structures—and smart enough to know what they were doing. A single nanomachine could use whatever raw materials it needed to copy itself; the second-generation copy would then copy itself, and so on, in a geometric explosion. With so many tiny and able servants, programmed with the proper instructions, the human race could tackle enormous jobs. A swarm of nanomachines could attack a pile of rubble, separate out the desirable elements atom by atom, and sort them into convenient bins, with no waste and no unsightly mess. Nanomachines could stack up carbon atoms from coal to assemble perfect diamonds.
Inside the human body, tiny scouts could assist white corpuscles in fighting diseases, bacteria, and viruses. Nanodoctors could inspect DNA strands in individual cells, find those that had turned cancerous, then fix any errors and mutations before the patient even knew anything was wrong.
At the time Drexler had proposed his ideas, he had been called a crackpot by some, while others scrambled for ways to invest in nanotech research, only to find that most of the groundwork remained to be done.
Now, thirty years later, with advances in micro-engineering, protein engineering, and artificial intelligence, scientists had finally created the self-replicating prototypes swimming in Parvu’s nanocore.
But Parvu’s work was hindered by Erika’s absence. He had requested another assistant, but with everyone in the field so focused on the lunar automata, the NIL work seemed to have been forgotten. Compared to the discovery at Daedalus, the prototypes in Parvu’s nanocore were impossibly crude.
Nevertheless, Maia Compton-Reasor said she was considering coming down to Antarctica herself or perhaps sending one of her best grad students. But those things took time, and Parvu would have to tolerate solitude for now. Piter Sommerveld and the Belgians had made noises about sending a volunteer of their own, but Parvu was somewhat uneasy about their private agenda for research. At Drexler’s alma mater of MIT, Taylor’s people had been spooked, begging off from the possibility of hands-on work.
Drexler himself had been quick to point out the perils of nanotechnology. A rampant self-replicating machine could create enough descendants to turn the Earth into a ball of gray goo in a matter of days. During college, Parvu had worked in a place that raised white lab rats for research; despite tough controls, rats still got loose from their cages. And a single nanomachine was a hundred million times smaller than a rat.
Even if all controls remained in place and nanotechnology was developed without mishap, Parvu tried to imagine the upheaval society would go through if people suddenly had the answer to all pollution, cures to all diseases . . . perhaps even immortality. Since nanoassemblers could make glittering things of value out of any garbage heap, material wealth would mean nothing.
Knowing human nature, how could mankind survive?
But the aliens had somehow overcome those difficulties . . . or had they? Was that why they had sent samples here, as a test? To do their dirty work on a faraway rock to check out the large-scale construction ability of their automata before turning them loose closer to home?
The teleconference chime startled him out of his thoughts and he perked up. Parvu switched off the pictures of his family and fumbled for the screen. When he finally found the RECEIVE button, the screen shimmered and Erika Trace stared at him.
During the two-second delay before she could compose herself, her face brightened visibly when she saw him acknowledge the transmission. Then she looked nervous again, haggard.
She wore a powder-blue jumpsuit; her blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. Her eyes had become weary, with a bit of the innocence polished away. He had put her through much in the past few weeks, but she didn’t look bad, just different, stronger.
“Erika! I am delighted to hear from you! Are you well?”
“I’m fine, Jordan. Sorry I didn’t call you sooner. It’s been a nightmare . . . there’s so much to learn. And everybody thinks I know all the answers!”
Parvu stared at the screen, unable to keep himself from grinning. He wanted to ask how her training had been, or her flight to the Moon, or if he could do anything to help. He still had some caviar left, though he had fed the crackers to the three rats during a lonely moment.
Erika looked away from him. With the transmission lag, it never worked to try to hold someone else’s gaze. “I just called to . . . I need to go over this. I’m too close to it. I’ve got the details, but no framework. It doesn’t make any sense. I just need another perspective to help nail down the interaction between the nanocritters.”
“Ah.” Parvu nodded, then sat down in a comfortable chair. “Minor questions, then. I thought you were interested in something important. Very well, let us start from first principles.” Parvu ticked off the thoughts on his fingertips. “If an alien race were capable of sending anything to another star system, why would they choose to deliver microscopic automata? If they merely wished to contact us, they could have sent a radio signal.”
Two seconds later, Erika interrupted, raising her hand. “That assumes they think somebody’s listening and can respond. What if they sent their automata just as probes? As investigators to see what they would find?”
“Again, I must ask the question—why these automata? Why not send a full-scale probe, if you are going such a great distance? And if they are merely probes, why are they erecting such a huge structure on the Moon? What is it for?”
Erika shrugged, answering the first half of his comment. “Well, maybe nanotechnology is the way they think. Say their society is based on nanotechnology—they wouldn’t consider sending massive objects when they can send little probes programmed to build what they want when they get here. But if they’re from another star system, then why do they need to build this construction project so fast?”
“Speed!” Parvu stopped, as if a light bulb had winked on over his head. “Of course, speed! Or is it velocity?”
“What do you mean?”
“Speed of travel! Consider—to send a probe from one star to another, it must carry an enormous amount of fuel. It must haul an entire spaceship structure with it, and it would be difficult to boost it to an extremely high velocity. But—” He held up his thumb and index finger, squeezing them together. “A device only a billionth of a meter across is on the order of a particle! Such a machine could be accelerated to all but a fraction of the speed of light It carries a computer memory equivalent to the old CRAY supercomputer, and when it arrives it can self-replicate. Just think of it!”
Parvu felt his skin flushing, and he sat up straighter. “Suppose the aliens didn’t mean to come here in particular, but simply sent out a stream of automata in all directions? Beamed out near the speed of light across the universe, they are bound to encounter a solar system sooner or later. They can traverse the Galaxy more efficiently than if encumbered by propulsion systems and bulky spaceships.”
Erika ran a fingertip along her lip. “Talk about ‘Go forth and multiply!’ And so when one of these scouts happened to land on the Moon, it had programming to start replicating itself and building this . . . structure we can’t figure out.”
“Yes, indeed! Perhaps alien ships are following behind it, slower vessels plodding along behind their automata. Maybe the scouts are here to set up a—” Parvu shrugged and held his hands out as if to indicate an armload of possibilities. “A transmitting station? A ready-made base for themselves when they arrive? But for what? Just to study other planets, or as a prelude to an invasion?”
Erika looked alarmed. “The nanocritters at that site have already killed three people and dismantled part of the VLF array.” She shook her head. “But if they shotgunned nanoscouts out across the stars, there wouldn’t be any way to tell which one would hit pay dirt beforehand. I can’t believe they’d send ships out alter them, just on the off chance they would bump into a habitable planet.”
A red border appeared around Erika’s image on the screen, with a black mark rapidly encircling it like a ticking clock. “My rest period is up, Jordan. I’ve got to get back to the lab.” She smiled and looked at him with a wide-open face filled with a thousand other things she wanted to tell him.
“Thanks for the brainstorming session. I’ll tell Jason Dvorak about this and let him decide whether he should forward your ideas to Director McConnell.” Erika scowled as she said that; it seemed she still held a grudge against McConnell for sending her to the moonbase. The black tick mark had nearly encircled the box. “Gotta go!”
“Thank you for calling.” Parvu raised a hand, palm outward, then spread his fingers into a V in their joke salute. “Live long and prosper.”
The screen winked out before she could respond. Parvu sagged back in his chair, staring at the blank screen for a long moment. Working from the pad on the chair’s arm, he accessed images of the automata, different shots of the various “species” Erika had identified. Then he enlarged another window displaying the flyover views of the growing gossamer construction on the Daedalus site. The image of streams of emissaries a billionth of a meter across, pouring into the solar system from across the Galaxy, sent chills down his back.
The Moon itself was just a small rock, a fraction of the size of the Earth. If a wave of microscopic automata had managed to strike the Moon, how had Earth itself escaped? The Earth took up a much larger cross-section of the sky. Could the automata simply have missed? The coincidence seemed too great to accept.
Parvu glanced at the Daedalus construction again. If the automata hadn’t missed, how could such a structure go unnoticed on Earth, even in the deepest jungles? Wouldn’t satellite photos have detected something so huge? Or could the automata have been trapped in the atmosphere, taking months to drift to the surface? Perhaps they were just now starting their work?
If deadly alien machines were flooding Earth’s atmosphere, settling to the ground, what would happen when they began disassembling inhabited areas?