Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

No way, Snowy. Nothing as complex as a plant could devolve into a microbe in one generation.

There’s all that garbage in the outer shell’s toroid sequence. How much did you say, ninety per cent of it? That will represent the intermediate stage, the devolution process; the garbage has to come from somewhere, after all.

Possibly, but it’s still very strange.

What about the third shell? she asked. Did you try cloning that?

Not when this recording was made, I haven’t had the time. Perhaps I’m a little bit afraid. That plant unnerved me, Snowy. lt shouldn’t exist, it really shouldn’t.

Did it flower, Royan? Did the bloom remind you of us, how we used to be?

There was a bud forming when I left the Farm, that’s all I know.

You sent me a flower-

Because I love you.

No, it’s a warning, like all these packages. What could you be warning me about? The asteroid disseminator plant? What happened to that project?

Success, I think I used modified microbes in symbiosis with gene-tailored landcoral.

He flipped the image again. She was tiring of his pixel virtuoso act, her teeth pressing together somewhere outside the void of this node generated universe. Patience was the one quality she always cherished, like water it could erode any resistance, a weapon she could always rely on. But now she wanted all this settled, finished, over with.

It was the microbe again, that same black tacky globe Kiley had scooped up. But different this time. Flattened slightly. And the surface texture was silkier, she was sure. A second appeared beside it; egg shaped. This one was even darker. They turned slowly below her perception point, giving her an all-over view.

This is what I was after all along, Snowy. The flat one has had its miners/absorption process beefed up. While the ovoid’s thermal conversion efficiency has been enhanced by a factor of five. I combined them with landcoral in a sandwich arrangement The landcoral will act as a basic organic framework, growing a crust over the asteroid which provides a skeleton for the microbes to grow on. Its outer surface will support a layer of the thermal conversion microbes to energize the polyp’s nutrient fluid, rather than photosynthesis, while on the inside, the other microbes gobble up the rock. I had to sequence in a second capillary network to transfer the dissolved compounds to the discharge pores. Later I’ll add collection pods, and hopefully some kind of filter mechanism so you get pure deposits in each pod. Gases might be a problem, though. But this will do for now.

This symbiosis arrangement is a bit crude, isn’t it? Julia asked. Somehow, wholehearted praise would have seemed like surrendering.

It’s only a proof of concept prototype, Snowy. The first generation. I’m not even sure if it will work externally, exposed to a vacuum. Maybe we’ll have to gnaw at asteroids from within. Once I’ve demonstrated its viability, we can get the research divisions to work on refining it. Top-grade geneticists should be able to splice all this into a single genetic structure.

Event Horizon genetic research divisions, Julia thought privately. She reviewed the arrangement again, implications sleeting through her mind, if Royan was right, if the microbe’s traits could be loaded into landcoral cells the way he said, producing a single space-adapted bioware organism, then there really would be rivers of metal pouring into the global economy. Enough to support Western-level consumerism right across the globe. Nice idea. No, nice theory, she corrected herself sharply; she’d had too many dreams stall and degenerate into mediocrity to believe in technology based utopia ideals now.

For all his determination, Royan wasn’t rooted in the real world. The central concept was sound, but the ancillary industries-the fleets of spaceships needed to pick up the metal and minerals, the industrial modules necessary to convert it into foamedsteel landing bodies, more recovery fleets, more factories to use it, the energy they would need-that would take time and money to organize. Besides, New London had cubic kilometres of ore in reserve already; and there were four more asteroid capture missions currently underway. Taken together, just those five asteroids would produce enough exotic metal and raw material to supply global demand for another twenty years.

Sounds too good to be true, she said carefully. Have you considered what it would take to put it into practice?

Nothing else, he said. The answer she knew he would give her.

Don’t you see, Snowy? The asteroid disseminator plant is a living machine. The very first. I’m on the verge of creating nanoware here, Snowy, the most powerful technology there is. Once you’ve cracked this you can do anything, it’s pure von Neumannism, self-replicating, and capable of producing anything you can supply a blueprint of. After they’ve been developed properly the cells can be programmed to dismantle an asteroid, or carve out a chamber like Hyde Cavern; they can be grown Into an O’Neill colony or a teaspoon and anything in between; you can put together minute specialist clusters that’ll float through the human bloodstream repairing tissue damage, airborne spores that can break up the world’s carbon dioxide, reverse the Warming. Nanoware rules the micro and the macro, Snowy. And this splice is only the beginning.

She wondered how that would square up against atomic structuring technology. Were the two complementary, or antagonistic? If she didn’t get the nuclear force generator data for Event Horizon, could she counter with asteroid dissemination? Save the company that way. More questions, problems.

And who would benefit? The turmoil from one new revolutionary technology was bad enough, introducing two that were this radical would produce utter chaos. She remembered what had followed Event Horizon’s success with the gigaconductor; whole companies becoming obsolete overnight, workers thrown on the dole; it had redefined economies all over the planet. And that was in a time when the power and transport industries had declined to virtually nothing.

But right now the global economy was powerfully upbeat, expansion was running at nine per cent, there was investment, confidence, stability. The planet was in better shape than it had been for decades.

In any case, present-day cybernetics was a form of large-scale von Neumannism. And at least with cybernetics there was room for people-designers, maintenance crews, civil engineers who built the factories. Their hierarchy might be top-heavy with ‘ware-literate staff, but there were still jobs for the semi-skilled, semi-literate, some dignity, keeping them off the dole. What would they do in a world where you could get a ten-bedroom mansion just by planting a nanoware kernel in the ground, then watch it grow like a flower?

Should I suppress this before it starts? Do I have the right, or even the wisdom? That’s what it boils down to. Another bloody decision I have to make. Always me.

She felt the blood hot in her cheeks. All right, you’ve modffied the microbes in the laboratory. Does this arrangement actually work in practice?

It has up until the moment I was recorded, he said. I grew a small prototype in the Farm laboratory’s clone vat, checked that the two modified microbes functioned the way they were supposed to. I had to do a bit more tailoring, a few modifications. But the penultimate stage is completed. That’s why this recording exists, to tell you I’m ready to see if the asteroid disseminator plant works, if the polyp and the microbes will operate as an integrated unit. I’m going up to New London to run some field trials.

Then something must have happened, she said.

The image of the microbes popped, Royan was standing before her perception point. Snowy, if it has, if I’ve screwed up, then do whatever you have to.