John Barnes - Mother of Storms

Now there’s something that hasn’t been tried out lately—the “replicators” —the experiment with little robots who look like Tonka trucks with arms. They have a little hopper in which they can melt a rock sample and then do what amounts to slow isotope separation, eventually breaking it into its constituent elements, so that where there was a hopper full of rock, there are now little ingots of all the solids, and little glass “bottles” of the gases and liquids, that go into making a replicator. The replicators then meet up with each other and swap pieces of material around until one of them has the materials to make a copy of itself. It sits down, does that, and where there were ten replicators gathering materials, there are now eleven.

The idea was that no matter how expensive it was to build the first batch of replicators, after that they would breed like sheep or cattle, and by turning on a software cue you could make them drive into the facility at Moonbase and keep offloading materials; eventually only a tiny fraction of materials extracted would go into replication, and you’d have an unending procession of replicators bringing gifts of oxygen, iron, aluminum, whatever.

The replicators were made in deliberate imitation of life, which is highly efficient at spreading itself around, binding energy from sunlight, and extracting scarce elements from abundant minerals. The exchange deal was self-reprogramming; whatever was scarce, they would seek to get more of by returning to places where it was easy to get it, by randomly perturbing some of their own instructions to try out different strategies, and by “bargaining” with each other.

In practice it turned out differently. The replicators replicated just fine, but the parallel processor system that controlled them at Moonbase turned out to be subject to a force no one had thought of—the market.

The first sign of trouble was when gallium became a medium of exchange. Of all the elements needed, the traces of gallium needed for some of the semiconductors were the hardest to get; very quickly the replicators learned that if you had gallium you could trade it for anything else. Many of them began to drive right past everything else, looking only for gallium-bearing minerals, until in short order most of them were carrying only gallium, plus the mix of elements that were found in the two minerals that contained it.

There was no one for them to “buy” the other things they needed from—until a couple of the replicators innovated and set up the “fortyniner’s store.” That is, they began to pay other robots—using gallium to do so—to go out and mine exclusively for the materials the other ones wanted to buy.

Predictably, in hindsight, two events followed quickly. One isolated replicator struck a relatively rich vein of gallium-bearing ore (though nothing anyone would have bothered with on Earth) and in short order the other replicators had followed it there, organizing a “gallium rush.” As gallium flooded the market, there was a period of rapid inflation, leading to all sorts of distant speculative ventures—some of the replicators had gotten as far away as three hundred kilometers.

This all collapsed when about half of them sat down to have “children”; much of the gallium that had flooded the market was now tied up in replicators, and a price collapse and “depression” followed. Many of the faraway replicators shut down because there was no profitable way of returning to base.

Somewhere out there, one of them hit on the perturbation that made a mess of things. It attacked, disassembled, and devoured several of the other replicators, eventually producing copies of its cannibal self. Another replicator dealt with the problem by reprogramming other replicators to bring their extracted ores to it; they dubbed that one the “slavemaster,” and discovered that the slavemaster had organized a defense against the cannibals, built around using the slaves in teams.

Moreover, they began to virus each other’s software, and to invent defenses against the viruses (that strange boomtalk word for replicating software, with its purely negative connotations, seemed perfectly appropriate in this case). As defenses improved, viruses that attacked defenses appeared—the scientists began to refer to that as “machine AIDS”—and suppressor software to protect the defenses, in turn, mutated until it began to attack everything else—for some obscure reason, an old scientist dubbed that “industrial ARTS.” There was, in effect, a health-care problem—most machines ran well below optimum because the code driving them had gotten so long and complicated.

Moreover, since they all had access to each other’s software, very shortly there were several teams of cannibal slavemasters out there in the boondocks, competing with each other but mining almost nothing, all infected with and spreading machine AIDS and industrial ARTS.

Matters came to a head when two of the dominant teams wiped out the others (eating and converting them in the process), combined forces, and came back into Moonbase to attack the “forty-niner’s store” in force; the merchants saw them coming, copied the software where needed, and fought a kind of epic battle on the plains before the fascinated eyes of the cyberneticists.

Then one sample replicator, pulled out for examination and tests, turned up with part of a solar-wind monitoring station in its guts. A quick check showed that the system as a whole had become conscious enough to realize that the prohibition on consuming other man-made objects kept it from getting some first-rate metals, and it had managed to hack around the prohibition by introducing industrial ARTS into the software protection of the main system.

They stopped it just hours from the point where it might have eaten Moonbase; if they hadn’t, it would have destroyed everything except itself, then populated the moon with robot vermin beyond any control.

Now, as Louie comes around to the site of the great battle, he sees old number N743P, chief of the merchants, sitting where “he” froze when the system was shut down, surrounded by dozens of slaves with empty hoppers. Some wag has painted United Left insignia on the slaves and arranged them in a circle as if they were picketing N743P.

Louie wonders idly if it might not be better to have switched them all back on and told them about all the good metal over at the French base—no, that’s petty, and the fact is that he likes the individual French astronauts who pass through the space station. It’s hardly their fault that Louie’s nation isn’t keeping up, and France is the last bastion of any kind of liberalism in Europe; many of them are almost pathetically eager to tell Louie, or someone, that they wish they could get out from under Brussels, and that they were against the Expulsion.

He kneels to look it over; N743P doesn’t look any different (apart from its tag) than any other robot. At least they hadn’t discovered conspicuous consumption yet, though it looked like this fellow was about to invent the futures market.

There’s a loud ping echoing through the stillness of the lunar day, and he realizes it’s time to get on with things back at the station. He has a moment of being a tall, spiky robot scratching its head—

And then he’s back in the station, pulling off the scalpnet, muffs, and goggles. He has a moment’s vision of the robot on the moon standing up abruptly and then very slowly and carefully, without anything like the precision it has when a person is steering it, walking back to its slot in the storage cave, tramping back with careful, heavy movements like a Harryhausen monster. It may take it the rest of the day to get home, but then, it has nothing but time….

Which is normally true for Louie, but not today. He grabs the handholds to drag himself to the “conference room,” the little piece of blank white wall that he stands in front of while he pretends to know what he’s doing with the weather reports.