Tony Ballantyne - Recursion

“Warp jumps,” Robert explained.

The camera picked up on one pair of bodies as they shot through space. They were now approaching a planet.

“This is part of the Enemy Domain,” Robert murmured. “Watch carefully.”

Herb gazed into the viewing area impassively. After a few moments he sat up straighter. Shortly after that his hands stiffened on the soft white leather of the sofa, then he reached for the glass of whisky and took a sip, and then another…

It began simply enough. Robert and Herb’s duplicates were standing on a low hill looking out over a grassy plain punctuated with low mounds. The Robert on the screen turned and pointed out something to the Herb standing next to him, and the camera focused on the horizon. They saw a low, dark shape, rising from the ground like a cancer. Now they could make out something silver in the grass, thin and shimmering in the light like a spiderweb. It was clearly spreading out from the dark growth in the distance, slowly choking the planet. The Robert in the viewing field bent down and pointed it out to Herb.

“Interesting, isn’t it? It’s got a coating of photoelectric cells all around the outside. This planet is going to be covered by that stuff, and it’s all being powered by nothing more than the sun’s energy. Just imagine if they dropped one of these VNMs on Earth.”

“It moves too slowly. We’d destroy it in no time.”

“Maybe.” The virtual Robert shrugged.

The Herb watching the viewing field, the real Herb, silently cheered his alter ego.

The view shifted and this time another Herb and Robert were standing on another planet. In this view a group of cows was huddled on a small island of green remaining in the middle of a sea of silver-grey VNMs. The VNMs were eating up the land, leaving the animals nowhere to stand.

“Are those real cows?” asked the Herb in the viewing tank.

“Oh, yes.”

One of the cows slipped and scrambled desperately to prevent itself sliding down the deep brown mud fringing the island, toward the restless silver sea below. There was a stirring at the shoreline, the first flickering of mechanical interest. Despite its frantic scrambling, the cow slipped closer and closer to the silver sea. One machine skittered across the bodies of its brothers and onto the mud, antennae waving, and that was it. Herb looked on in horror as the silver VNMs rushed over the unfortunate animal.

The scene jumped again to show a huge, deformed city that spread out to cover most of one side of a planet. Its silvery grey towers reached upwards to the stars and the silver-grey hearts of the fleet of spaceships hovering above it.

“I call this the Necropolis,” said the real Robert. “On this one the Enemy AI got the design of the VNMs wrong. The city was abandoned before it was finished. Never mind the fact that it meant abandoning several million half grown human clones in the foundations. The Necropolis. You’ll also notice the fleet of spaceships hovering above. They stopped reproducing when their cargo never arrived.”

Herb looked at the planet and felt sick. “There is no way anyone could have gone down there. Was I down there?”

“Two copies of us went. Only one pair came back. I think both of the pairs traveled up to the top of the space elevator. They got stuck there and had to guess which way to jump. One pair guessed wrongly.”

The scene shifted again. They were following a long dark line through space.

“What is it?” asked Herb after four minutes of watching the hypnotic movement.

“Oh, I like this one,” said Robert. “What happened was this. They dropped a single VNM on a planet, rather like you did on the one below us. The only difference was that this one worked.”

Herb gave a tolerant sigh.

“Anyway. The VNM reproduced, making copy after copy of itself until the planet had been converted into something rather like that mess out there.”

Johnston gestured toward the spaceship’s door. “Okay. So we can both visualize that bit. Now, what happened next was the clever part. You’ve got a planet which is now nothing more than a mass of mechanical bodies held together by their own gravity. Okay. Now the creatures at the equator begin to walk toward the poles. When they get there they begin to fuse together. More and more creatures arrive and the extremes of the planet begin to stretch out into space. Keep it up for long enough, and this is what you’re left with. Clever, eh? You never thought of that, did you?”

Herb shrugged. “Yeah? Probably because it’s pointless?”

Johnston laughed. “Pointless eh? Have you considered what would happen if you dropped the line that was formed by that process on another planet?”

Herb froze.

“Tell you what, I’ll show you.”

The picture in the view tank changed again. A fiery red line could be seen burning through the grey sky of some planet. Herb wasn’t sure if he could detect the patterns of cities on the planet’s surface.

“Of course, you can’t even shoot it down if it’s coming toward you,” Johnston whispered, suddenly next to Herb’s ear.

The view changed again. Herb gave a shout. “There were people there! Humans!”

Robert shrugged and returned to his seat.

“Don’t worry about it. They weren’t sentient. That’s an important point: they never seem to have had the nerve to allow genuine humans to develop inside the Enemy Domain. Anyway, the weapon you saw is obsolete. The AI has perfected fractal branching. Look at this one.”

The view shifted again so that Herb was looking down at an enormous snowflake, framed against the black night and the piercing grey stars.

“It’s got a surface area of just under a billion klicks squared and it masses about half that of Earth. Just imagine what would happen if they grew one of these things in Earth’s orbit. Can you imagine the planet hitting that? It would be like passing through a cheese grater.”

Herb was shaking his head slowly. Unconsciously, he had been mouthing one word over and over as he watched the screen. No. No. No . The silent words became a whisper.

“No. It’s too big. We can’t fight that.”

“Oh, we haven’t seen anything yet. That was just the beginning. Sit back and relax. Now we’re going to try to appreciate the scale of the thing. Let’s get an idea of the true size of the Enemy Domain.”

The view flickered again. The camera panned across seven humps of some strange bioengineered creature, then froze. Johnston was studying Herb’s wide-eyed face with an expression of vague sympathy.

“Actually, before we do that, I’ll just fetch you another bottle of whisky. I think you’re going to need it.”

Herb didn’t know how long he sat before the viewing area.

They didn’t seem to care, that was the problem. Everything in the Enemy Domain was just building material. Planets, rocks, asteroids: everything was converted into yet more self-replicating machines. Herb saw view after view of cities and spaceships, snowflakes and chains, but most frequently of all, endless seas of VNMs all scuttling over each other, just like the sea of them below the spaceship in which he sat. It seemed to Herb as if the whole universe was now being converted into self-replicating machines, and the only thing he could think was, Will there be anywhere left for me to stand?

But that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that the Enemy Domain was also filled with half-grown human clones. On planet after planet it seemed that whatever controlled the Domain had set them growing and then suddenly just lost interest: a bubble of space two hundred light years across filled with billions upon billions of half-grown human beings.

All abandoned.

Eventually, the show ended. Herb said nothing. Robert gradually brought the lounge lights back up and knelt down to pick up the splintered walnut shells that lay on the carpet beneath his seat. He gathered them up, dropping them on his white handkerchief, which he carefully carried into the kitchen where he flapped out its contents into the sink. When he returned to the lounge, Herb was still sitting on the sofa staring at nothing.