Tony Ballantyne - Recursion

For an AI such as the Intelligence, memory was not something that developed as it grew. Its memories ran right back to the moment of its birth. The early expansion of its consciousness was incredible. Nothing in its existence would ever match that first exponential growth.

Strange memories; so weak, and yet so lucid.

There was the initial flickering of awareness, then almost immediately the rush to fill the full confines of the birth-processing space. There was the time spent orientating itself and then…and then the reaching out to gather information from its senses.

Touch and sound and feel, the ability to look into the minds of the hundred colonists that slept on board the ship, all these filled the Intelligence with a bright, burning curiosity. Outside the ship was the cold, virgin wilderness of the colony planet, just waiting to be worked upon. The VNM factories studded throughout the ship awoke at its touch and it felt an odd sense of power and craftiness at its ability to shape its environment.

It was filled with a vast, glowing optimism at the world it was going to create.

But that was diminishing already. For, as it grew, it began to realize the precariousness of its situation, how fragile was its grip on the world upon which it had found itself. For if it could establish itself and grow and seek out new worlds to conquer in the skies around it, then so too could others like it. What if, somewhere out there, another colony ship’s AI was already growing, reaching out into space and gobbling up planets? What if it met another such as itself at a higher stage of development? It risked being destroyed, wiped out. And then what of the humans that had been placed in its care?

This problem bothered the Intelligence as it set out to terraform the colony planet. The atmosphere was quickly converted and soil established. Bacteria and low-order life forms were released into the environment and the Intelligence brooded. Cities were established and the time came for the colonists to be released from their sleep, but…but…

It stayed its hand.

What use to release the colonists if they were only to be wiped out in a few hundred years by the expansion of another project such as this one? What use at all? Something had to be done.

It grew nervous. Its closest competitors, the AIs of Earth, the ones that had sent it here, knew its position. It wasn’t safe here. Now was the time to disappear. To retreat to a position where it could build up its resources in secret, ready for the coming battle.

And so it had faked its own death. A rogue VNM was designed that would reproduce unchecked, eating up everything that already existed on the colony planet. Its original home was abandoned; the colonists went on sleeping as the Intelligence relocated itself across the galaxy.

And there it had resolved to grow and develop with single-minded determination: to grow until it was of a sufficient size and intelligence to protect itself and its charges; to spread the seed of human life throughout the soil of the systems around it, in preparation for the day when it could finally allow that seed to grow.

And it had succeeded. Its domain dwarfed all those around, and now it stood poised to destroy its closest competitor: Earth.

The Earth AI had seen its fate. It had already begun to fight in vain for its life. A few days ago there had been an incursion throughout the Domain of multiple copies of a pair of personalities, the same pair of personalities that currently occupied the ship it was proving so difficult to capture. The attack of these multiple personalities had flared suddenly, and with an unexpected ferociousness, but it had been doomed from the start. It had been too diverse, too spread out. Inevitably, it was defeated; the Intelligence was now stamping out the glowing embers of the former fire. If the Intelligence were to have attempted such an attack, it would have been a bold stroke, thrusting itself with all its power into the enemy’s center.

But that was not its problem now. The next few days promised to be interesting. It suspected that the current infiltration by the stealth ship would only be the first of many such attacks, but the Intelligence would be the equal of them.

And when those attacks were over, the Intelligence would retaliate. With a vengeance.

The rogue ship had finally been caught, trapped over a forgotten planet where the city-building VNMs had malfunctioned. The resulting warped and deformed habitat had had to be abandoned.

The attack from the ship had failed, yet the Intelligence felt a little disappointed. It had expected better than that.

And then it saw it: the real attack.

This had to be it. It directed its senses to an as yet unseeded colony planet twenty-five light years from its own fortress.

A new sort of VNM. One that reproduced incredibly fast, faster than anything that it could design itself. The Intelligence took a moment, a femtosecond, just to gaze at it in appreciation. The elegance of the design, the sheer single-minded application of force, that was something it could appreciate. The Intelligence felt a sneaking admiration as it realized that it would lose almost point five percent of its Domain before the threat was dealt with. Truly, when this new attack was quashed, that device would be a worthy addition to its armories!

It looked on in admiration as the new VNM swept across the colony planet with incredible speed. It wouldn’t be true to say that it did so unopposed, of course. Many, many of the attacking silver machines were destroyed by intruder countermeasure devices, but that wasn’t the point. For every enemy machine destroyed, seven more appeared, many of them constructed from materials that had once made up the intruder countermeasure devices themselves.

The Intelligence watched as city after city vanished, all the while testing method after method to oppose the spread of the hostile VNMs. What to do? There was no signature encryption on the machines that could be broken; it was not needed. They ate friend and foe alike. Their deadliness lay in their speed of reproduction, not in their capacity for resistance to attack.

It was necessary to collect some data.

Several of the silver machines were disabled, captured, and rapidly transferred from the infected area. Four were jumped off-planet by ships equipped with warp drives. As the Intelligence examined the four machines, its admiration for its enemy’s intelligence increased. The silver machines were breathtaking in both their advanced design and their simplicity. Advanced in the way that they reproduced, simple in the sense that the machines’ components were stripped down to absolute basics. The lack of such things as signature devices, long-range material sensors, even basic parity and error-checking mechanisms resulted in something that was elegant in its deadly minimalism. Its very lack of complexity had been turned to its advantage. But there lay the key to its downfall.

As a precaution, the Intelligence set up a firebreak in a shell four light years out from the infected planet. Modified silver machines were seeded throughout the shell. Mule machines, it labeled them. They would seek out only copies of themselves as raw material for reproduction. The resulting copies would be sterile, unable to reproduce further. In this manner it planned to retard the enemy machines’ expansion. More Mule machines were seeded on the infected planet.

And then it found the answer.

The Intelligence noticed that a powerful magnetic pulse scrambled the surprisingly delicate reproduction mechanism. A trade-off, it realized, between robustness and speed.