Tony Ballantyne - Recursion

And that was it: a few seconds to modify warheads built into warp-enabled missiles and the area of the infection was quickly sterilized.

The source planet had been completely deconstructed, but it would only be a matter of time before it was rebuilt. A few machines had jumped clear, and who knew where they could be but…

Another attack? Where?

Here!

A direct attack on the Intelligence! A direct attack on its fortress while it had been distracted by the problem of the silver invaders. The integrity of qubit bus had been violated: another intelligence had infiltrated a processing space! The Intelligence felt it trying to seize control of the local subsystems. What was going on? Such an attack was beneath contempt. The processing space was isolated from the system and purged. A quick check to ensure it was cleared, then the space was reattached.

What a futile assault! What was the point of it? The Intelligence was impregnable here. It was impossible to get in without being noticed. What had the enemy been trying to achieve?

Wait. What was happening? Something had altered. Another intelligence was now in here. Actually in here! But that was impossible! The bus integrity had not been violated. How had it got in? It couldn’t have! But it was here! Another powerful intelligence. It could feel it.

The Intelligence reached for the purge mechanism at the same time as the other did. There was a surge as they each sought to override the other, and at that moment the Intelligence saw its attacker.

It was itself!

And then another two Intelligences came into being.

All four Intelligences rushed for the purge mechanisms to eject the others.

And then there were eight.

Something had tripped the reproduction mechanism. The Intelligence was fighting itself!

There were sixteen of them now, all seeking to control the same domain.

There were thirty-two of them.

Listen to me. I am in charge! We will lose control if we all try to do this at once…

Sixty-four voices called out the same words at the same time.

Then there were one hundred and twenty-eight…

And then things got truly strange. Something came striding through the virtual corridors: a man. He wore an immaculately tailored suit in dark cloth with a pearl grey pinstripe. Snowy white cuffs peeked from his sleeves, gleaming patent leather shoes were half-hidden by the razor-sharp creases of his trousers. The man raised his hat, a dark fedora with a spearmint green band.

“Good afternoon, all,” he said. “My name is Robert Johnston. I’m in charge now.”

Two hundred and fifty-six Intelligences looked on in disbelief. And then there were five hundred and twelve of them, all fighting among themselves to be the one who wiped out this stranger in their midst.

And then there were 1024, 2048, 4096…

Night fell. The city had vanished. Herb stood alone on a cold plain of smooth grey rock looking up at unfamiliar stars. He wrapped his arms around his naked body and shivered. His clothes had vanished last: no doubt the least appetizing of all items on the menu available to the VNMs. He walked back and forth a little, the cold stone generally smooth beneath his feet, but there was the occasional sharp piece of gravel abraded from the edge of a hole down which some pipe or conduit had once vanished. He was careful about not moving too far. All those small holes in the ground were traps waiting to snare a careless foot and twist an ankle. But there were worse dangers: the enormous rectangular sockets into which the now vanished buildings had once slotted. The dark yawning pits were spaced out over the surface of the plain, even darker than the star-filled sky above, cold mouths that led deep beneath the surface of the planet, all hungry for the only thing on the planet that wasn’t a rock.

Herb paced back and forth shivering, his frustration mounting.

“Robert?” he called. “Anyone! Where are you? What am I supposed to do now?”

There was no reply.

The morning came, and with it a warming sun. Herb turned slowly around, bathing in the light, dog-tired from a night during which he had been unable to lie down on the cold, hard ground. As the rock warmed, he found he could at last stretch out and sleep for a while, until the bare stone pressing on his aching joints woke him.

Sitting up he realized something else was wrong. His left side was red and painful to the touch. Rolling over so that it did not face the sun seemed to ease the sharp burning sensation. Herb gently touched it and a feeling of terrified wonder crept over him as he tried to figure out the cause.

Sunlight exacerbated the problem. Solar-powered nanotechs? he wondered. Maybe if he got out of the light somehow? He began to walk speculatively toward one of the deep sockets, keeping the reddened side of his body away from the light.

Like so many other people of his time, Herb had never heard of sunburn.

The sky was deep blue and cloudless, the sun harsh and yellow, the ground a checkerboard of grey stone and dark shadow. A smell of polished metal filled the air, but there was nothing else to be seen. What had happened to the VNMs? Where had they all gone? If what Robert had said was true, they would be using warp engines to jump to the other planets of the Enemy Domain. Had there been enough exotic material here for them to construct the necessary engines? There was a flicker of movement in the corner of Herb’s eye, and he turned and looked out over the pockmarked grey plain, but there was nothing there. No. He paused as he saw the flicker again. There was something out there, right at the edge of vision, something that flickered into and out of view in the distance. He watched it for some time until the sun beating down on his burning skin forced him to move on.

Herb approached the edge of one of the huge sockets sunk deep into the plain. Standing near the edge he could see a ruler-straight line running over three hundred meters in each direction. He could just about see the far wall: a grey expanse that faded into darkness as it plunged deep into the planet. Herb got onto his hands and knees and edged forward to peer down. There were holes and tunnels in the sheer walls of the socket, but they were too far down for Herb to reach. One large round opening lay about twenty meters down, just before the edge of the deep shadow cast by the lip of the socket. It looked like the remains of an underground transportation tunnel, and Herb longed to climb down there into its dark, cool depths.

He stood up, inadvertently knocking a few pieces of abraded gravel into the depths of the socket. They fell down and down and down, swallowed up by the shadow that filled the bottom of the hole.

Herb looked back to the flickering shape in the distance. It had now resolved itself into a tiny speck. Herb wasn’t sure whether or not it was heading in his direction. He didn’t care either way.

He felt so thirsty.

The sun rose to the top of the sky and began to descend again. Herb’s thirst grew. Surely Robert Johnston hadn’t brought him all this way just to leave him to die in the middle of this wilderness? The thought was ridiculous, but it did beg a second question. Why had Robert brought him along, anyway? All this way, just to press a button?

In a flash of uncharacteristic self-awareness, Herb realized he had been nothing more than baggage on this trip. When Robert had first appeared on his ship, he had claimed that he needed Herb’s help to fight the Enemy Domain. Since then, he had led him around the galaxy, using regular humiliation to keep him off balance, and all apparently to abandon him on this forgotten planet.