— From Quince Guide compiled by humans
Mika wondered if this new exterior input centre was just another of many ready for use inside the Jerusalem, or if it had been manufactured to order, for she knew the great ship contained automated factories easily capable of turning out items like this. Then she turned her attention to the projected views from the pinhead cameras around the asteroid—or rather planetoid, for the Jain mycelium had utterly digested the asteroid and formed it anew.
‘The limited scanning I can safely use without making a conduit for viral subversion shows that it has attained maximum size possible without losing control of its structure. It has done this by foaming alloys and silicates, and by creating other components of itself out of materials with a wide molecular matrix,’ Jerusalem explained.
‘Like what?’ asked Susan James.
‘Buckytubes, balls and webs, various aerogels, and other compounds that don’t have names, only numbers. It also, in certain areas, is generating structural enforcing fields.’
‘The question that has to be asked is why,’ said Mika.
D’nissan, now at a console because use of deep scanning was considered too dangerous, said, ‘To attain maximum physical growth using the materials available. The greater the volume it occupies, the greater its chances of encountering more materials to incorporate and utilize. The more apposite question should be: what will it do now?’
‘It has, in the last ten minutes, reduced in diameter by two per cent,’ Jerusalem told them, ‘and its internal structure is changing.’
D’nissan turned to Mika. ‘Did we do the right thing to let this off the leash?’
‘Come on,’ Colver interrupted. ‘It wasn’t ever on a leash to begin with.’
‘Oh, I think it was.’ D’nissan turned back to the screens. ‘Skellor controlled it initially with his crystal matrix AI, and the recorded personality Aphran controlled what remained in the bridge pod after he departed, else it would have spread like this. Now it is acting as is its nature to act.’
Still watching, Mika saw that the planetoid was indeed slowly collapsing. ‘These structural changes…’ she said.
Jerusalem informed her, ‘Energy and resources are being directed to many singular points inside it, sacrificial to the rest of it. It is making something and destroying itself in the process.’
Two screens now changed to show blurred scans, which Mika stared at without comprehension for a moment before suddenly it hit home.
‘It’s growing those nodules my medical mycelia started to grow,’ she said.
‘So it would appear,’ Jerusalem replied.
Mika stared long and hard. She shivered, the skin on her back prickling. Her mouth felt dry. ‘You know,’ she continued, ‘on Masada I blamed myself- and have been doing so ever since. I allowed perceived guilt to blind me: my fault that Apis, Eldene and Thorn would die.’
D’nissan turned to her. ‘Is this relevant?’
Mika nodded. ‘I was searching for a mistake I’d made which was causing the mycelia to malfunction and become cancerous, when in reality I’d made no mistake at all. The blueprint for growing those nodules was there all the time, quiescent until started by some sort of chemical clock.’
Colver and James turned to listen in. D’nissan then asked, ‘So what are we dealing with here?’
‘Seeds, and possibly something more than that.’ She paused in thought for a moment. ‘The mycelium I extrapolated and engineered from the sample I possessed was not complete, and reached this stage of its life too quickly. The seeds it produced were sterile.’
Colver raised a frigid eyebrow, then looked around. Everyone had felt the slight lurch and seen systems adjusting: the Jerusalem was moving.
Mika continued as if not noticing. ‘On Masada, just after the dracomen first came, I described them as a race rather than just biological machines because they had gained the ability to breed. Ian Cormac contested that by saying there is little distinction between evolved life and made life. He was right. This,’ she waved a hand at the screens, ‘like dracomen, can breed, though its reproductive method is something like that of an annual plant.’
‘Lots of little baby mycelia then?’ asked Colver.
D’nissan interjected, ‘You said “breed”. This seems little more than Von Neuman reproduction—as with all nanomachines.’
‘Oh, I know what I said.’
‘Then some kind of cross-pollination between separate mycelia? Until we did this there’s been only the one Skellor controls.’
‘No, not that.’
‘The word “breed” implies something more than just reproduction,’ D’nissan pointed out.
‘Yes, it does.’ Mika hesitated. She could not empirically prove her theory, but felt it to be true. She should not be afraid; she must venture this. Turning to Colver she said, ‘You opined that it is parasitic on technical civilizations because they spread it around, and once wiping them out, it shuts down.’ Colver nodded. She went on, ‘I think it goes further than that. The mycelia are breeding with us. Their breeding partner is a civilization and they’ll take from it everything they can utilize, destroying that civilization then seeding—those seeds remaining dormant until found by another intelligent species.’
All the screens now flicked to a retreating view of the collapsing planetoid.
‘Jerusalem, what’s happening?’ D’nissan asked.
‘Mika’s seeds are rapidly approaching maturity,’ Jerusalem replied, ‘as are those structures inside the planetoid that look suspiciously like some form of organic rail launching system. There are already objections to what I am about to do, but I consider it a sensible precaution.’
A black line, subliminal in its brevity, cut towards the planetoid, then all the screens blanked. When they came back on again, a ball of fire was collapsing in on itself, strange geometric patterns running in waves across its surface, dissolving and reforming. Again the screens blanked on a secondary fusion explosion. This time when they cleared, streamers of white fire were burning themselves out to leave a gaseous lambency above the red dwarf star.
The Ogygian had a long cylindrical body around which the landing craft were docked, a front sphere that had previously contained colonists and cargo, and a dart-like tail.
The crew’s quarters were in that tail, which was a thickening of the ship’s body with, extending from it at ninety degrees, three long, evenly spaced teardrop-section pillars holding out from the ship itself the lozenges of the U-space engine nacelles. The wider cylinder at the juncture of those three pillars contained an octagonal tube, usually spun up to simulate gravity. Around the forward end of the cylinder ran a ring-shaped screen, girdling the narrower body of the ship, and accessible to the eight segments into which the inner octagonal tube was divided. Seven of those segments were living quarters and recreation areas for the crew. One segment was the control bridge, which also still contained the captain.