“Why do I have the impression that this wasn’t necessarily a good thing?” Floyd asked.
“Because it wasn’t. Oh, the idea was sound, and the tiny machines did a lot of good in many areas of human life. UR was on the good side of the equation. The trouble is, when you’re dealing with what is in essence a new form of life, there simply isn’t room to make too many mistakes.”
“And human nature being what it is…” Floyd said.
“It was late July twenty seventy-seven,” Auger said. “For the last couple of years, we’d been busy releasing tiny machines into the environment in an attempt to fix the climate. The planet had been heating up for more than a century, as we spewed crap into the atmosphere. The oceans were screwed up. Sea levels were rising, flooding coastal town and cities. There were freak storms. Some places got colder. Some places got hotter. Some places just got… strange. Really strange. And that was when some coalition of dickheads had the idea that we ought to try squirting some intelligence into the weather system. ‘Smart weather,’ they called it.”
“Smart weather,” Floyd echoed, shaking his head incredulously.
“ ‘Big dumb idea’ would have been closer to the truth. It was going to solve all our problems. Weather we could turn on and off, weather we could boss around. We seeded the oceans and the upper atmosphere with tiny floating machines: invisible to the eye, harmless to people. Unthinkable numbers of them, self-replicating, self-redesigning, self-coordinating. They reflected radiation here; absorbed it there. Cooled down this place, warmed up that place. Made clouds bloom and disperse in geometric patterns, like something from a Dali painting. Made deep-ocean currents bend through right angles and flow through each other, like rush-hour traffic. They even made money out of it, painting thousand-kilometre-wide corporate logos across the Pacific Ocean in phytoplankton. They could arrange a local enhancement in the colours of the sunset, as viewed from your private island. A little more green tonight, sir? No problem at all. And you know, for a while, it actually worked. The climate stabilised and began to creep back to pre-twenty fifty conditions. The icecaps began to grow again. The deserts began to retreat. The hotspots began to cool down. People began to move back to cities they’d abandoned twenty years earlier.”
“Call me a fatalist,” Floyd said, “but I sense a ‘but’ coming along.”
“It was never going to work. Late in twenty seventy-six there were rumours—unconfirmed reports—of some weather patterns refusing to follow orders. Ocean circulation events no one could turn off. Clouds that wouldn’t disperse, no matter what you did to them. A persistent obscene symbol off the Bay of Biscay that had to be airbrushed out of every satellite image. It was clear—even though no one was admitting it—that some of the machines had evolved a little too far. They were more interested in their own self-preservation than obeying sequenced shutdown-and-disassemble commands. So you know what the coalition of dickheads did, for an encore?”
“I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”
“They came up with some even cleverer, slyer machines and said they’d sort out the first wave. And so they were given authorisation to inject these into the environment as well. Trouble is, they only made things worse. Teething problems, they said. Meanwhile, the out-of-control weather events were getting more freakish by the hour, far worse than anything we’d had to deal with before. Now it was mechanized weather. By mid-twenty seventy-seven, they’d thrown eight layers of technology into the fray, and things hadn’t improved. But then there was a hopeful sign: in early July of that year, the obscene symbol dissipated. Everyone got very excited, saying that the tide was turning and the machines had begun to return to human control. They all breathed one vast collective sigh of relief.”
“Which, I take it, was premature.”
“The phytoplankton bloom making up the obscene symbol had vanished for a reason: the machines had eaten the plankton. They’d started using living organisms to fuel themselves. It was against the most fundamental structures built into their programming—they weren’t supposed to harm living things—but still they did it. And it got much worse, really fast. After the plankton, they worked their way up the marine food chain pretty damn quickly. By mid-July there wasn’t much left alive in the entire Atlantic Ocean, apart from the machines. By the twentieth of that month, the machines had begun to attack land-based organisms. For a few days, the whiz kids still thought they could keep a lid on things. They had some small successes, but not enough to make a difference. On the twenty-seventh, the machines digested humanity. It happened very quickly. So quickly it was almost funny. It was like the Black Death directed by Buster Keaton. By the twenty-eighth, with the exception of a few extremophile organisms buried deep underground, there were no living things left alive on Earth.”
“But someone must have survived,” Floyd said, “or else you wouldn’t be here to tell me any of this.”
“Some people made it through,” Auger said. “They were the ones who’d already left the surface of the Earth, moving into space habitats and colonies. Primitive, ramshackle affairs, barely self-sufficient, but enough to keep them alive while they coped with the loss of the Earth, and the numbing psychic trauma of what had happened. It was about then that we split into two political groupings. My people, the Threshers, said that nothing like this could ever be allowed to happen again, which is why we rejected the nanotechnology that had led to the development of the machines—and so much more—in the first place. The Slashers, on the other hand, thought that the damage was done and that there was no point in limiting themselves out of some misguided sense of penitence.”
Floyd was silent for a few moments, as he attempted to get his brain around everything Auger had told him. “But you told me you’re from twenty-two-whatever-it-was,” he said eventually. “If all this happened in the middle of the twenty-first century, there’s still quite a lot of history you haven’t told me about yet, surely.”
“Two hundred years of it,” Auger said, “but I’ll spare you the details. Really, not much has happened. The same political groupings still exist. We control access to Earth, and the Slashers control access to the rest of the galaxy. Most of the time, it’s been reasonably peaceable.”
“Most of the time?”
“We had a couple of small… disagreements. The Slashers keep trying to repair the Earth, with or without our consent. So far, they’ve only made things worse. There’s a whole ecology of machines down there now. The last time they tried—twenty-three years ago—we ended up having a small war over access rights. It turned messy—really messy—but we patched things up afterwards. It’s just a shame about what happened to Mars.”
“Nice to see wars haven’t gone out of fashion,” Floyd said.
Auger nodded sadly. “But in the last few months, things have turned sour again. That’s why I wasn’t exactly thrilled to discover a Slasher presence in your Paris. It tells me that they’re up to something, and that makes me worried. I can’t help but think it has to be bad news.”