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.
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.