Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  Presently, Dr. Klein was seated in his chair, looking at the latest images of the Ecophage, as taken by sensor probes that evening. It was just a silvery, brownish mess, with no particularly interesting designs to the layman.

  But Klein always noticed the uniform swelling of parts, the evenly distributed heat blooms, which, when viewed through certain wavelength filters, appeared to have the intent of a flock of birds taking flight, then suddenly changing direction. And there were also the occasional, but no less noteworthy, emergences of a logarithmic spiral, which quite often appeared naturally in the universe, from the shell of a nautilus on Earth Cradle, to the spiral shape of the Milky Way itself.

  Floating off to his left side, there was a holopane that showed the seminal works of Dr. James Pan, whose lengthy essay The Gray Goo Event: How a Cloud of Biovorous Nanoreplicators Proves the End of a Biologically Sound Environment had defined the problem of the Ecophage for all humanity.

  Klein was currently reading through the part that had literally defined the equation that he and his people used, to this day, to predict how fast the cloud-swarm would devour all life and resources on a planet:

  IN REGARDS TO REPLICATION RATE

  If we simply ignore the considerations of thermal pollutants for the moment, and the barriers those might place on the spread of an SRP (self-replicating probe), then in theory a geographically and uniformly distributed population of SRPs could increase the overall size and mass of their population at the expense of any biosphere it came into contact with, according to the following relation:

  Mrep = Minit e(t/T)

  for maximum exponential growth, where t is elapsed time (sec), t is generation cycle or replication time (sec), Mrep is mass of SRP swarm at time of t, and Minit is initial individual nanite mass at time T.

  But of course, we will need to understand the conversion time, and what all this entails (SEE page 47, MASS MAGNIFIERS).

  Using the lowest possible assumed values from pages 23-25, and taking into consideration the energy barriers for a device this size, it is possible that molecular manipulators might be slewed up to speeds of 80 cm/sec…

  It was an astonishing number, and also one that could not be verified until Klein and his people witnessed the destruction of Ratavastec, which was soon to commence. Even now, the cloud-swarm was descending on the outermost planet, Corpolon. Already there were heat blooms off the scale, and this was just for a dead planet with no life on it, only minimal ices to be converted to energy.

  “Would you just look at it,” said Iola Nabi. She was the chief mathematician for the expedition, and had made a career out of the funding she got in making prediction models. Her head scarf framed her mocha-colored face, and her eyes glittered in the light of the pane showing Corpolon’s end. “My god, just…look.”

  Klein nodded. “Did you ever feel so small?”

  “Not ever. Not like this.”

  They were seeing something that happened only once every few hundred years. Parts of the Ecophage had branched off, other cloud-swarms had gone off in search of resources elsewhere, with no clear intent to ever rendezvous with the Principle Swarm. It was unknown just how many swarms were out there, but they were prevalent near the Galactic Core.

  The theory was that, since most intelligent species had developed on the outskirts of the galaxy, away from all the chaos happening near the Core, there hadn’t been many civilizations that ever mined the Core, leaving ungodly amounts of raw materials there for the Ecophage to feast on.

  “What’s the replication rate reading now?” Klein asked.

  Iola seemed not to have heard him. She was staring at the destruction of the planet, mesmerized. Corpolon looked like a giant fuzzy ball now, for it was surrounded by trillions of machines, great and small. Mostly small. The nanites were already hard at work around the poles, mining ammonia ice, and what little water was hidden beneath the surface. According to the data, massive amounts of hydrogen and oxygen were being produced, presumably for fuel reasons. Corpolon’s two moons were also being surrounded, the surface being raked clean of helium-3.

  Iola finally snapped herself out of it, and said, “Eh, increasing threefold by the hour, as my first model predicted.”

  “That fast?”

  She nodded. “I’ve never wanted to be more wrong in all my life, but it looks like I was dead on.”

  Oblivion awaits, Klein thought. As a scientist, he did not like such fatalistic thinking. He desired solutions. But it was difficult, standing where he was, seeing what he was seeing, not to feel a touch of the foregone conclusion.

  Iola looked at something only she could see, a pane on her lenses. “Eblerost is downstairs at his sensor station, he’s saying the SRPs are going right for the sapphire deposits, just like you said they would.”

  “Thanks to Pan’s equations. If anybody deserves the credit, it’s him.”

  “It’s amazing, he figured all this out almost a hundred years ago.”

  Pan had figured it all out, all right. He had looked at some of the data the Faedyans had provided ages ago, old studies done by their ancient scientists. It turned out, each time the Ecophage encountered a new problem, it could be expected to generate massive amounts of heat. Too many SRPs working at once created tremendous amounts of waste heat, which began to warm up the environment. If the environment heated up too much, then the biospheric conversion typically ceased, and the Ecophage began to fail.

  Pan predicted that, if they were to follow the Ecophage long enough, they would find that sapphire would be a preferred resource for the SRPs to mine and transform. Preferred, because its softening point was 2,070°K, and it had a high strength, making it a great substitute for diamond if the SRPs found themselves in a pinch. If the SRPs were forced to forage for organic substrate in order to reproduce, then they could do a lot worse than sapphire. In fact, sapphire might do even better than diamond, since the combustion temperature for diamond was between 870°K and 1,070°K.

  “It’s astonishing just how easily we can predict its behavior,” Klein said. “But we can’t seem to figure out a way to stop it.”

  Iola pulled her gaze away from the death of Corpolon, and looked at him. “Did you get an answer from the Faedyans?”

  He sighed. “Yes, but it was short. Their Council for Developing Sciences basically just said, ‘You have all the data we ever gained on it.’ Our ambassadors didn’t get much else, but I also get the feeling they didn’t try very hard.”

  “Did you tell them that all the information we’ve gotten from all xenos is extremely outdated, incomplete, and in a hundred different fucking alien languages?”

  “I did,” Klein said. “I told them that all the data they took on the cloud-swarm is anywhere from five hundred to ten thousand years old, and that a lot of it is missing, and that a lot of dead scientists’ work have been for naught if we can’t find a way of stopping this thing someday.”

  “And what did they say?” Iola asked.

  “That I’ve already tried their patience enough with budgetary demands.”

  She shook her head ruefully. “Don’t they see? Don’t they understand? This will kill us all, eventually. Now, or a million years from now.”

  “You should be used to it by now, Iola. How often have we ignored natural disasters until it’s too late?” Klein shook his head. Then, something else occurred to him, and he changed the subject. “Did you know a group of Vigiles came aboard yesterday to arrest Ivana?”

  Iola was shocked. “Arrest her? What for?”

  “Apparently, she was known to fraternize with an Isoshi. There’s a new law enacted. Xeno Nonconformist Act, or something. Some of Kalder’s doing.”

  Iola shook her head, then nodded at the fuzzy ball of Corpolon. “They care about who we’re all fucking, but not about the things that are fucking us.”

  Klein snorted out a laugh. He thought that should go in his journals. Who knows, perhaps someday, a thousand years from now, when all our scientific work here has gone t
o waste and our names are forgotten, all that will remain is Iola Nabi’s immortal words about us getting fucked.

  It would make a terrific final epithet for humanity.

  “I hope you’re getting enough sleep,” Klein said, looking at the circles under her eyes.

  Iola looked at him like he’d grown an extra limb. “Are you kidding? We’ve been waiting all our lives for this, spent forty years wondering if we’d live long enough to watch this. It’s the the destruction of an entire solar system at the hands of the Ecophage. I need to record every second of this.”

  “Diogenes is recording all the relevant data.”

  “I still want to see.”

  “I understand.” Clapping Iola on the shoulder, he added, “But make sure you get some rest. I want you fresh when Pawache dies.”

  IT TOOK FIVE days for Corpolon to be almost completely consumed. When the Ecophage was done with it, the planet was cut down to two-thirds its size, and the cloud-swarm’s size had nearly tripled. It now carried a massive cloud of dust and ice at its core. It whipped around Corpolon and what was left of its moons, gained speed via repeated Oberth maneuvers. It looked like the rippling tail of a greatwyrm, but without the wyrm itself.

  Its great size, coupled with the distance that Eyes On kept from it while it worked, made the cloud-swarm appear to be moving relatively slowly. When finally it set out for its next target, the cloud-swarm assumed a fanned shape, spreading out across the asteroid belt that it encountered, never slowing down as it gobbled up mile-long rocks and made its way to the gas giant Ulfbert.

  ULFBERT HAD THIRTY-SEVEN moons. Twenty-nine of them were devoured, the rest were left alone.

  The main focus of the cloud-swarm was Ulfbert itself. The red-and-green giant was teeming with hydrogen, helium, methane, ethane, and ammonia. The nanites produced chlorofluorocarbons in massive quantities, almost a trillion gallons of it, and used it to manufacture propellants and refrigerants. Several nuclear reactions erupted every hour. They all happened, deep, deep within the cloud, as the nanites stoked the fires necessary to produce the isotopes necessary for other key processes.

  Klein and his people watched in rapt attention. No human being had ever seen this before, never seen the Ecophage in action. It was proving to be a complex ecosystem, filled with trials and errors, almost like watching Nature go through evolution in fast-forward. The churning cloud that surrounded Ulfbert was, after a time, Ulfbert itself. That is, it became impossible to tell where the gas giant ended and the cloud-swarm began.

  “It’s a feeding frenzy,” Zebriah commented more than once. He was their orbital dynamicist, and his job had been to calculate the speed of the Ecophage as it swelled and orbited each planet.

  New satellites were being produced all the time, some of them were giant new factories, made from metals that the cloud-swarm had presumably gathered from Corpolon. Now, with Ulfbert as fuel, the SRPs had the energy they required to create these new factories, which now generated smaller probes, which in turn were mass-producing more nanites.

  It was a violent, horrific act, one that took place over thirteen days. And, when it was all done, the Ecophage moved on, leaving only a ball of gas half Ulfbert’s original size in its wake.

  THE ECOPHAGE WAS really excited now. It was behaving like they had never seen it do before. The cloud rocketed through space with lightning storms rippling through its middle. Smaller nucler reactions were happening deep within its nucleus. It had nearly doubled in size again, and Eyes On, along with the rest of the Merchant Research Fleet, had been forced to back way, way off.

  It was now at a size where it managed to capture two planets at once. It was astonishing! The two planets were Hostetller and Normandoi, and they were within eighty million miles of each other when the Ecophage descended on them. It bathed in the light of Ratavastec Prime, the main-sequence star, which watched helplessly as the Ecophage first stretched itself thin as cotton to catch both worlds. Over the next eight days, Hostetller and Normandoi drifted farther apart, separating the two halves of the Ecophage. But after Hostetller was devoured, that half of the cloud-swarm left the planet’s corpse behind, and rejoined its Normandoi half.

  Now fully reformed, the hundred-million-mile-long swarm surged like the high tide towards Pawache, the only planet in the Ratavastec System with life.

  IT WAS A horror show. All who saw it either wept or went morbidly silent. There was no intelligent life on Pawache, but there was a burgeoning biodiversity, which had started some fifty million years ago and had been closely monitored by Isoshi and Faedyans for a few thousand years.

  Green and purple plant life, along with small, skittering life-forms, had only just started to cover the planet. They were still struggling against a too-thin atmosphere, and water slightly below the alkalinity one would want to see on a world with such life.

  Watching it all getting dismantled at the molecular level was both the saddest and most scientifically exciting thing they had ever seen, or would ever see.

  The Merchant Research Fleet had their own sensors in place there—they had been put there fifty years ago, when it became obvious that’s where the Ecophage was going. Half their budget had been used to get samples from Pawache before the end, including dozens of animals. Most of them had died out of their natural habitat.

  But there were other sensors through which Dr. Klein and his people could watch the death of a world. Sensors put in place by a group of Harbingers. Doubtless, they wanted to use vids of the destruction as propaganda, one more reason to surrender all hope.

  Vid footage from the surface showed Ratavastec Prime become blotted out. An appalling darkness fell over the land, casting mountains, seas, and plains into total darkness. Streaks of larger probes looked like falling stars entering the atmosphere. Winds began to pick up as trillions upon trillions of nanites began poisoning the air, seeking out all oxygen and hydrogen particles. The skies turned red as the nantie clouds spread thinly across the planet. Lightning storms began as the friction between nanites and particles conjured up static discharge. That same discharge was collected and used as fuel for the conversion effort.

  Klein and his people watched as creatures ran screaming, flesh falling from their bodies and meat melting off their bones as the molecular bonds were broken down. It looked like flesh-eating bacteria had taken all of them over, and the vid footage looked like the victims’ suffering had been put in fast-forward.

  Iola collapsed to her knees at one point. Another researcher hugged Klein close, sobbing.

  The Ecophage really got cooking on the third day. All life had already been extinguished—at least, as far as they could see. And now soups of sludge moved across the oceans of the world as the nanites focused on the water supplies. The seas boiled. The ice in the poles sublimated. Nuclear explosions rippled throughout the atmosphere as the Super Factories (as Klein and his people had dubbed them) began pumping out Super Drones, which chuffed out columns of smoky clouds that turned out to be a new kind of nanite they had never seen before, one that moved faster than all the others.

  The fourth day was mostly dedicated to the Ecophage’s efforts to drill beneath the planet’s surface. It did this by a combination of tornado-like funnels of superheated debris, directed by the nanites themselves. Some sensors suggested they had begun extraction of parts of Pawache that past explorers had determined were probably rich in diamond and sapphire.

  By the fifth day, all that was left was the gray goo, the leftovers of the biochemical breakdown, and thousands upon thousands of miles of desert wasteland, where colossal cyclones of brown dust pushed across the surface like lonely ghosts. A full third of the surface mass had been removed, transformed into either energy or nanitemass. There was not a single sign of biomass.

  It looked like what Earth Cradle would look like if God had decided to wipe the world of Man and everything else, and start all over.

  The footage from the surface cameras had only lasted the first two days, because the climate
had quickly turned into a kind of hell, the surface an inferno. But what footage they had was extraordinary, and rare. A lot of the footage the Faedyans had given them was old and corrupted. But this…

  Here is a horror show the people of the Republic won’t soon forget, thought Klein, while composing his notes. It took him a moment to realize he was weeping.

  KLEIN CONSIDERED NOT showing the footage to anyone, but then he remembered the Harbingers had a lot of the footage too, and would spread it themselves. That made the choice a lot easier. At least if he released it, he could tack on a lot of academic analysis, neutralize some of the panic with some mumbo jumbo, perhaps.

  It might work, he thought. It might buy us more time to study it, a bit of excitement to stir more budgetary allotments.

  He stood near the cloud tracking center, watching the latest on the Ecophage’s movements. It was already completing its gravity assist, and was soaring away from the corpse of Pawache. He had a brandy in his hands. It was his fifth one. One for each day it had taken the cloud-swarm to totally devour the planet.

  “You going to be okay?” It was Iola, speaking from a million miles away.

  When her words finally reached him, they seeped into the soft, spongy barrier he had unintentionally erected around his brain. Klein felt bereft, as if the Ecophage had done to him what it had done to the whole Ratavastec System. He kept seeing the destruction in his mind, replaying the screams of the animals. And from there, it wasn’t hard to imagine what the Ecophage would do to a human world. To a whole civilization.

  “It’s not fair,” he said. “They weren’t even given the chance.”