Time of the Stones

by Fred Rothganger

  “Antikva, it’s dry season.”

  “Yes, of course. They’ll be dormant. You should wait until the equinox.”

  * * *

  The lab staff covered the worktable with something like a large pan, its lip several centimeters tall. They flooded it with a solution of alcohol and placed the dish of scintillae on a thin glass stand in the middle of the pool.

  Repeatedly the scintillae slid up over the rim of the Petri dish and tasted the liquid. Each time it immediately withdrew from the lethal concentration. There was no cover. A lid could not restrain the scintillae in any case, and foreign organisms that fell into the dish did not survive long.

  The lab staff began synthesizing stockpiles of organic compounds for the task ahead. The glassmaker worked constantly, producing new pieces of equipment: vials, coiled tubes, beakers and retorts.

  One day Susan asked, “Where has Malsa been?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about her. She’s always sick with something.”

  “Sick? What is she complaining of?”

  “Stomach cramps, and itchiness in—” The woman stepped close to Susan to whisper. “—private places. I think it’s just menstrual issues.”

  “Could be a yeast infection ...” Susan gasped. “Bring her here, quick! She’s been handling scintillae without protection. You all have.”

  They carried Malsa to the lab building and set up a pallet for her under the tent near the Stone.

  Susan knelt next to her. “Malsa, dear, how are you feeling?”

  The woman coughed and shivered.

  Susan ordered, “Build up the fire. Make this place warm.” She turned back to Malsa. “The scintillae don’t eat flesh, but the sugars in your body could attract them. Some might have crawled up your abdomen. You need to undress and expose yourself to the Stone. I’ll draw them out.”

  One of the other women assisted Malsa. Then Susan flashed the HOME code, asking the scintillae to head toward the light source.

  People waited for several minutes. Nothing happened.

  Susan said, “Shade the scintillae colony. This will drive them crazy.” She sent the pulses again, this time with blinding brightness across Malsa’s entire body. The whole lab filled with reflected colors, like an Ancient dance hall.

  It was an old code.

  Malsa continued to deteriorate. Susan woke at her side on the third morning, to find the lab staff looking somber. She put her hand on Malsa’s lifeless body. “I’m sorry ...”

  So many humans had died in the quest for technology. Some, like Malsa, were victims of the process itself. They worked in mines or factories swimming in toxic waste, and never tasted the benefits of their sacrifice. Others, like her Ancient lover, did not live long enough to see their dreams fulfilled. Now they were gone and nothing could bring them back.

  “How cruel that you should die before your time. I swear that your life will not be wasted, nor the lives of all who went before. We will build the world you should have gotten.”

  * * *

  Susan experimented with the colony, working out a new dictionary of pulse codes. It turned out to be more efficient than the one she had originally designed. They had adapted to crawling over rough terrain, latching onto a piece of food, ejecting invaders, and so on. There was so much that would be useful in a new nanobot swarm. Nothing like a thousand years of evolution to solve a few engineering problems.

  There was one problem with evolution: anything that lacked survival value would eventually fall away. The organism would not waste energy on it. The original scintillae had a complex molecular machine for downloading gene sequences. Unless they decided to rewrite themselves in the wild, it was useless.

  She sent the SEQ command, and whooped for joy when the ACK code came back. Then she sent the first DNA base code and waited. The ACK never came, no matter how many times she tried. This colony was a dead end. Perhaps, by sheer luck, another would still retain the necessary machinery.

  * * *

  The second expedition returned near the beginning of rainy season, carrying over 100 samples. This time the men had succeeded in putting them into dormancy for the trip home. Now the moat box was crowded with row after row of dishes. Lots of disgruntled scintillae trying to connect with each other.

  The expedition had marked a crude map where they found each sample. Those nearby on the map spoke a similar pulse code. Those farther apart were also farther in dialect.

  It was a good sign. The genes for the downloader might still be intact somewhere. Perhaps not all in a single organism, but a little cross-breeding might solve that.

  Susan did her very best to find the SEQ code for each colony. Then she tested which DNA base codes they would ACK. Those that responded to the most codes were bred with each other. The others went to storage.

  The work was tedious and long. Test after test, generation after generation. Weeks ... months ... until one day a colony responded to all four bases. Perhaps the downloader was working. There was only one way to know.

  She told the lab workers, “Take a small sample and save the rest for breeding stock.” When the sample was ready, she sent the DNA sequence for green fluorescent protein. The next day she illuminated the whole table in the bluest blue the Stone could make.

  Nothing.

  The original scintillae had escaped near the beginning of the Dark Times, before their gene-synthesis complex was fully functional. Susan had sometimes worked on the problem during the intervening centuries, just for entertainment. A small DNA sequence inserted at the right place could fix it.

  Of course, that required a way to download genes. Susan gave the order for her box to be retrieved from storage. They set it before her and carefully unlocked the lid. Like Dracula’s coffin it swung open, revealing a small gray cube about a hand’s width on a side.

  They gently lifted it to the floor, in the center of an array of supplies. There was thermoplastic for constructing microfluidic channels. Reservoirs with glass straws supplied various polymers, fixatives and catalysts.

  The lab hands attached electrodes to a battery of galvanic cells, delivering several thousand volts to charge the Ancient swarm of microbots. Susan communicated with it via another hack to the device driver for the Stone’s projection system.

  For the first time in a millennium her corpse stirred to life. Immediately it resumed dying. Gray dust drifted off the cube as it shaped itself into the required form and connected to all the tubes and piles of materials. Racing against time, it assembled nucleic acids into long chains.

  A few days later they collected the small droplet of DNA and infected a colony of scintillae. If this didn’t work, the only remaining option would be to sequence the entire scintillae genome. Would the old swarm hold out that long?

  They repeated the same test as before. Susan sent the green fluorescent sequence, waited a day, then bathed the table in blue light.

  One of the lab hands said, “Look! It’s glowing green.”

  Susan almost burst into tears. At last! Now we can really get started.

  They reproduced the breeding stock and spent several months selecting colonies for reliability. Susan tried longer, more complex sequences. She downloaded updates to the gene-synthesis complex itself. Eventually they bred a strain of scintillae that could download anything.

  * * *

  Perio came by. “I’ve poured the Basin’s resources into this for two years, and what do you have to show me? Dishes filled with glow-in-the-dark goo! I don’t believe you’re serious, and I will not be made a fool. I think it’s time to bring in more torture victims for you.”

  “That worked once because there was a concession I could give. Now I am doing everything I can. If you torture me to do the impossible, I swear I’ll kill myself.”

  He laughed. “How can a ghost commit suicide?”

  “I’m not a ghost. I don’t care to explain, and you won’t understand. The Ancients gave me the power to end my own existence. Once that choice is made, no magic—Ancien
t or modern—can ever bring me back.”

  “So you can free yourself from the Stone?”

  “Oh yeah, I can.” She nodded in triumph. “I have often craved death, more so since I met you. I would finally go to my lover’s arms, whether in oblivion or eternity. And you would be left with a Stone that is useless, so don’t even think about testing me on this.”

  The King glared at her. They both knew he would not gamble away world domination on the chance that Antikva was lying.

  “You should be pleased with my progress. We can now command living things to take any form we wish. That was the hardest part. The rest will come quickly.”

  “It had better.”

  “Oh, it will.” She chuckled darkly.

  * * *

  The lab staff prepared to leave for the evening. Susan told them, “Take the day off tomorrow. That’s an order.”

  She was perpetually erratic, but this was something new. They looked at her, hoping for an explanation.

  “I plan to run a computer program to design some genes for the scintillae. I will start it right after dawn. But if anyone comes onto the mesa, the Stone will wake me instead. I will be most annoyed if I lose a day’s work because of visitors.”

  They shrugged and filed out.

  * * *

  Scintillae could move fast because each one had a jointed exoskeleton laced with actin filaments. It was the same protein found in muscle fibers. They barely resembled the original yeast from which they were created.

  Susan downloaded genes for special proteins to build new, non-organic structures. Some of them were nanomachines and special materials designed by the Ancients. Gradually she replaced parts of the cell until they were stronger and faster than anything seen before in Nature.

  The scintillae got reduced to a blob of living matter at the heart of a complex machine. Yeast knew how to get energy both with and without oxygen. That was the difference between bread and beer. Susan added a third pathway for electricity. They could metabolize food into electricity, and they could power their life processes from electricity alone. They could even convert electricity into fat for storage.

  She augmented their natural control pathways with a computer at the atomic scale. She added radio and high-speed optical links. The living machines were ready to run a swarm program, instructions that would tell them how to move in formation and create larger things.

  One morning she told the staff, “Take away the moat and the table. Just put the dish on the floor and give it plenty of mash. I also want you to feed it some crushed rock. Here’s what to look for ...” She described how to recognize the right minerals.

  The mass sat there without any barrier to keep the world safe. It dissolved away parts of the gravel they fed it, and even some of the stone pavement that topped the mesa. It ate voraciously and grew to over 50 kilograms.

  Susan decided that “The Blob” would be a bad choice for movie night. Her helpers might run shrieking in terror, and rightly so.

  She sent the first program. While the lab hands watched, about 90% of the mass separated and crawled under the tent. They rushed out of the building to follow it.

  It crawled to one of the Grecian pillars standing on the eastern edge of the mesa and slid to the top like a big glob of mucus. It extended two large square leaves, then a flower that looked like a stir-fry pan with a stamen sticking out the center. The dish pointed east. The creature wrapped tendrils around the ornate stonework. One thin root snaked down the pillar, found the nearest pot and poked itself into the soil.

  Susan told the team, “Take what’s left of the swarm. Follow the east road out of the city until you are well away from any homes, then put it on the ground.”

  One of them did as instructed, and several others went along to watch the show. When he released the swarm, it formed a smaller plant. It plunged roots into the ground and grew one large square leaf on top. The upper surface was dark blue, almost black, sucking in sunlight.

  Nothing more happened, at least that they could see. They all returned home.

  * * *

  Susan called the strange new plant a dendroid. By the end of rainy season that year, it had grown to the size of a small tree. The single square leaf on top was almost as wide as some of the houses. Each day it turned to follow the sun from dawn to dusk. The stem was tall enough to keep the leaf off the ground all day long.

  Occasionally one of the lab hands would go and inspect the dendroid, but nothing they reported back surprised Susan. She seemed to know exactly what it was doing. In fact, the inspection trips were more make-work than anything, since there was little to do in the lab.

  By the equinox there were four dendroids the size of houses. By the start of rainy season there were 16. They gradually spread across the open plain, always away from homes or farms. It was the worst land in the valley, yet they seemed to thrive on it. They arranged themselves into regular rows, spaced so they never cast a shadow on their neighbors.

  * * *

  Susan called the lab staff together. “For your own safety, don’t come back here tomorrow. Thank you for all your years of work. Take anything you wish from the lab as a souvenir, but sterilize it first. Watch for scintillae the rest of your lives. If you ever see any, catch and kill it.”

  She sent a message to the King: “The weapon is ready. Come to the mesa at the break of dawn, and I will show you what it can do.”

  Unleashed

  Year 9, Day 150

  The King arrived to find Susan standing alone on the empty mesa. He asked, “Where’s the Stone?”

  “You’re late. The sun’s been up for over an hour.”

  “I was eating breakfast with my family.”

  “I sent it back to its rightful place in the mountains.” She smiled with deep pleasure. “Ah, you should have seen it. My beast came and carried it away. It walked down those stairs and out of the city to the west.”

  He reached out and touched her shoulder. “You’re solid.”

  “Oh yes! Isn’t it wonderful?” She spread her arms and twirled. Long red hair and white skirt flared out. She stopped and they swished around her.

  “Where’s the lab?” Aside from Susan, the only vestige from their years of work was that strange plant on top of one of the pillars, with its dish-shaped flower.

  “I destroyed it, everything: the building, the equipment, the scintillae samples. The ashes are in the city dump. I’ll go exterminate all the wild scintillae when I find the time.”

  She spread arms to the sky, threw back her head and laughed in triumph. “Humans created me. Now machines will rule the Earth!”

  She stopped abruptly. “I’m starving. Mind if I come over for breakfast?”

  He shrugged in bemusement and gestured toward the stairs.

  As they descended she said, “You know, this is the first time I’ve ever gone down these stairs.” She looked around with eyes wide open, soaking in the new vista. “Now, let’s see ... those must be the royal quarters over there.”

  The King nodded. They walked across the citadel plaza toward the palace. It had a pair of large wooden doors, which guards opened for them. They entered a huge room. Along each side ran wooden tables and benches, obviously a mead hall of sorts. At the far end on a dais stood the throne. Court was not yet in session, and the room was nearly empty of people.

  The King stood near the dais and clapped his hands twice. Immediately two maids in uniform appeared and stood at attention. He said, “Bring some food for Antikva.”

  The maids stared in wonder at the creature before them. Everyone knew about Antikva but few ever got to see her. The stories of her beauty were not exaggerated. So trim and firm, yet so plump and—

  “Move it!” the King barked.

  Instantly their wonder turned to fear and they hurried away. Less than five minutes later they returned and spread a repast of cold meats and sweet breads at the end of the table nearest the dais.

  Susan stood next to the table and tore into the food.
She gobbled down a chicken leg, tossed the bone and grabbed another. “Mmm, this is deliciouf!”

  The maids barely hid their disgust. What a pig! How did she stay so skinny?

  After working through five times any reasonable breakfast, Susan stopped, licked her fingers and told her hosts, “Thanks. That was truly the best meal of my entire life—because it’s the first one that actually mattered.”

  The maids felt some pleasure at the compliment. They picked up the remains and cleaned the table.

  Susan hopped onto the dais and slung herself casually across the throne, with knees hanging over one arm and back leaning against the other. She folded her hands in her lap, smiled coyly at the King and waited.

  He said, “Er, my generals will be here in a little while so we can discuss how to use the weapon.”

  Susan replied with the accent of African descendants in the Ancient United States, “Boy, your situation ain’t sunk in yet. I’m in charge here.” She laughed. “I’ve always wanted to do that.” Her expression grew dark with hate. “I’ve waited a long time for this day. I can never forgive you for what you did to my friends. Every night as I cried myself to sleep, I found comfort in dreaming up creative ways to kill you.”

  The King signaled for his guards. Six men left the door and marched down the center of the hall toward the dais.

  She watched them come. “You must be kidding. What part of ‘weapon’ did you not understand?” She stood and stepped down from the dais.

  The men surrounded her.

  In a whirl she used her feet, elbows and hands to strike key pressure points on each man. Two fell to the floor unconscious. A third could no longer stand on his left leg and stumbled to join them. The remaining three suddenly found their arms very difficult to move.

  She stepped over the fallen men, returned to the dais, grabbed the King by the collar with both hands and hoisted him off the throne he had just taken. As he dangled in her grasp, she said, “Now, will you make my day and call the rest of the army in here?”