Assemblers of Infinity

by Kevin J. Anderson

  The alien creators had known what their scout machines would do to a living world if the devices happened to touch down there, and so the aliens --

  far wiser than Parvu -- had incorporated a fail-safe routine to their programming. If an alien nanomachine encountered organic molecules during its initial attempts to assemble the primary blueprint in their Controllers'

  computers, the Disassemblers would shut down entirely. The Programmers, Quality Checkers, and Controllers would continue gathering data while waiting for further instructions. But they would not threaten any living world.

  Parvu had sabotaged those precautions with his clumsy prototypes.

  He reentered the NIL's main lab complex, then shuffled off to the storage area. His slippers felt too tight on his feet. His balance seemed to be gone, and he stumbled several times, holding himself up by leaning against a curved wall until most of the dizziness had passed. He thought he could hear the roaring passage of blood in his head.

  In the storage area, Parvu encountered a smell and a stillness that should not have been there. Boxes of backup equipment and components still sat where they had been stacked, wrapped in bioplastic film. But the cages holding the other two white rats -- Old Gimp's companions -- were accusingly still.

  Wire-mesh coffins.

  Inside, the two rats lay dead, bloated mounds of white fur.

  Parvu shrank back, for an instant terrified that the automata had broken free of their containment and had come to kill the other lifeforms in the NIL. But then he saw the rats' emaciation, their gas-swollen stomachs.

  Their food trays were empty. The metal edges had been scalloped and dented by tiny teeth as they gnawed in desperate appeal for food.

  Parvu had not remembered to feed them for days. Days. The two rats had pushed themselves against the wire mesh, clawing in a frantic attempt to tear each other apart for food. Both of their small wedge heads had flopped toward Parvu, glassy pink eyes now filmed and grayish with death. They seemed to be accusing him of betraying everything he had ever known, from his family and his world, to his helpless laboratory animals.

  Parvu stumbled out of the storage room. Unable to focus his vision, Parvu saw the screen swimming in front of his eyes. Images appeared in it from his mind, the squat form of Maia Compton-Reasor shaking a finger at him. Her glasses kept sliding down her nose. When Parvu tried to see the rest of her, he noticed that she was blocked, her other arm wrapped around the burly form of Maurice Taylor.

  Taylor looked like a tough football player, not the highly paid MIT

  research head. Taylor's brow was furrowed and accusing. "I knew we should have kept running computer simulations," he said. "Real nanotech research is too dangerous."

  As Parvu bumped against one of the self-conforming chairs, the forms of Compton-Reasor and Taylor merged into a tall, blond, cadaverous shape that he recognized as Piter Sommerveld, the head of the Belgian research group long suspected of doing unethical nanotech experiments. Sommerveld extended a finger out of the screen. He wore a tarnished silver ring set with a massive opal. "You should have let us tinker with it first, Jordan Parvu!"

  Parvu's skin felt like lava, seething and hot. The fever was eating him up -- could he have gotten sick from lack of sleep, from working too hard, from the stress? Or was this a sign of waste heat from madly replicating automata inside his body, eating him from the inside out as they swarmed through his cells, collecting data, analyzing, trying to communicate with their brethren inside the clean-room, getting ready to disassemble him!

  Rounding the corner in the outer labs, he saw the observation window and stared into a snapshot of hell, rippling with living rivers of flesh. The walls themselves seemed to be pulsing.

  The blobs of the enormous composite organism seemed to sense his approach and flowed away from the window, allowing him to look inside. A membrane of organic and metallic sludge had draped itself over the computer terminals like spiderwebs, over the toppled table, over the equipment. It had covered the control console at the seat of the nanocore, but the hybrids had left the glistening cylinder intact. Perhaps some memory of Kent's had warned them of triggering the fail-safe sterilization systems that would slag the chamber with x rays if anything breached the containment.

  The emergency override -- the "panic button" Erika had called it -- sat key-locked and encased in glass below the panel that housed the recording and data-entry flatscreens. Parvu prayed the rampant automata had not been smart enough to subtly reconfigure the electronics from the other side.

  As he stared through the window, the surface of the sea of disassembled flesh swelled and pulled itself together, rising up in a cylindrical shape. It became taller, spread out, grew protrusions as it drew more mass from the main organism. The hive of automata built something else, molecule by molecule, cell by cell.

  It was a body. Humanoid, but stylized, streamlined and smooth.

  Then it grew Kent Woodward's face, in a pulsating, ever-changing flow of psychedelic colors.

  Around the quarantine chamber, small colonies detached themselves from the primary mass and crawled about on the ceiling, moved over the smooth sections of walls, and fixed on the seals of the autoclave, on the blocked ventilation systems. The edges of the observation windows bubbled as a thin smear of automata chewed through the epoxies holding the thick glass in place.

  Trying to look both places at once and moving as fast as his fingers would allow, Jordan Parvu withdrew the small red-enameled key from his jumpsuit pocket. He had never thought he would have to use this intentionally.

  On the other side of the window, Kent Woodward's reconstructed body flinched, as if all the muscles had not yet been put back into place, as if the controllers did not yet know how to operate the vast and complex machine of a human being.

  Parvu's hand shook violently. He had to hold his arm steady with his other hand to find the slot, to slip the key into the lock-box around the panic button. He twisted it, then opened the glass covering.

  A dagger of pain shot up through his stomach, up his spine, and into his head. He had never felt anything like it before. A warning jab from the automata trying to gain control of his own body -- or just terror of dying?

  Inside the chamber, the Kent-reconstruction moved one leg, but its foot was still fused to the gelatinous mass on the floor. With slow precision, one cell at a time, a seam appeared, freeing a naked, perfectly formed foot.

  Parvu punched the priming button. Even now the underground capacitors would be charging.

  Kent opened his mouth as if to say something. Then his lips opened wider. His teeth looked very white and blocky, but then they sharpened. His face twitched, puckered, as his mouth and nose and cheeks elongated, stretching out into a long snout. His mouth opened again, this time showing sharp fangs that pierced upward, growing into tusks. His entire head contorted, cramming into a wedge shape, like a rat. Pointy ears protruded.

  White fur thick as spines poked out from his pores.

  Both of his arms extended. His hands flexed and grasped at air. They became claws, curved and sharp enough to rip through the wall of the quarantine chamber. Behind the mask of the monstrosity showed the clear, human eyes of Kent Woodward, filled with pain.

  Parvu's own skin seemed to be burning, his muscles knotting and rearranging themselves, crippling him. But he could still move.

  He felt something bump his feet, something small and moving.

  Instinctively, he flinched away, glanced downward. He could not keep himself from screaming.

  He saw a rat, a white lab rat. Old Gimp. Or an exact replica. It had been reassembled right at his feet.

  The automata were loose! They had finally broken out of their holding tank to burst free upon the entire Earth. He could see the seals around all the windows boiling, falling away.

  Parvu heard singing in his head, a million chittering voices all screaming NO! But he exerted control of his own body for one last time as he brought his finger down on the second button.
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  Beneath the floor of the NIL, a seven-armed array of capacitor banks dumped their charge at once, seven electrical cannonballs slamming together in the center of the star to create a plasma toroid that roared up the conducting path of the nanocore. Colliding with the depleted uranium slab set in the ceiling, the plasma spewed a shower of deadly x rays, sterilizing everything within a kilometer radius. Not even a virus could survive, nor a single nanomachine.

  Jordan Parvu felt a blinding white light behind his eyes, inside and out.

  Bright, bright ... very bright.

  --------

  CHAPTER 38

  THE DAEDALUS CONSTRUCTION

  "It's an entrance."

  Jason looked down the ramp that descended into the secondary structure.

  The corners of the arches were delicate and rounded, highly elongated. Each detail added to his guess of what the alien "builders" must have looked like.

  "How big is it?"

  Plodding in her cumbersome suit, Erika circled the ramp, taking measurements of the yawning hole with the electromagnetic sounder. "About three meters in diameter -- big enough to take the rover down. How about a Sunday drive?"

  Jason craned his neck and looked around. The ramp was set into the top of the building, directly beneath where the nine diamond-fiber arches came together at the base of the giant waterlily structure. He pulled the rover to where the ramp plunged under the lunar surface. Blackness swallowed the headlights. "That damned material makes it hard to see how far down it goes."

  He flicked up both the radar and IR sensors. The IR showed heat radiating from inside, but not enough to let him see any features -- and not enough to make him fear a nanocritter resurgence. The source of this warmth seemed to be something else entirely. "I guess the only thing to do is go down and see for ourselves."

  "You're getting pretty cavalier, Jase. What about sending the rover down telerobotically?"

  "We could have done that from the hopper." Erika still seemed skeptical, but Jason felt numbed by the grandeur around him. Somehow, he didn't think the "builders" would intentionally hurt them. "Where's your sense of adventure?"

  Erika rummaged in the rover's cargo bin and pulled out a portable relay antenna. Setting the parabolic dish on the top of the building, she tried to find a place to anchor it, but the pneumatic punch had no effect on the alien material. She finally stretched out the tripod and eyeballed it to the L-2

  point above.

  "I want to keep everybody informed what we're doing." She pulled out a winding of fine fiberoptic line, plugged it into the relay dish, and started unreeling it toward the ramp. "I've got a few kilometers of this stuff. At the very least, it'll help us not to get lost."

  "Hansel and Gretel on the Moon?"

  "Yeah. Ready to go?"

  "Just a minute. Cyndi, you been following this?"

  "Just be careful down there," came Cyndi's voice.

  Another cold shiver pulsed through him. It was a weird feeling, surrounded by a deserted alien complex as large as a small city. Craning his head back, he glanced up. A hundred meters overhead, the base of the kilometer-wide parabolic dish fused with the diamond-thread arches. This point seemed to be the central nexus for the whole complex. And the doorway led inside.

  Jason swallowed and turned back to the rover. As he watched Erika smooth the loop of fiberoptics to reel out behind them, he spoke into his mike. "Okay, Columbus -- we're going in."

  The ramp was steep, about a fifteen percent slope. Jason had to bend backwards to keep from stumbling with the massive sensor package he carried.

  High above, near the opening, they had been forced to abandon the rover in the first tight turns of the catacombs.

  Even worse, they almost turned back when Jason discovered they could transmit signals out through the fiberoptic connection, but they couldn't receive anything. Returning to the surface, they discussed the problem with Columbus.

  "The cavity must be a one-way membrane for radio waves," Newellen conjectured. After a brief consultation, Chu had directed them to continuously transmit their journey via the fiberoptic link.

  Erika used a cluster of lights to light the way along the sloping tunnel. The passage was tall and narrow and inclined to one side in a claustrophobic helical turn.

  "Like a parking ramp in Augusta," said Erika. She directed the stereochip cameras in front of her, piping the signals out the optical fibers to the relay dish, hoping that Columbus could still pick it up.

  Jason laughed. "I bet the Disney Corporation is already designing a new rover, complete with fiberoptics, so people can explore this place. Imagine the ticket prices."

  "And the lines!"

  Erika played her light up and down the walls of the corkscrew as they descended. The walls were black-speckled with a faint blue glow. The fibrous windings-within-windings continued to appear in the walls and floors.

  Otherwise, they saw no markings, warning signs, or even instructions.

  "Your nanocritters aren't much for interior decorating," he said, trudging after her.

  She hesitated. "Maybe they don't care about such things. We shouldn't assume the builders think like we do."

  Jason quickly lost count of the turns as they descended. He had abandoned all sense of direction; his inner ear was useless to him. He saw only Erika's light in front of him as it splashed against the weirdly textured wall.

  She captured everything on the stereochips. Beams pierced the darkness, showing the walls opening into wider passages. She shone her light around to the right. The corkscrew had stopped and was flush with the floor. "Looks like we've hit bottom," she said.

  "Great." Jason placed the diagnostic package on the hard ground. He took care to lower the box by bending his knees. "This thing feels like it's gained weight."

  Grunting in her unwieldy suit, Erika knelt in front of the package.

  Powering up the unit, she ran through a series of self-calibrations. "Stop breathing so hard, Jason. You're biasing the seismic sensors."

  Jason took the light away from her and looked around, but most of the illumination was either absorbed or scattered by the alien material, reflecting barely enough for him to see in the large chamber.

  Everything had a fuzzy-blue look to it, as if Jason could see the walls better without his illumination. He handed the light back to Erika. She knelt on one knee in front of the diagnostic package.

  "Did you bump this against anything bringing it down here, Jase?" she asked. "You sure you didn't prang it against a wall?"

  "No, why?"

  Jason squinted at the box on the floor. LED readouts, touch-sensitive controls, and a few hard-switches made up most of the exterior control panel.

  Erika straightened. "I'm getting an anomalous reading on some of the instruments. Really anomalous. UV photons are at a hundred watts per square meter -- enough to give you a bad sunburn if you weren't in your suit. The second number is the neutrino flux. It's way too high."

  Jason frowned. Neutrinos? They were notoriously difficult to capture in instruments, needing about a hundred light-years of lead to be sure of catching one; the new superconductor-based detectors were much better, but still not completely reliable. "Neutrino measurements aren't too accurate anyway," he said.

  "We're not trying to be exact to a bunch of decimal points -- but look at that exponent! Five orders of magnitude higher than what we saw up top. The detector can't be that far off."

  Erika pondered, then keyed in a query, moving clumsily with her gloved fingers. "It's about the flux of neutrinos you'd expect from a nuclear reactor."

  He studied the perimeter of the chamber again, searching for telltale signs of any kind of machinery.

  "No neutrons, though," Erika continued. "No charged particles. Nothing else except a UV flux." She stood up. "Don't ask me to figure it. Should we go on?"

  "We don't know a damn bit more about the place," Jason said. He recalled sitting in front of his holo-dais, while Eiffel stared down at him.

&nb
sp; He had pondered the arches, the secondary structures, trying to infer something about the alien builders, a hint as to their mindset, their purpose, or their home world.

  "Wait, maybe that UV flux does give us a little hint. What if it's their illumination? Maybe that's the alien equivalent of visible light, the frequency they see in. If their star is a UV radiator, then it makes sense."

  Jason swung the lights behind them to where the complex opened up, deeper beneath the lunar surface. Handing the lights back to Erika, he picked up the massive diagnostic package with a grunt. "I feel like a pack mule." He followed Erika cautiously into the dark, not sure where they were going.

  "Follow your nose," Erika said.

  "Nothing else around here to navigate by."

  With each footstep they took, the darkness opened up in an ever-expanding circle. Erika moved the illumination back and forth. Looking down, Jason could see only the indicator lights from the diagnostics package.

  The walls, the floor, the ceiling of the alien structure seemed to swallow up photons as they struck, leaving only the windings-within-windings material glowing a cool purple.

  They trudged on in silence, growing more tense each moment. Waiting for something to jump out at them. Every step Jason took seemed lighter than the last, which didn't make sense.

  "This is weird, like one of those House of Mystery tourist traps with slanted floors and trapezoidal archways."

  Erika finally pointed the beam to the top of the ceiling. "The ceiling is sloping up too. Everything is focused on where the corkscrew started."

  The chamber kept getting larger around them. The downward slope increased again. Jason took two steps in front of her, as if he were walking into the mouth of something terrifying.

  "Holy shit!" He felt himself starting to slip. His booted feet couldn't find a grip on the floor -- because the floor was no longer there. It had suddenly lurched beneath him, dropping away like a funhouse gimmick. A surge of gravity grabbed at him. "I'm falling!"