Recursion

Herb 5: 2210

The ship reinserted itself into normal space. Herb braced himself for the attack…

Nothing happened.

Gradually he relaxed. Herb felt like an old-fashioned wind-up toy. The tension would slowly build up inside him, hunching his shoulders, bunching his fists, restricting his breathing, until he noticed it was happening. Then it took a conscious effort to relax; release his pent-up breath in one huge sigh; force himself to breathe more slowly. And that would appear to work for a while, but all the time the tension was rebuilding, his body slowly winding itself up again.

It was happening already as Herb scanned the viewing areas.

Where were they? Where was the attack? Nothing. Only empty sky.

Robert coughed. He was about to perform one of his little distractions; Herb just knew it.

“The thing about warp drive, superluminal drive, faster-than-light drive,” said Robert, “is that once you make the jump, you can’t be tracked.”

Herb was not impressed. He had been expecting better than this.

“Well, yes. Everyone knows you can’t track someone making a warp jump,” he said.

Robert grinned. “And they’re right. But what many people don’t realize-and it’s partly because they don’t take the trouble to think about the problem, and partly because the AIs keep quiet about it-is that you can still usually make a pretty good guess at a ship’s position.”

“How?” Herb’s stomach was tightening with uncertainty.

Where were they? Robert scanned the viewing field in the floor again and frowned. “The Enemy Domain saw us insert ourselves into warp at a certain point. There is a certain range of speeds at which we can travel using a warp drive, so that gives the Enemy a minimum and maximum distance that we can have traveled. Think of two concentric bubbles expanding outward from our starting point. As the outer bubble sweeps through a system, they will go on alert. After the inner bubble has trailed through later on, they stand down.

“Once we jump, we’re like the particle in an electron cloud. The Enemy can map a probability of us being at any point within it. Once we materialize, the wave function collapses and a new set of equations comes into play. AIs have been solving these equations for decades. They’re good at them. They need to be; they’re using them to probe-” Robert paused. “Well, that’s another story.”

Herb nodded blankly. He wondered how long this horrible, twisting tension could be held in by the walls of his stomach. He felt as if it would rupture in an acidic explosion at any moment.

Robert reached into his left-hand jacket pocket and pulled out another VNM. This one was smaller than that machine of Herb’s which had been dropped onto the last planet. The new machine was an odd shape; it twisted around on itself like a Mцbius strip. Robert placed it on the white handkerchief that was still spread out neatly on the sofa next to him.

“So now we play a game of cat and mouse,” he grinned at Herb, “if you’ll forgive the clichй. Quantum entanglement provides for instantaneous communication, so the entire Enemy Domain will know of our position the moment we are spotted. Therefore, we must try and outguess them. We must try not to be seen.”

Herb nodded. They seemed to be doing a pretty good job so far; there was still no sign of Enemy activity. He looked around the room, gazing at the viewing fields that covered the ceiling, the walls and the floor, knowing as he did so how unrealistic it was to expect to see anything out there but stars. Nonetheless, he kept looking. The fear that he would see a fleet of ships swooping toward them could not be shaken. Robert remained unfazed. He continued his lecture.

“As long as we remain within the Enemy Domain, more and more of its ships can jump to place themselves within reach of the expanding spheres of our separate jumps. As the wave front passes them by, those ships will jump to follow it. When we jump again, they will repeat the maneuver. I’m afraid, Herb, we can’t keep this up indefinitely. If we wish to stay in here, then sooner or later the Enemy will catch us.”

He smiled again. “I’m planning on later.”

Herb glanced around the screens. He had been expecting explosions, attack ships, anything but this calm nothingness. Where had the Enemy got to? His voice sounded a little high-pitched as he spoke. “There’s nothing happening. Where are we?”

Robert laughed.

“About three hundred AUs from where we started, just floating in empty space. We’ve hardly moved at all. Despite all I’ve just said, they’ll never think of looking for us this close to our jump point.”

Herb got to his feet.

“I need to do something. I’m going to make a cup of fresh coffee. Do you want some?”

“No, thank you,” said Robert. “It would be wasted on me. Robots don’t care for coffee.” He folded his hands on his lap and continued his methodical scanning of the viewing fields. Herb opened a cupboard in the tiny kitchen and pulled out the coffee tin. He pulled off the lid to the rich smell of chilled air and roasted beans.

“Damn. Only half full. I forgot. The rest will be on the other ship. The replicating engine is set not to reproduce luxury goods.”

Robert said nothing.

Herb pulled a glass cup from another cupboard. “I’ve figured out why you dropped my VNM on that planet we just stopped at,” he said. “You want it to convert the nickel iron sea into copies of itself.”

“Come on, Herb, you can do better than that. What about the VNMs already there? They’ll be trying to convert your VNMs back again.”

“I know. I suppose you’ve got my VNM transmitting the friend code.”

Robert nodded. “I could have done, but I didn’t bother. Remember Lesson One of VNM warfare, Herb: as long as your machines are converting the opposition at a faster rate than they are converting back, you’re going to overwhelm the Enemy in the end. It’s not about initial numbers, it’s about the conversion vector. You want it pointing in your direction.”

Herb spooned coffee into the pot and poured nearly boiling water over the grounds. He nodded thoughtfully.

“I see. But what’s the point? Once the Enemy AI figures out what you’re doing, it will just release a machine a bit faster at reproducing than mine was. They’ll get converted back and we’ll have achieved nothing.”

Robert’s faint smile widened to a big white grin. “We’ll just have to keep the Enemy AIs concentrating on something else then, won’t we?”

He looked back up at the viewing fields. “You’d better hurry up with your coffee. We jump just as soon as this ship hits point one lights.” He checked his watch. “That’s in about fifteen seconds,” he added.

Herb hurriedly pressed the button on the coffee pot and the water shivered in a complex pattern, sending the grounds spiraling to the bottom to be held there. He carried the pot and his glass cup back to the sofa facing Robert’s and sat down, placing the pot on the parquet floor just by his feet. Holding the cup tightly in his hands, he gazed up at the ceiling viewing field. Robert had set a large crimson circle expanding across a 2-D slice of starscape. A gold marker, just off center, indicated their ship’s position. A second gold marker lit up, halfway between the ship and the trailing edge of the bubble.

“The second marker is where we’re jumping to. They should assume we’re somewhere in the crimson circle at the moment.”

“Cunning.”

“I know. But we won’t be able to pull this trick too often, mind. Okay, hold onto your coffee, we’re going to jump…”

Herb bit his bottom lip…

Their reinsertion was accompanied by a series of flashes so powerful they tripped out the vision on the viewing fields. Twice the rear fields dimmed, then the left-hand fields, then the portals in the floor at Herb’s feet. Robert thoughtfully plotted the explosions on a section of the viewing field just above Herb’s head. Ripples formed in the dark surface of Herb’s coffee. As he watched, the tiny waves began to interfere with each other and form a fizzing pattern of brown bubbling liquid. Herb stared at the cup with morbid fascination. The ship must be undergoing incredible accelerations for this effect to be noticeable inside the cabin. He dreaded to think what was happening to the fluids inside his own body. The butterflies in his stomach would have steel wingtips at the moment.

“Got it,” said Robert, animation returning to his face. “Wiped the security net. That took longer than I expected. It’s a good thing we were through here earlier on. There are cut-down copies of my intelligence nested in the processors of a lot of the machinery in this system. Not strong enough to effect a change on their own, but they were helpful in the fight…”

“We were through here earlier on?” said Herb.

“Of course, when we scouted the territory. All those saboteurs we planted…”

Herb felt shaken. He remembered Robert’s earlier demonstration, his simulation of their bodies splitting in two and splitting in two as they sailed through the galaxy.

“How many of us are there?” he asked in a tiny voice.

Robert shrugged. “I’ve no idea anymore. You haven’t grasped it yet, have you Herb? This war is about reproduction. Anything that can make a copy of itself does so, or else it gets swamped.”

Herb sipped coffee without tasting it. He needed something to do to distract himself.

“Herb, if you think the battle we’re currently engaged in looks frantic, you should see what it looks like from Machine Level.”

Robert quickly scanned the viewing fields, his dark face half hidden in the pastel glow of the displays.

“Still, everything looks okay at the moment. We’ve achieved a balance of sorts, so I think we’re ready to hit the planet’s surface.” He assumed a serious expression. “I’ll warn you now, we’re going to jump down there using the warp drive.”

“What?” Herb almost spilled coffee in his lap. “What if you miscalculate? A fraction of a decimal place out and we could end up slamming into the ground! Isn’t jumping directly down to a planet incredibly dangerous?”

Robert shrugged. “Normally I’d say yes. However, given our current circumstances, I think that a close proximity warp jump is the least of our worries.”

Down at Machine Level:

The entity known as Robert Johnston was far beyond what humans understood to be a personality construct. Unlike the crude copies of itself that had been sent out into the linear and pseudo parallel processing spaces of the Enemy Domain, the personality construct resident in the robot body was of a super parallel non-Turing design that human minds could not begin to comprehend. Its like was not scheduled to be seen in human space for at least another two hundred years.

Super parallel non-Turing: in other words, Robert Johnston could think about many things at once.

To Robert Johnston, reality was a series of interlocking layers. At the moment, for example, he could see the dissipating warp field still shimmering around the ship yet well below the threshold that would cause anomalies for anything crossing the boundary into normal space.

Another part of him had interfaced with a minor security net on the planet which saw the universe as a three-color array of threats, friends and undecideds. That particular Robert was busily engaged in slotting the ship into the “friends” column.

Part of Robert Johnston could even see the world through eyes similar to Herb’s.

Using those senses, its robot body appeared to be sitting in a warm patch of sunlight cast by the ceiling viewing fields. Robert called this a human view. Such a slow view. Herb sat opposite him, anxiously looking from viewing field to viewing field with the speed of a snail in aspic.

And then there was that other way of looking at humans…

Robert Johnston could see Herb as a pattern of feelings and emotions that even Herb himself was not always aware of. He read the tension evident in his shoulders as a standing wave of electrical impulses, heard the fear in his chest by the rapid pattern of his heartbeat.

He could look deeper. He saw how, as Herb gazed around at the friendly warmth of this new planet, he was for a moment taken back to that day, weeks ago, when he had boarded his spaceship to make the return journey to his converted planet. Herb was feeling a strong wave of something almost like nostalgia. Not just a wish to be home, safe, but something more: a realization that if he had his time over again, his life could be so much better.

In the middle of the battle, Herb was having a sudden insight into what a mess he had made of his life so far; how much of a waste it had been.

It was the emotion that Robert had been waiting to read in Herb. One that he had been leading him toward for the past eleven days.

Directly below the ship, a river of blue-grey machines crawled along a rocky channel. A seemingly never-ending parade of shuffling, stumbling cylinders being funneled through the U-shaped valley that ran in a straight line from horizon to horizon. One aspect of Robert Johnston guided his robot body to pick up the Mцbius VNM it had shown Herb earlier and then throw it out of the ship’s hatch to land in the parade of machines that crept through the valley underneath.

While one part of his consciousness examined the structure and command systems of the machines below, another part explained to Herb, with painful slowness, the methods by which those machines would eventually terraform the planet across which they marched. On one level of reality Robert Johnston was examining the bacteria-tailoring factories that would build the soil for the planet, on another level he was explaining to Herb how the creeping machines would eventually form a circle around the planet to act as a heat pump, and on yet another level Robert Johnston was watching the Mцbius machine that his robot body had just thrown from the ship. The machine righted itself and took a couple of stumbling steps forward, but was gradually dragged down by the slow, inevitable movement of the creeping machines. It reappeared for a moment, bobbed up above the backs of the machines, once, twice, and then was gone.

The hatch slid shut.

Herb had noticed that two of the blue-grey machines from the planet below were now sitting motionless on the hatch.

“What are they for?” he asked.

“They’re for later,” said Robert, oh so slowly, while at the same time he reconfigured the thickness of the ship’s bull, making the stern slightly thicker than the nose. After all, the stern was catching most of the explosions.

He told the ship to ascend.

Herb’s world was so slow…Robert knew what Herb was about to say before Herb did, and yet Robert still had to sit and listen to the end of each sentence. It was important. Not to do so would be unsettling for the young man.

“Your machine didn’t work,” said Herb. The words moved at glacier speed. Robert already had the reply slotted in place, ready to play, while another part of his attention completed the analysis of the Ouroboros machines below.

“Patience,” said Robert. “These terraformers are faster at reproduction than those on the last planet. Give it time and my Mцbius machine will make enough copies of itself to be able to twist that loop around and reverse the terraforming process.”

“Oh,” said Herb. The ship was accelerating away from the planet’s surface again, getting ready for another jump. Robert could see the thought occurring to him. He knew what Herb was going to say next.

“Why are we stopping the terraforming of that planet? Surely terraforming is a good thing?”

“Only if you’re a human. Not everyone in the galaxy is,” replied Robert. “Jump in ten seconds…”

And then most of the ship’s propulsion system vanished.

In an instant all of Robert Johnston’s attention was directed to trying to keep the ship aloft.

There wasn’t enough of the propulsion system left to do that.

The ship was falling back toward the planet: impact in 13.2081177 seconds.

The ship’s self-repair systems came on line. They were fast, but not fast enough. Impact would still occur, now in 26.1187722 seconds. Robert Johnston added some of the nanotechs he carried in his own robot body to the ship. The reinforcements were enough to help the repair system complete its immediate task. The ship’s fall was halted: impact in (indefinite) seconds.

Now Robert split his awareness in two. Part of it continued to oversee the repairs; a larger part was directed to discovering what had happened.

He ran through the ship’s internal monitoring records and replayed the last three milliseconds before the propulsion system had vanished.

There was the answer. The ship had fallen victim to a stealth attack. Somehow the local security net had got a set of nanotechs onto the hull. That should have been impossible, given the defense routines Robert had set up, but even more incredible was the fact that the nanotechs had managed to do so without being noticed. They had worked their way into the propulsion system, making themselves into exact copies of existing parts. When they had converted enough of the system, they just…dissolved.

Robert Johnston was puzzled. They had dissolved too soon. If they had waited longer they could have left him with no propulsion system at all. Why so soon?

A second replay of the ship’s memory and he saw it. A routine internal scan had been initiated ten picoseconds before the attack. The enemy nanotechs must have feared detection; they acted too soon rather than be wiped out. Thankfully.

The threat had been identified.

All this took just under two seconds. Robert Johnston now felt it safe to split his consciousness further so as to interface with other layers of reality.

To Herb, it was as if the attack was still underway. Robert could see him as he was thrown out of the sofa, his left knee banging on the wooden floor. Robert could read the pain in Herb’s body as his left hand was twisted the wrong way and almost broke.

Robert Johnston was still funneling materials toward the propulsion system. There wasn’t enough mass in the propulsion chamber, so he sought it from elsewhere on the ship. Herb’s bedroom was quickly cannibalized.

The propulsion systems now operated at four percent efficiency.

Back in the slow world, Herb was thrown to the left, tumbling across the floor, hot coffee splashing over him as he went. A white vase fell to the floor, shattering next to his head. Meanwhile, the robot body was picking itself up off the floor, its face slack and utterly expressionless. The ship continued to shake and jerk around, but the movement was diminishing. Herb sat up slowly, favoring his right hand. As he stared at his left, Robert could see wave after wave of sickening pain sweeping through the human, centering on his knee. The robot body came and put an arm around Herb, helped him to his feet.

“Are you okay?” asked Robert. He helped Herb to limp across to his sofa and sat him down.

“I think so. My hand…No. It can wait. What happened?”

Robert began to explain.

All the while another part of Robert was examining the options of what to do next.

He had been too cocky, he had underestimated the capabilities of the local AI. He could not afford to make that mistake again.

Now he would have to take time out from the attack to replenish the ship’s resources. He calculated that it would take about four minutes. He estimated the Enemy’s ships would be here in five. So, just enough time to drop back to the planet’s surface and then get out again.

Much too confident. He would not make that mistake again.

Then another part of his awareness picked up the flickering of a warp transition. One, two, three Enemy ships inserting themselves into normal space. They had got here far too quickly. Another mistake.

He would have to jump again right now…

He looked at the warp field, began to coax it into shimmering life…

He was simultaneously observing Herb. Robert could read the fear that coursed through the man’s body at his announcement of the jump. Herb’s mouth was dry, his pulse rate increasing, his stomach pulsing, and yet his body’s functioning was still within acceptable parameters. Herb would experience far worse before this was over.

Something foreign still lurked on the ship.

Another jump. They reinserted into normal space and the lounge lit up with the brilliant white glare of an explosion. This time all of the viewing fields darkened. Herb felt as if the ship was skimming sideways, riding a wave, dancing and surfing toward a beach. He could feel the busy rumble of something like water beneath them.

“We’re riding the explosion,” said Robert, “just inside the wave front. They won’t be able to scan inside here. At least I hope not. No nanotechs could survive out there in that maelstrom, so we can assume we’re not going to be boarded again… We’re going to jump again in a moment.”

Robert’s face slackened, just for a fraction of a second, and then: “The top ninety percent of the hull has ablated. At least it didn’t breach…”

The ship rocked again as they began the transition back into warp. Herb was flung from his seat, across the room. He tripped on Robert’s sofa, catching his left knee again as he landed. He screamed with pain…

…The ship reinserted itself into normal space.

“It’s okay, Herb,” called Robert. “It’s okay.” He was looking at him with genuine concern.

“I’m okay,” Herb mumbled. “I just banged my knee.”

Robert nodded. “I’ve taken us into the space between the stars again. We need to give the ship time to repair itself.”

Herb was light-headed from the pain. He was finding it difficult to concentrate.

“I hope so. They’ll never find us here, surely?”

Robert offered Herb a little pink tablet. The way he was moving seemed odd; Herb seemed to be befuddled.

“Swallow this,” Robert murmured. “It’s an MTPH variant. It will help you to separate the pain into different parts, make it easier to deal with.”

Herb took the pill and swallowed it. “Couldn’t I just have a painkiller?” he asked.

“You’d learn nothing that way, Herb. Pain and adversity help us to grow.” He grinned a little. “Well, they help humans grow, anyway. Look, Herb, the ship has lost a lot of mass, so when repairs are complete, the hull is going to be stretched very thin. The Enemy ships will be jumping incrementally out from our last position in a shell formation, scanning as they go. They’ll reach this point in about four minutes, I’d guess. We have to be gone from here by then.”

The pill hit Herb’s stomach and the pain seemed to recede: it was still there, but it was as if another person was experiencing it.

“Whoa,” he said, “that’s pretty good stuff. Hey, why don’t we just jump back inside the ring of spaceships?”

“We will if we have to, but I’d rather not. We’ve got to keep heading toward the center of the Enemy Domain. The Enemy will eventually figure that’s what we’re doing, and then it will direct its search ships to better effect. This battle is still just getting up to speed.”

“Getting up to speed. Right.”

Herb looked around the inside of the ship. The kitchen cupboards had burst open; pots and pans spilled across the floor, washing across a tide of broken glass and crockery. A white vase lay smashed on the blond wood. There was a rip in one of the white sofas. Robert himself looked odd.

The viewing fields imposed a sense of order on the shambles of the room, their regular shapes showing stars shining against a dark background. Red indicator bars showed they were still picking up speed. How fast did they have to get?

Robert looked the worse for wear: his suit was disheveled, his shirt had come untucked, his tie was twisted so that the knot was lost under his starched collar. His jacket was badly ripped near the shoulder. That’s when Herb finally noticed what was odd about Robert.

“What happened to your arm?” he asked. “Where’s it gone?”

Robert’s right arm lay on the white sofa he had been occupying earlier. He sat down next to it and picked it up with his left hand. Herb caught a flash of silver at the severed end as Robert turned it to push it into his shoulder joint. He twisted it a couple of times.

“The repair mechanisms won’t engage,” he said softly. “I had to deplete myself of nanotechs and send them to aid in the repair of this ship. They’re building up numbers again, ready to effect the repair within me, but resources are low. Other priorities are currently higher, and what use are arms when fighting this type of war? Better that my brain remains intact.”

He smiled gently at Herb. He was no longer the personality who had spent the past few days constantly goading Herb: now he seemed like an amiable old man, a wise father figure. The rules of their relationship were changing.

“How are you, Herb?” he asked.

Herb sat carefully on the sofa opposite. He felt a lot better now. His mind was sharper. The pain was still there, but he could put it in perspective, look at it in a wider context. A lot of things seemed clearer under the influence of the pink pill. Herb considered his actions over the past few days, then over the past few years. He suddenly felt incredibly embarrassed. He had thought himself so clever, so special. He had been a fool.

Robert was gazing at him from the seat opposite, his expression one of quiet observation. He knows what I’m thinking. He knows that I’ve seen the truth. And he wants me to know. He’s a robot. He chooses the expression he wants to wear.

“You’re…you know what I’m thinking, don’t you?”

“To a degree,” said Robert.

“You led me to this point, didn’t you? This is not just about the Enemy Domain; it’s about me, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“That sounded really arrogant of me, but it’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“But why me? What makes me so special?”

“Nothing. The EA cares for all, Herb. It’s in its very bones, you might say.”

Robert paused for a moment, thinking. At least, he paused to give that impression. Then he continued, “Besides, I’m more closely connected with your family than you might imagine, Herb. I have been practically since the beginning.”

Herb said nothing. He wondered what Robert meant. He knew that Robert would explain if he wanted him to know.

Robert sighed deeply. “You know, Herb, you’ve lived a lonely life. That was your choice. The EA would have done a lot better for you if only you had let it.”

Herb said nothing. Now even his embarrassment was dissolving: he felt strangely liberated. It was the drug. It was helping him to stand apart from himself, not just from the pain, but from the person he had allowed himself to become.

“I don’t know what to say,” said Herb.

“There’s nothing to say.” Robert picked up his right arm and twisted it round so he could see the watch. “One minute before the Enemy ships arrive, I guess. We’ll jump in a moment. Stay ahead of them, keep them guessing.”

He gazed at Herb with a sympathetic expression. “We’re getting there, Herb. We’re over halfway.”

“Good.”

“I won’t lie, though. The next bit will be the hardest part. Are you ready for this?”

Herb licked his lips. Much to his surprise, he was.

“I am,” he said.

“We could still jump out of the Enemy Domain, back to Earth. I’d have to start the attack again with someone else, but I could do it.”

Herb shook his head. It was tempting, very tempting. If Robert had asked him an hour ago, he would have jumped at the chance. As it was, he again shook his head.

“No, I want to go on.”

Robert smiled at him.

“Okay. Here we go…”

Again, they reinserted themselves into normal space. Herb was bracing himself on the sofa, leaning forward slightly, his eyes tightly closed against the expected glare of atomic attack. Nothing happened. Slowly he straightened up and looked around. Nothing.

Robert’s face was one of intense concentration as he gazed up at the ceiling. He reached awkwardly across his body, groping in his right-hand pocket for something, then thought better of it, bringing the hand out empty. He drummed his fingers on the white leather of the sofa.

“Something’s up,” he said. “It could be a trick, I suppose.”

A drift of pans and kitchen utensils slipped into a new equilibrium with a metallic clatter. Herb jumped at the noise, then relaxed as he realized it was nothing to worry about. His heart was beating so fast. A little voice inside him told him to calm down, to relax a little. It seemed good advice.

“Got it,” said Robert. “I’ll put it on the roof screen.”

It looked like a golf ball blown up to planet size. Light and dark stains seemed to wander over the otherwise nearly uniformly colored surface of the planet. The effect reminded Herb of an ancient carpet his father had preserved in a room in one of his houses. The colors of its weave had faded over the centuries, leaving nothing more than a faint impression of variation in an overall field of pale blue.

“What is it?”

“It’s a nasty piece of work. It’s stripped this system of everything. Even its defenses.”

“Why?”

Robert ignored him; he was speaking to himself. Rather, Herb realized, he was diverting most of his processing power to the ongoing battle and leaving just a little of himself to communicate with Herb. He listened carefully to Robert’s muttering.

“Is this intended, or is it a result of faulty VNM architecture? I wonder. Why build it so close to the center?”

Robert glanced at a couple of screens before resuming his muttering.

“Then again, they’d want it close if it was a test. Keep it a secret. In a bottle: yes it is…Imagine, the end…”

He turned to Herb. “Tell me what you see.”

“I don’t know. What is it?”

Robert spoke softly. “I will show you fear in a handful of…There are strong VNMs down there, Herb. Look.”

Herb felt a rush of vertigo as the viewing field in the ceiling zoomed right in toward the planet, picking out an area of its surface. They passed through strange, glittering clouds that seemed to roll and tumble as if they were too heavy to float. The effect was of sand swept up by an inrushing tide.

The golf ball pattern of dimples grew larger, became huge, shallow depressions sliding from view as the camera centered in upon one of them. The bowl-like effect slowly faded as they zoomed in closer; the curvature of the ground was lost close up. Herb began to make out a faint gossamer net of silver spread across the dark stone of the planet’s exposed lithosphere.

Closer and closer and the net revealed itself to be the inevitable VNMs. But they were different this time: they each moved in their own space, spread in a hexagonal pattern, each a good fifty centimeters from its neighbors.

“That’s odd,” said Herb. “What are they doing?”

The machines moved in a slow dance, walking a few steps forward and then dipping their noses to touch the ground. A couple of seconds after they did so, a faint plume of silver dust emerged from them.

Herb gasped as he realized what was happening.

“They’re eating the planet, aren’t they? Chewing it up small and spitting it away. But why?”

Robert’s voice was grave, echoing the tones that he had used when he first entered Herb’s ship, what seemed like an eternity ago.

“It’s the death of the universe.”

Herb shivered. Robert sighed. “This is the ultimate weapon. Entropy for its own sake. Machines that split matter into particles so small that it makes rebuilding so difficult as to be almost impossible.”

“But why?”

“Why not?” said Robert. “A threat? A display of ego? A punishment? Or maybe just because it can be done. When this planet is almost gone, the program will change, and those machines down there will build an explosive device and gather around: the detonation will send them tumbling through space. If just one of them reaches another planet intact, the whole process will begin again.”

“Oh.”

“It won’t happen yet. This is just a test. They won’t be set to spread beyond this system. There will be no bomb, just a command to stop reproducing after so many generations. At least I hope so. These machines are strong VNMs.”

“What do you mean, strong?”

“I mean they will probably convert our machines faster than we can convert theirs.”

Herb swallowed hard. “Oh.”

“Oh is right. They’ve got limited intra-system travel. I’m guessing these are replicants of the machines that destroyed the defense systems here; that’s why we didn’t get shot at when we arrived. Not that the defense systems are needed. There are nearly a hundred of the little buggers attached to our hull right now. They’re at work trying to convert us.”

Herb trembled, but he didn’t panic. He had too much faith in Robert by now.

“Okay. So why don’t we pick them off the hull? Shoot them off or something?”

Robert smiled.

“You’re learning, Herb. You’re learning to trust me. Now is the time to learn the second rule of VNM fighting. What do you do if you don’t have superior numbers, and you can’t convert the Enemy faster than it can convert you?”

“I don’t know. You’re going to tell me.”

Robert grinned delightedly.

“Of course I am. What you do is get yourself into a position of having superior numbers. We shall use stealth technology. Three of those machines clinging to our hull have been reprogrammed. Those machines will now reproduce along with all the others in this system, destroying the planet as they go. But sometime, in the future, when there are enough of the good guys, a signal will be sent and the revolution will begin.”

“Very clever,” Herb said. “I’m beginning to learn.”

“Good.”

“But…”

“But what?”

Herb hesitated. “Well, this is all very well, but…All we’ve done so far is fight a bunch of dumb machines.”

“So?”

“Well, what are you going to do when you meet something with real intelligence? When you meet another AI?”

“Oh, you’ll see…”

“And what if the other AI is more intelligent than you are?”

“It will still not be more intelligent than the EA.”

“But supposing it is?”

“It won’t be, Herb. That’s the secret of life in the universe.”

Herb was thrown off balance for the moment.

“What? Are you saying that the EA AI is God, or something?”

Robert didn’t laugh this time; instead he looked even more somber than before.

“What I am saying is, that if you were to understand what the EA really is, you’d understand a lot more about why you’re here. You’d understand why the whole universe hadn’t been eaten long ago by machines like those on that planet below.”

Herb felt a momentary light-headedness. It quickly passed, and he thought nothing more of it.

“Okay. Then explain it to me…”

And then the ship shook violently again and Herb felt himself lifted from his seat and sucked toward the ceiling. He could see stars up there. Not stars on a viewing screen: real stars. He could see the edge of the inner hull, semicircular bites taken from the painted metal. He could see the outer hull, twisting and warping as it struggled to repair itself, and he could hear the rush of cabin air as it exploded from the ship. His left leg jarred with pain and Robert was suddenly there, clinging to him with his remaining arm, legs gripping the sofa with robot strength, so great they had torn right through the leather to tangle in the framework beneath. Robert’s other arm, his detached arm, bashed and banged and tumbled end over end through the gap above, and Herb saw it sailing out into the bright, hot space beyond. His eyes were hurting, his lungs bursting, and yet the howl and the tug of the outrushing air was diminishing. The outer hull seemed to flap and flow over itself, the inner hull did the same. The ship changed its direction and Herb was flung against the wall near the kitchen area. He gasped with pain.

Robert sat on the floor by the sofa, his legs bent at a strange angle. Herb’s ears were singing with pain. Robert’s mouth was moving as if he was speaking. Herb heard the calm, measured tones fading up as if Robert was approaching from a great distance.

“…jumped again and again. They’re getting better at predicting where we’re going. Finding us much faster than I thought they could. Not much material left on the outer hull, barely enough to…”

His voice faded out again and Herb shook his head. The view from the screens changed again and again. For just a moment, Herb saw a glimpse of a silver dart, its sharp end flickering: it was firing at them.

Robert’s voice faded back in. “…where’s the VNM, Herb, the one I gave you?”

“I don’t know. I must have dropped it. Maybe it blew out of the gap in the hull.”

“…No. It’s programmed not to leave your presence. Look for it.”

Herb didn’t want to move. Even after the pink pill, the agony from his left side was almost too much to bear. He didn’t want to have to move across the room in search of the silver machine. Then he saw it. It was nearby, lying on the floor by his left hand, still wrapped in the linen napkin.

“I can see it,” said Herb dully.

“Get it.”

He reached out and took it, gasping with the pain. “…Got it.”

“Nearly there,” said Robert. “One more stop and then we’re there. Do you think you can make it?”

Herb winced. “Yes.”

“Good. Okay, we’re about to jump…”

The ship wobbled a little, sending further thick, sick waves of throbbing pain through Herb. He looked around the interior of his once beautiful ship, at the broken ornaments, the thick weal of the badly healed scar in the ceiling, the cracked and warped parquetry of the floor, at the torn and leaking remains of the two white sofas, and finally, at Robert. The once immaculately dressed robot now sat in a torn suit, his shirt and jacket covered with a spreading bluish grey stain, one arm missing and his legs in a twisted heap beneath him.

For the last time, they reinserted into normal space, close to a planet’s surface. Above them, in the night sky, the biggest fleet of spaceships Herb had ever seen filled the viewing fields, stretching from horizon to horizon, stacked up into seeming infinity. The ship was falling fast, down toward the strangely warped city that reached, grasping, at them through the lower screens. Herb shivered at the grotesque, tangled forest of skyscrapers that sought to engulf them. It looked strangely familiar, then he remembered: the files that Robert had shown him, back when they had hovered over Herb’s badly converted planet. Looking now around the wreck of his ship, feeling the pain in his left side, that time now seemed like paradise.

“No…” said Robert. “Too soon…”

“What is? What’s too soon?”

“The Enemy ships. They’re here already. They must have a tracking device on this ship…Of course, that’s it: those VNMs must have done more than dissolve our engine…But where is it? I can’t see it…”

“Never mind that,” said Herb. “Jump, jump again.”

“No point, they’ll just follow us again. We need to find it first. But where is it?”

The ship shuddered, and a strange note filled the air, half warning signal, half death song. There was an edge of finality to it, and Herb suddenly knew that the ship would not be leaving this planet.

“What’s that…?” he asked, his voice faltering.

Robert didn’t answer. His face had gone completely blank. Herb knew that was a bad sign. Robert was having to concentrate entirely on something else.

Slowly at first, the twisted towers of the Necropolis began to move toward them. Herb felt a strange feeling in his stomach. He was now in free-fall; the gravity generators had finally given up. If the ship were to be hit now, there would be no dampening effect. He would be rattled around like a pea in a bottle.

Robert snapped out of his trance.

“That’s it, Herb. I can just about land this ship, but nothing else.”

Herb picked up the silver machine. “Shall I press the button?” he asked, his voice shaking. Nonetheless, he suddenly felt very brave.

“No point. We’re in the wrong place.”

Herb felt despair settle upon him. So that was it.

“So we’ve failed. I don’t understand. I really thought you knew what you were doing.”

Robert smiled. The care lifted from his face, and he was his old self again: the original, irritating, cocksure, supremely arrogant man who had stepped through the secret trapdoor all that time ago.

“We haven’t failed,” he said. “I’m sorry, Herb, but you’ve been tricked.”

Herb said nothing. He was beyond surprise.

Robert grinned. “You’re not the real Herb. You’re just another personality construct, living in the processors of the ship. The real Herb got on that other copy of your ship just after it was replicated, back above your misconverted planet.”

“You’re lying. This is just another one of your tricks. I’m in so much pain.”

“That’s just part of the simulation.”

“Then it’s cruel.”

“I know. But necessary. I had to distract the Enemy AI. It had to believe you were really on this ship. It had to detect human thinking and reactions.”

“Why?”

“So that it wouldn’t see the real you approaching until it was too late.”

“So what will the real me do?”

Robert grinned. The pain in Herb’s side suddenly vanished, and he was standing upright in the middle of the ship, a perfectly healthy young man again. Then he was standing in a room halfway up one of the towers of the Necropolis. Robert was standing next to him. A whole Robert Johnston, both arms intact, dressed in an immaculate navy blue suit, a matching hat tilted on his head.

They both gazed through the wide picture windows at the tattered wreck of Herb’s spaceship as it plunged to the ground before them. It landed with a jarring thud that both flattened and split it at the same time. It bounced once and skidded to a halt. No explosion. There was nothing on board that would burn. It simply lay, squashed and lifeless, against the side of the building.

“What was that?” asked Herb. “Something tumbled from the ship just before it hit the ground.”

“The Ouroboros VNMs we took from that planet a few jumps back. This place is a mess. It could do with starting again.”

Herb looked up at the twisted towers, the trailing strands of deformed buildings.

“You’re not kidding,” he muttered. “And what about us? What do we do now?”

Robert smiled, but it was a pleasant smile. A friendly smile. Herb found himself warming to it.

“Well,” said Robert. “You like VNMs, Herb. I thought maybe you’d appreciate the opportunity to do something positive. I thought that maybe we could help the transformation along. Would you like that?”

“Do I have any choice?” Herb said, almost out of habit, then he paused. Whether he was the real Herb or not, he’d realized something back on the ship. Something he needed to think about.

His life so far had been a complete waste. Maybe it was time to try acting in a different fashion.

Maybe here would be the perfect place to begin thinking about it. And why not think about it while doing something for someone else for a change?

“Actually, maybe I will help.” Herb began to smile, too. “I think I would like that.”