Recursion

Herb 3: 2210

…into darkness.

Darkness and silence.

Herb could touch, smell, taste, feel nothing.

A set of memories and no more.

He could remember their long climb up the tower into space, flickering from room to room and then, without warning, they had stopped. Robert Johnston had paused just long enough to announce that they could go no further with certainty, that they must now jump into the unknown-and they had jumped.

That was when the memories of a world ended. Memories of touch and sight and taste. Now there was…nothing.

So where was he? Robert had said that Herb’s consciousness had existed in the processors remaining after the VNMs of the Necropolis had failed to commit suicide correctly. He had therefore viewed the world through the senses of those machines. What if he had now jumped to a place where those senses no longer existed? What if his consciousness now existed in a processor with no connection to the outside world? How long would he remain here? Forever? To spend eternity without any senses, cut off from everyone and everything: the thought was enough to send his nonexistent pulse racing in panic. And then a second, more sinister, thought occurred to him.

Robert had said that many copies of his personality had been dispersed throughout the Enemy Domain to seek out the secret of its origin. What if other copies of Herb Kirkham were even now trapped in eternal darkness? Tiny bubbles of consciousness glittering unnoticed, suspended in endless silence throughout the dark ocean of the Enemy Domain.

Nothing, still nothing. A scream was building in Herb’s imaginary throat…

“Hey, buddy. What’s the matter?”

Robert Johnston thrust his face over Herb’s left shoulder, his features illuminated from below by some invisible light source. Herb blinked as his imaginary eyes adjusted to the darkness: his senses had switched on again. He felt the weak pull of gravity, smelled the cold, tinny air. Stretching away beneath his feet was a regular pattern of shadows, picking out the edges of a triangular grid. Around and above him, nothing. Only gloom.

“Where are we? What happened?” Herb’s voice was hoarse with emotion. Robert stepped before him. Am I imagining it, or does he look shaken too?

Robert was poised on his toes, gently shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he regained his sense of reality. Noticing Herb’s curious expression, he changed his movement into a little dance.

“Come on, Herb. Get with the beat.”

“Don’t give me that,” said Herb. “You were as frightened as I was. What happened back there?”

“Nothing I couldn’t handle. There was nothing at the top of that elevator. Nothing. I think we lodged ourselves among the unused seed VNMs. I suppose they didn’t see the need to set them growing, once they realized the Necropolis had gone so badly wrong. There were no senses up there for me to use: they hadn’t been grown. I had to make an educated guess and jump us off in the direction of one of those ships hovering above the planet. I remembered the pattern they formed and sent us off on the path through the lattice that would most likely intersect with one of them. I got it right, but only just. We’re right at the far edge of the formation.”

Robert turned around and began to dance his way along the narrow walkway on which they stood, suspended over what Herb now recognized to be a spaceship’s outer hull. It looked surprisingly old-fashioned: struts and bracing were virtually unknown in these days of shell construction. Herb had a sudden sense of the otherness of the Enemy Domain. He wondered under which alien sun these ships had replicated. He imagined their juvenile forms, floating in bright blackness, the cold glare of some star picking out the stretching and sliding as the braces and struts tensed and tore themselves apart while the ships reproduced by binary fission.

“Look up.”

Herb obeyed as row upon row of silent coffins suddenly appeared above him.

“I just found the ship’s monitoring system for those things. I’ve linked them into our personalities as a visual feed. It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

Herb licked his lips. “Are they occupied?” he whispered.

Robert paused a moment. “Let me see…No. They’re empty. I wonder. Do you think that they were supposed to be filled from that planet beneath us? Let me think about that. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? Hmm.”

He lapsed into silence again and strode off along the walkway, his dancing forgotten now that his nerves were calmed. Yet again, Herb found himself following Robert Johnston into the unknown.

They were standing on the bridge of the spaceship. At least, that’s what Robert called it. Herb didn’t understand the concept. There was a wraparound window that made for ideal star-viewing, three comfortable padded chairs, equipped with straps for some reason, and between the chairs and the window, blocking the best standing position to take in the view, a bewildering array of controls.

“I don’t understand. What is this place for?”

Robert grinned. “For flying the spaceship, of course.”

Herb frowned. He ran his finger over the green, webbed material covering one of the chairs, then began to fiddle with one of the straps.

“I still don’t understand. How will these help fly the spaceship?”

Robert was watching him intently, saying nothing; it made Herb nervous. He was being tested, he was sure of it.

Robert spoke. “You don’t understand, do you? Don’t you remember your history lessons? I imagine that the Enemy Domain is thinking ahead. It’s thinking about what would happen if someone was forced to land this ship with the AIs knocked out. All this is intended for human pilots.”

“Human pilots? Is that possible?”

Again Robert said nothing, and Herb cursed himself internally. Of course it was possible. Isn’t that how all ships used to be controlled? Then another question occurred to him.

“Human pilots? Robert, I thought the Enemy Domain was an alien construction.”

Robert gave one of his enigmatic smiles. “It depends what you mean by alien.”

Herb sat down in one of the chairs. It was extremely comfortable, fitting itself to his body perfectly, except for where the straps dug into his back. He wriggled them aside and relaxed.

“You let me think the Enemy Domain was of alien origin. It’s not, is it? The Necropolis was built for humans, before it went wrong. These ships have spaces on them for human beings. Robert, what’s going on?”

Robert Johnston sat down on the next chair along.

“What’s going on? Let me put it this way.” Robert lifted his feet, resting them on the bank of controls before him, and raised a finger.

“Imagine it like this,” he said. “Look at the first finger of your right hand. Got it? Okay, now look at the first two joints of your finger. Imagine that’s the volume of Earth-controlled worlds. It’s about the right shape, too; we seemed to have expanded more sideways than up or down. Now hold out your hand, just like this, see?”

Robert moved his palm downward, in front of his body. His pale pink nails were reflected in the window just before him. Slowly, Herb copied him.

“Look at the first two joints of your index finger: the Earth volume. According to that scale, the planet we are currently floating above would be at the bottom of your right earlobe. You’ve got to get the idea of the scale of things, yeah? Now contrast the size of the tip of your finger with the size of your head and your neck. Run a line down the front of your body, down past your waist, down your legs, right to the tips of your little toes, and then all the way back up to your right shoulder. Think how big all that is compared to those tiny little joints on your right hand. That volume equates to the Enemy Domain.”

Herb looked down at his feet, seeming so far away on the floor. He looked back to his hand in disbelief.

Robert continued softly. “Now, we’re at your right earlobe. Above a planet that lies at the edge of the wave of expansion of the Enemy Domain. Think about your right arm, down to the elbow, along to the hand, think of the palm of your hand, your knuckles, down that first finger of your right hand, all of that space. All of it now occupied by the Enemy Domain’s machines. Think of all those tiny metallic bodies creeping over each other, feeding, and reproducing in their own image. Hungry metal tendrils reaching forward, jumping from world to world. Searching for something. And there, at the end of that first finger, that tiny little finger joint, Earth, all those people, everyone you ever knew, all happily unaware of that smothering, suffocating tide of machinery bearing down upon them. Imagine a single ant scuttling over the sand on a beach and looking up to see the tsunami bearing down upon it.”

A moment’s silence, and then Robert spoke at his softest.

“Don’t think alien or human. Just think destruction. That’s what we’re talking about.”

Herb stared at his fingernail for a moment; stared at the veins that stood up on the back of his hand, at the whorls that ridged the top of his knuckles, the pale blond hairs that marched up the back of his forearm. He suddenly shuddered.

“You’re shaking.” Robert was speaking at his normal volume again. “All this,” he gestured through the window at the few sparse ships floating here at the edge of the vast fleet, “all these ships, that elevator, the Necropolis, the bumblebee robots that buzz around on the planet, the spiders that creep through the tunnels, all of this system in which our consciousnesses find themselves…”

He paused for breath, easing back into the huge green chair. “All of this system is the tip of the tiniest hair that grows from the most insignificant pore on the very edge of your right earlobe. So, don’t think human or alien, Herb. Just think about being afraid. Being very afraid.”

When Herb spoke there was just the faintest tremor in his voice.

“I am frightened,” he said. “I’ve never denied it. Come on, who wouldn’t be?” He smiled sardonically. “An agent of the EA has entered my spaceship via a secret passageway, has captured me, fired my consciousness across the galaxy to the edge of an Enemy Domain, and then that same agent tells me that I am going to help fight something so big I can barely imagine it. It could be said that, yes, I’m slightly nervous.”

Robert studied him closely, then shook his head. “No. You’re being flippant. Not nervous enough. Do you know what that tower is used for now? The one we just came up?”

“Of course not.” Herb licked his lips nervously. “But I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“Launching cannon for VNMs. The Enemy Domain is seeding the galaxy with copies of itself.”

Herb gave a shrug. “Figures. That’s how the Enemy Domain got so big, I suppose.”

“Okay. Have you figured out what all these ships are doing here, then?”

“No. Have you? You said they were going to be filled from the planet below. I think it would be the other way around. These ships are bringing humans to populate the planet. They would unload them onto the space elevator and take them down below to live in the Necropolis. Would have done if everything hadn’t gone wrong, anyway.”

Robert smiled.

“Good answer. The best-” as Herb smiled, Johnston waited just a moment before smashing him right down again “-given the knowledge you have. Your mistake is in thinking of the human beings who would occupy those coffins as individuals. They weren’t. They were meant to be clones. Clones that were being grown on that planet below us until the VNMs building the city we call the Necropolis malfunctioned. They’re still there, but their growth has been suspended. I felt their consciousness, millions of them, semi-aware in the darkness, as we jumped from the top of the elevator. That planet is almost sentient, there are so many of them down there.”

For a moment, Herb couldn’t be sure; it almost looked as if there was a tear in the corner of Robert’s eye. As he tried to look closer, Johnston rose from his seat and went to gaze from the window, out into space. He continued speaking, his voice slightly hushed.

“If you look down on that planet with the right eyes, it’s a dark ball embedded with the brightest little lights. All lost and alone and forgotten at the edge of the Enemy Domain…”

His voice trailed away and Herb felt a sickening lurch of vertigo. He imagined the ship’s floor splitting open beneath him, imagined the long drop back through the silent, empty fleet of ships, passing their hollow, forgotten shells as he tumbled faster and faster toward the planet below, rushing toward the up-reaching, deformed spires. And there, buried beneath them all, like so many unwatered seeds, the half-formed, twisted consciousness of things that would never become people. What were they like? he wondered. Half-grown adults? Children?

It was too much. He finally began to shiver.

“It’s too big,” he said. “You’re right. It’s too big. We can’t fight this.”

Robert turned back to him.

“Oh, yes, we can. Come on. We can use this ship’s communication devices to upload ourselves. It’s time to go back.”

Herb wouldn’t have believed it possible to feel bored and terrified at the same time, but somehow he was. Four days had passed since Robert Johnston had first appeared on his ship, and since then they had done nothing. The ship still floated a few hundred meters above the restless silver sea of VNMs, the mechanical remains of his converted planet. Robert Johnston’s mysterious errands caused him to pass constantly between his own ship and Herb’s. Herb had been told in no uncertain terms not to attempt to look down the passageway that linked the two ships, and Herb was sufficiently frightened of Robert not to attempt it.

Apart from the occasional presence of an agent of the Environment Agency, life aboard Herb’s ship carried on as normal. He spent time preparing elaborate meals and eating them; he played games-chess, Starquest, dominions, bridge-against the ship or alone. He worked out the bare minimum in the gym to stop the ship’s nanny nagging him and he watched entertainments. Apart from the extreme tension that seemed to tie him down to the comfortingly familiar objects of his living room, everything was perfectly normal.

Except for that time, somewhere in the middle of the night, when he had woken up at the feeling of something being pulled from his head. Herb had sat up in bed and begun raising the room’s temperature out of sleep mode, only to be told by a calm voice to lie down and go back to sleep. Herb had taken one look at the flexible black object hanging like shiny satin from Robert’s hands and quickly obeyed. Robert frightened him.

Apart from that incident, there was nothing to unsettle him. Nothing, of course, except Robert himself.

Herb spent one afternoon sitting on the white leather sofa gazing at the open hole in the floor where the trapdoor lay. A son et lumiиre played out around him. He ignored it, increasingly wondering about sneaking down through the trapdoor and into Robert’s ship. What did it actually look like? He had had his ship’s computer retune and recalibrate its senses time after time in an attempt to get a look at it, but with a spectacular lack of success. Whatever Johnston had done to his own ship had rendered it invisible to Herb’s senses. In desperation, Herb had even toyed with the idea of climbing out onto the hull of his own craft in an attempt to get a visual on it, but so far had failed to muster the courage. What if he slipped and fell down onto the writhing planet below? If the drop didn’t kill him, his silver creations certainly would.

So why had Robert hidden his ship from view?

Herb suspected it was probably just because he could. Johnston seemed to take a delight in demonstrating his superiority at every occasion. Still, maybe there was another reason…

The thought of escape had been growing slowly in Herb’s mind. If he could cut the link to Robert’s ship and activate the warp drive…

There were only two problems, as far as he could see.

First, how could he be sure that the link was actually broken? How would he know he wasn’t jumping through space with Robert still attached? Maybe that was why Johnston kept his ship hidden. Anyway, there was a second consideration.

Where would he go? Actually, the second point wasn’t so much of a problem. He knew where he would go: straight home to his father’s estate. Back home to Earth and four square kilometers of smooth, green lawn. His father was rich. In the middle of a tiny country with skyscrapers shoulder to shoulder, all jostling for position among farmland and public recreation grounds, his great-great-grandmother had leveled a patch of land in the middle of the Welsh hills and built nothing on it but a low, tasteful mansion. The rest of the land had been converted to a condition that his father liked to refer to laughingly as “unspoiled”: Gentle slopes and pleasant woodlands studded with lakes, a picture of an idyll that would have seemed entirely out of context with the original surrounding countryside. The whole estate was a grandiose gesture of understatement that inflamed envy and resentment in equal measures: Herb’s father was so rich he could leave valuable land untouched. Of course, the space beneath the land did not go unused.

Herb’s father was a rich and powerful man. But, thought Herb, was he powerful enough? Could he stand up to the EA? A second thought caught Herb’s attention. Would he want to? Herb quickly suppressed the idea.

So, he decided firmly, he had a place to escape to. Possibly. But first, could he break the link between the two ships? To achieve that he would have to get a look at Robert Johnston’s ship.

The answer finally occurred to him, and he gave a slow smile. So Robert didn’t think that he was that bright?

Maybe he could prove otherwise.

Herb was listening to Beethoven: the late string quartets, opus 127 to be precise. He had read somewhere that these were considered amongst Beethoven’s greatest pieces, if not some of the greatest pieces ever written, and Herb was damned if he wasn’t going to enjoy them as much as the so-called experts.

He had set the sound picture so that the string quartet appeared to be playing just over the trapdoor where Robert would emerge into the room. Maybe it would surprise him, but probably not.

In his head, Herb was rehearsing his plan to get a picture of Robert’s ship. He just had a few words to say, but they had to seem nonchalant. He could not give away the fact that he was plotting something. The idea was actually quite simple. Johnston controlled what was picked up by the senses on Herb’s ship, but those weren’t the only senses Herb had at his disposal. Had Robert forgotten the billions of VNMs swarming below? Each a descendant of a machine built to Herb’s design, and each one sporting a rudimentary set of senses? The question was, how to do it without Robert noticing? And the solution was simplicity itself. Herb spoke.

“Hey, Ship. I would like a chocolate malt and a hot salt-beef sandwich. And would you do a full scan out to point one light year? Include sensory information from all other public sources. I want to gather as much data as possible for the records. The state of this planet may be germane to any future legal action brought against me.”

As he spoke, Robert Johnston strode out of the secret passageway. The sight always turned Herb’s stomach slightly. Robert walked up the side of the passageway, perpendicular to the floor of Herb’s ship. As he stepped from the passage to the floor, his body swung through ninety degrees. That last step was dramatic. Robert straightened his hat and smiled at Herb.

“Full system scan, eh? That reminds me. Now that there is no need for them, I must disable the software blocks I placed on your ship’s senses to prevent them seeing my ship. They must be really putting a hole in the middle of your world picture.”

Herb smiled sarcastically. Robert pretended not to notice.

“I see you were about to have a snack. Good idea; I think I’ll join you. You made a good choice. Ship, I’ll have the same as Herb. Chocolate malt and a salt-beef sandwich, hold the meat.”

He gave Herb an apologetic smile. “I’m a vegetarian, didn’t I tell you?”

“Are you really?”

Herb didn’t care. All around him the ship was sucking up its impressions of the immediate surroundings in a bubble point two light years in diameter. Buried somewhere in that set of data would be the images sensed by the VNMs just below him.

Some of those images would reveal Robert’s ship.

Herb was beating Robert at chess. He had arranged his opponent’s captured pieces in a circle around the foam-flecked glass that had held his spiced lager. He grinned across the board as Robert frowned while thinking of his next move.

“Do you want to concede? Again?”

“Not yet. I feel I learn something just by playing through to the end.”

“Please yourself.”

Herb sat back in his seat and began to hum. Robert sighed and moved a piece.

“You don’t want to do that,” Herb warned. “Mate in three moves.”

Robert sighed again. Just for the moment, the arrogant air had left him.

“Herb,” he said, “don’t you ever think that there are more important things than winning? Haven’t you heard the saying ‘It’s far more important to be nice than to be clever’?”

Herb rolled his eyes. “The call of the loser. Okay, have that as your move.”

“That’s all right. I concede.” Robert knocked over his king and stood up. He placed his hat on his head.

“Don’t you want another game?” asked Herb.

“No, thank you. I think I’ll go back to my ship and have a nap.”

Herb shrugged. “Suit yourself. You know, we’ve been hanging over this planet for ten days now. I thought we were supposed to be going off to war. When are we actually going to do something?”

Looking a little sad, Johnston gave a barely perceptible shrug.

“Soon. The first reconnaissance reports are coming back already. We’ll give it another couple of days to see what else we get.”

“What reports?”

“You’ll see. Good night.”

Robert waved good-bye as he stepped into the secret passageway, his body jerking forward through ninety degrees as the new gravity caught hold. He marched away down to his ship.

Herb watched him go, a feeling of frustration burning inside. Even when he won, Robert had a way of making him feel he had lost. Everything he did seemed intended to highlight Herb’s inferiority. Worse, no matter how Herb tried to fight back, he always seemed to end up losing. Herb wasn’t used to that; the few friends he had made had always been chosen as being just slightly less clever than he was.

Herb paused in shock. The idea had never occurred to him before. Was it true? He didn’t know if he wanted to think about it. He quickly changed his line of thought.

The local scan was complete: all the data were stored within the ship. What he needed now was to access the images without Robert noticing what he was doing. Herb had already planned what he would do.

“Ship, play back the results of the last scan, mapped to a 3-D visual feed in the main viewing area. Random jumps every ten seconds, fifty percent probability space focused around the ship to a radius of ten kilometers.”

Herb flopped onto one of the white sofas just as the space before him filled with a view of the planet below: silver machines in a restless sea of unending motion. After ten seconds the view flicked to a sky view of endless grey. Another ten seconds and flick, another view of the planet, this time from much higher up.

Herb sat back, watching patiently. He couldn’t focus straight in on his ship: that would alert Robert’s suspicions. This way, it would seem just like any, everyday, random survey. Sooner or later, the view must fall on Johnston’s ship. Flick, and a shot across the planet’s surface; flick, and a shot into space, the atmosphere fading just enough to show the faint pinpricks of stars beyond; flick, a picture of Herb’s ship, floating in the distance, too faint really to make out any detail. Flick again and nothing but sky. Flick again, and there was Herb’s ship close up and in detail. A white rectangular box with bevelled edges top and bottom. And standing on the roof of Herb’s ship, in the spot where Robert’s ship should have been, wearing the palest blue suit and white spats with a matching carnation in the buttonhole, stood Robert Johnston. He was waving to the “camera.”

Robert Johnston had beaten him again.

Herb had risen early and gone into the ship’s gym to work out. He turned off the VR feed as he wanted to concentrate on the basic feeling of exercising the frustration from his body rather than visualize a pleasant run through the country. He ran six kilometers on the treadmill, did another two kilometers on the rowing machine and then put himself through thirty minutes of high-impact yoga.

After that he staggered, sweating, through to the lounge and called up a breakfast of orange and banana juice, brioche loaf, yellow butter, and honey. Robert Johnston stepped into the room just as Herb was finishing his third thick slice of brioche.

“Good morning, Herb. Ah, excellent! Breakfast. I hope there’s enough left for me.”

Robert sat down on the chair opposite and inspected Herb’s meal.

“Maybe just a few sausages to go with it. See to it, please, Ship.”

“I thought you were a vegetarian.”

“Not on Thursdays.”

Johnston cut himself a slice of brioche and began to eat.

“Mmm. Good choice. Well, the news is, we’ve received enough reports back on the Enemy Domain to begin your briefing. Once we’ve done that, we should be ready to jump into the fight almost immediately.”

“Oh good,” said Herb, weakly. He felt a sudden stab of cold fear deep inside. The easy passage of the past few days had made him almost forget the threatened danger of the Enemy Domain. Now the realization of his predicament came rushing back upon him. In just a few hours he could be dead. Or worse.

Johnston was helping himself to a sausage. “We’ll just finish breakfast and then we’ll begin.” He took a bite and half-closed his eyes with pleasure. “Mmmm! Excellent! Well. I suppose I’d better explain. A few days ago I took a recording of your personality while you were sleeping. I took the liberty of beaming several thousand copies of it into the Enemy Domain. Those personalities have since been living in the processors of the Domain, collecting information about conditions in there. Those personalities who could do so have beamed themselves back here again. I have made a selection of the best of the memories they picked up. After breakfast, we’ll take a look at them. See what we’re up against.”

He waved his fork in delight.

“These really are excellent sausages! Maybe just a touch of maple syrup…”

Herb stared at him. The sick feeling in his stomach had now driven all thoughts of eating from his mind. Despite that, he forced his voice to remain cool and level. “How come the act has changed? Yesterday you were all 1920s American. Today you’re acting like some sort of effete English gentleman.”

“I like to experiment with personalities. You should try it yourself. That one you’re using at the moment obviously isn’t working.”

Herb sneered at him.

“Oh, touchй,” said Robert.

After breakfast they sat down to share the memories. Robert set a glass of drugged whisky at Herb’s elbow.

“I don’t need that,” said Herb.

“It’s there if you change your mind.”

Robert had opened up a viewing field in the space in front of the white sofa. Once Herb was settled the show began. The scene revealed the ghostly figures of Herb and Robert both rising from Herb’s spaceship and floating up into space. As they rose they began to move faster and faster, the planet beneath them shrinking to a dot. The star around which the planet circled moved into view and began itself to shrink as the two ghostly bodies accelerated through space.

“I added this bit for effect,” Robert said. He was carefully laying out a white handkerchief on his lap. A bowl of walnuts balanced precariously on the arm of the sofa by his right elbow. Herb gave a grunt in reply.

On the screen before them, their two ghostly bodies shimmered as if they were moving out of focus, and then, slowly, a second pair of images peeled away from the first. Now there were two Herbs and two Roberts. They began to shimmer again, splitting into four, and then eight…

“I like this part,” said Robert. “It represents the multiple copies of our personalities that I beamed all the way through the Enemy Domain.” Robert took a walnut from the bowl at his side and placed it in a pair of bright red nutcrackers he produced from his jacket pocket.

“How long does this go on for?” muttered Herb.

“Not too long,” Robert replied, pushing a shelled walnut into his mouth.

The ghostly bodies of Herb and Robert began to separate from each other and suddenly zoom from sight. Bursts of red and green stars accompanied their sudden exit from view.

“Warp jumps,” Robert explained.

The camera picked up on one pair of bodies as they shot through space. They were now approaching a planet.

“This is part of the Enemy Domain,” Robert murmured. “Watch carefully.”

Herb gazed into the viewing area impassively. After a few moments he sat up straighter. Shortly after that his hands stiffened on the soft white leather of the sofa, then he reached for the glass of whisky and took a sip, and then another…

It began simply enough. Robert and Herb’s duplicates were standing on a low hill looking out over a grassy plain punctuated with low mounds. The Robert on the screen turned and pointed out something to the Herb standing next to him, and the camera focused on the horizon. They saw a low, dark shape, rising from the ground like a cancer. Now they could make out something silver in the grass, thin and shimmering in the light like a spiderweb. It was clearly spreading out from the dark growth in the distance, slowly choking the planet. The Robert in the viewing field bent down and pointed it out to Herb.

“Interesting, isn’t it? It’s got a coating of photoelectric cells all around the outside. This planet is going to be covered by that stuff, and it’s all being powered by nothing more than the sun’s energy. Just imagine if they dropped one of these VNMs on Earth.”

“It moves too slowly. We’d destroy it in no time.”

“Maybe.” The virtual Robert shrugged.

The Herb watching the viewing field, the real Herb, silently cheered his alter ego.

The view shifted and this time another Herb and Robert were standing on another planet. In this view a group of cows was huddled on a small island of green remaining in the middle of a sea of silver-grey VNMs. The VNMs were eating up the land, leaving the animals nowhere to stand.

“Are those real cows?” asked the Herb in the viewing tank.

“Oh, yes.”

One of the cows slipped and scrambled desperately to prevent itself sliding down the deep brown mud fringing the island, toward the restless silver sea below. There was a stirring at the shoreline, the first flickering of mechanical interest. Despite its frantic scrambling, the cow slipped closer and closer to the silver sea. One machine skittered across the bodies of its brothers and onto the mud, antennae waving, and that was it. Herb looked on in horror as the silver VNMs rushed over the unfortunate animal.

The scene jumped again to show a huge, deformed city that spread out to cover most of one side of a planet. Its silvery grey towers reached upwards to the stars and the silver-grey hearts of the fleet of spaceships hovering above it.

“I call this the Necropolis,” said the real Robert. “On this one the Enemy AI got the design of the VNMs wrong. The city was abandoned before it was finished. Never mind the fact that it meant abandoning several million half grown human clones in the foundations. The Necropolis. You’ll also notice the fleet of spaceships hovering above. They stopped reproducing when their cargo never arrived.”

Herb looked at the planet and felt sick. “There is no way anyone could have gone down there. Was I down there?”

“Two copies of us went. Only one pair came back. I think both of the pairs traveled up to the top of the space elevator. They got stuck there and had to guess which way to jump. One pair guessed wrongly.”

The scene shifted again. They were following a long dark line through space.

“What is it?” asked Herb after four minutes of watching the hypnotic movement.

“Oh, I like this one,” said Robert. “What happened was this. They dropped a single VNM on a planet, rather like you did on the one below us. The only difference was that this one worked.”

Herb gave a tolerant sigh.

“Anyway. The VNM reproduced, making copy after copy of itself until the planet had been converted into something rather like that mess out there.”

Johnston gestured toward the spaceship’s door. “Okay. So we can both visualize that bit. Now, what happened next was the clever part. You’ve got a planet which is now nothing more than a mass of mechanical bodies held together by their own gravity. Okay. Now the creatures at the equator begin to walk toward the poles. When they get there they begin to fuse together. More and more creatures arrive and the extremes of the planet begin to stretch out into space. Keep it up for long enough, and this is what you’re left with. Clever, eh? You never thought of that, did you?”

Herb shrugged. “Yeah? Probably because it’s pointless?”

Johnston laughed. “Pointless eh? Have you considered what would happen if you dropped the line that was formed by that process on another planet?”

Herb froze.

“Tell you what, I’ll show you.”

The picture in the view tank changed again. A fiery red line could be seen burning through the grey sky of some planet. Herb wasn’t sure if he could detect the patterns of cities on the planet’s surface.

“Of course, you can’t even shoot it down if it’s coming toward you,” Johnston whispered, suddenly next to Herb’s ear.

The view changed again. Herb gave a shout. “There were people there! Humans!”

Robert shrugged and returned to his seat.

“Don’t worry about it. They weren’t sentient. That’s an important point: they never seem to have had the nerve to allow genuine humans to develop inside the Enemy Domain. Anyway, the weapon you saw is obsolete. The AI has perfected fractal branching. Look at this one.”

The view shifted again so that Herb was looking down at an enormous snowflake, framed against the black night and the piercing grey stars.

“It’s got a surface area of just under a billion klicks squared and it masses about half that of Earth. Just imagine what would happen if they grew one of these things in Earth’s orbit. Can you imagine the planet hitting that? It would be like passing through a cheese grater.”

Herb was shaking his head slowly. Unconsciously, he had been mouthing one word over and over as he watched the screen. No. No. No. The silent words became a whisper.

“No. It’s too big. We can’t fight that.”

“Oh, we haven’t seen anything yet. That was just the beginning. Sit back and relax. Now we’re going to try to appreciate the scale of the thing. Let’s get an idea of the true size of the Enemy Domain.”

The view flickered again. The camera panned across seven humps of some strange bioengineered creature, then froze. Johnston was studying Herb’s wide-eyed face with an expression of vague sympathy.

“Actually, before we do that, I’ll just fetch you another bottle of whisky. I think you’re going to need it.”

Herb didn’t know how long he sat before the viewing area.

They didn’t seem to care, that was the problem. Everything in the Enemy Domain was just building material. Planets, rocks, asteroids: everything was converted into yet more self-replicating machines. Herb saw view after view of cities and spaceships, snowflakes and chains, but most frequently of all, endless seas of VNMs all scuttling over each other, just like the sea of them below the spaceship in which he sat. It seemed to Herb as if the whole universe was now being converted into self-replicating machines, and the only thing he could think was, Will there be anywhere left for me to stand?

But that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that the Enemy Domain was also filled with half-grown human clones. On planet after planet it seemed that whatever controlled the Domain had set them growing and then suddenly just lost interest: a bubble of space two hundred light years across filled with billions upon billions of half-grown human beings.

All abandoned.

Eventually, the show ended. Herb said nothing. Robert gradually brought the lounge lights back up and knelt down to pick up the splintered walnut shells that lay on the carpet beneath his seat. He gathered them up, dropping them on his white handkerchief, which he carefully carried into the kitchen where he flapped out its contents into the sink. When he returned to the lounge, Herb was still sitting on the sofa staring at nothing.

“Big, isn’t it?”

“I don’t want to fight it anymore. I’d rather take my chances in the Oort cloud.” Herb’s voice was a dull monotone.

“Oh, don’t be like that. I’m sure you’ll have no worries.”

Herb laughed hollowly. “We’re doomed, aren’t we? There’s no way we can defeat that. All those spaceships, all those machines. Where did they come from?”

“Earth.”

“Why are they attacking us? Did you say Earth?”

“Of course. It doesn’t take a genius to work that out, does it? You’ve seen the technology. It doesn’t look any different from that of Earth’s, does it? Herb, you’ve even seen pictures of one of your alter egos wandering around a shopping center! How alien do you think that is? You’ve got an imagination the size of a muffin! You saw roads and cars! You even saw bloody cows! Who did you think was in charge of the Enemy Domain? Martians?”

Herb was blushing with embarrassment. “I don’t know. It’s just…I mean…How can it be from Earth? How did it get so big? Why didn’t we hear about it?”

Johnston jumped onto the coffee table and threw his hands up in despair.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Herb! Use your brain! You should have been expecting this! Everyone should have been expecting this! That’s one of the reasons why we have an Environment Agency! Come on, think!”

Herb shook his head. He felt too overwhelmed by it all to react. Johnston leaned down and spoke in a softer tone.

“The only surprise should be that it didn’t happen sooner. Good grief, Herb, we have let self-replicating machines loose upon the galaxy! Self-replicating machines! Haven’t you ever stopped to think what that implies? You’ve already seen first-hand the damage that can occur when they go wrong! Look at that planet you destroyed! All it takes is one machine with above average Artificial Intelligence to get loose, an AI with a grasp of how to build a warp drive, and there’s no telling where it will all end.”

Johnston jumped down from the table and knelt at Herb’s feet.

“I mean, come on. We’ve seen it happen on Earth! Look what happened when DIANA tried to build that space elevator back in 2171. Public outcry, mass protests. Some saboteurs even managed to get hold of a batch of mothballed stealth suits and used them to get close enough to try and blow it up. And all the while, unbeknownst to the protestors, the VNMs designed to anchor the thing to the planet were out of control. They just kept going down and down, burrowing into the Earth. They were tough to stop, too. Those things were built to be strong. If the EA hadn’t figured out a solution in time, the whole planet could have been converted to something close to adamantium from the inside out. Now, just put that problem on a galactic scale. That’s what we have to deal with.”

Johnston shook his head in despair at Herb’s stupidity.

“You still haven’t seen it, have you? And you converted a whole planet by accident! Don’t you realize how fast these things spread? Suppose you have one machine that takes a year to make a copy of itself. Not ten seconds, not ten minutes, like the ones you used on that planet below. Let’s just say a year. In two years you have two machines, in three years you have four. In a hundred years you have 1.26 times ten to the power of thirty of the things. That’s ten billion billion machines for each planet in the Milky Way.”

The numbers were making Herb feel dizzy. Johnston was almost shouting now.

“Its not even the first time something like this has happened. In the past few years I’ve helped destroy twenty would-be galactic empires.”

Herb laughed weakly and spoke in a wobbly voice. “Twenty. Well, there you are. Well done, Robert.”

Johnston calmed down. He took hold of Herb’s hands and rubbed them gently between his own. He gazed at Herb with a gentle smile.

“You’re frightened. Of course you are; who wouldn’t be? Well, trust me. We’ll beat it. Both of us.”

“Both of us. Of course,” Herb said. “And who else? How big is our army?”

Robert looked confused.

“Army? What army? There’s just you and me.”

“Just you and me,” Herb repeated.

“Of course. What good would an army be? No matter how many people we raised, we’d still be hopelessly outnumbered.”

“Of course.” Herb began to laugh. “Of course. No problem. How silly of me. You and me versus an Enemy two hundred light years in diameter!” His laugh grew more strident. “And there I was thinking that this would be difficult. Well. That’s okay, then.”

Tears began to run down his cheeks.

Johnston tilted his head slightly. “Herb, I think you’re becoming just a little bit hysterical.”

That just made Herb laugh even louder.

Herb was making himself a cup of tea the long way. He set the water to boil over three minutes; he had a teapot ready, already filled with two spoonfuls of genuine organic leaves from his father’s plantation. Doing it properly made a difference, no matter what people said. He saw Johnston emerge from the secret passageway and suppressed a smile. Robert ignored him. He was carrying a heavy object, something plastic and basically cuboid. One side was pearly grey glass. He staggered across to the coffee table and set it down as gently as he could. Herb watched him out of the corner of his eye until a deep red glow shone from the center of the water, signaling that it had boiled. He picked up the thermal jug and poured its contents into the teapot. Hot steam rose and he pushed his face into it, relishing the sensation as it condensed on his face.

Johnston had vanished back down the secret passageway. There had been a subtle shift in the balance of power, and they both knew it. As long as Herb could keep up the appearance of hysterical disbelief, he had Robert off balance. Now Herb was refusing to look at a viewing field unless forced to.

In response, Johnston had slipped back into his 1920s American mode. His suit was that little bit sharper, his accent that little bit harsher. He had to work harder to gain Herb’s attention. But, as always, he had a plan.

Herb placed the lid on the teapot. He was now only four minutes away from the perfect cup of tea. Robert reemerged from the passageway, this time dragging a long flexible plastic cable. Herb watched in silence as Robert used a complicated looking connector to join it to a similar cable emerging from the plastic cuboid.

Herb experienced a sudden flash of recognition. “That’s a television, isn’t it? I’ve seen them in old information files.”

“Gotcha!” Robert pressed a button on the machine and stepped back. There was a strange whistling noise at the edge of Herb’s hearing. The grey glass panel at the side of the box lit up. Pictures began to move on it. Herb squinted to see them clearly.

“What’s that?” he said.

“A piece of history. You’re looking at one of the early colonization projects, one of the first wave initiated after the invention of the warp drive. Like most of the projects back then, this one was sponsored by a single corporation, in this case DIANA.”

They were watching a large spaceship, seemingly stationary against the background of stars. It was all silver and gold curves, in the fashion of the time. Herb found it difficult to make out the overall shape of the ship, but he had to admit it had a certain pleasing quality to the eye, the way the matching curves swept out and back in, balancing each other.

“We’re pretty certain that this particular colony ship was the source of the Enemy Domain.”

“Pretty certain?” asked Herb.

“Nothing is ever a hundred percent,” Johnston replied easily. “This ship was headed out in the right direction. The programming on the VNMs we’ve seen matches the development tensors of the original ayletts loaded on board this ship. We’ve even matched the genetic material of the hundred or so colonists on board with the half-grown clones on the planets throughout the Enemy Domain. We’re pretty sure.”

“Oh,” Herb said. The picture had now zoomed in on a group of men and women boarding the craft. They didn’t look that much older than he did. They were laughing and chatting as they pulled their way along the handholds lining the ship’s corridor, and Herb realized that this was before the time of artificial gravity. They looked as if they were heading off for a day’s picnic, not traveling halfway across the galaxy to set up a new home. He felt a queer shiver of fear in his stomach. These people had no idea that things were about to go so badly wrong for them.

“So what went wrong?” he asked.

“We don’t know for sure,” said Robert, “but we can guess. It was a common enough failing back then. The problem is there.”

The television picture jumped to a processing space. A room, not much smaller than Herb’s lounge, filled with the oversized computing equipment of a hundred years ago. Shimmering arrays of memory foam and transparent arrays of qubit processors, all too big and laughably slow. Around the edges of the room there were even the silvery metal strands of electronic equipment, remnants of a technology now completely obsolete.

“Did that lot go wrong?” Herb asked.

“Not exactly. It functioned the way it was supposed to. The problem is, well…Do you know what was run in that processing space?”

“Everything, I should think,” Herb said. “Ship control, astrogation, VNM blueprints, library…”

“You’re right, but that’s not the point. There was one AI in there. Just one. That’s all the processing space was capable of supporting. It was the best available at the time, you should understand, but the point is, there was just one. The ship was built by a corporation, remember. It was simply too expensive to put in the equipment to support another AI.”

The screen changed to show a view of the ship from space. It was receding this time. There was a flicker and then it vanished. Inserted into warp.

“Just one AI,” repeated Robert. “An AI too big and too intelligent for the ship, so it was set to sleep until it arrived at the colony world, where it would be woken up and set to building. It would then release its VNMs, tailoring them to the environment it found itself in. It would make that planet safe for the colonists, and all the time, while its machines and buildings and sphere of influence were growing, it would itself be growing, becoming more intelligent as it rebuilt itself. You see, it’s always the same when these systems go out of control. You have self-replicating machines reproducing unchecked and an AI that is growing up at the same time as them. The AI naturally thinks it’s omnipotent. All children do when they’re born. It’s the limitations and disappointments of life that are imposed upon us that force us to grow up. The AI isn’t experiencing those limitations. If a second AI had been there, as there always is now when we grow a new AI, well…With two AIs, the two intelligences would have to learn to negotiate and compromise with each other. Without that…you’ve seen the result.”

Herb suddenly realized that his tea must be stewed by now. What a waste of good leaves. Robert had snared him, dragged him back into the mission. Something still didn’t make sense, though.

“Okay, it’s from Earth. So why is it trying to attack us?”

“It is in the nature of those who have never been told ‘no’ to think that the universe is there for their own benefit. Like I said, it’s acting like a spoiled child.”

Robert stared at him, and he shifted uncomfortably. Herb got the impression that Robert wasn’t just talking about the Enemy Domain.

Robert continued. “Think about it. The AI has to protect its colonists from everything. It needs to expand to make them safe. Left unchecked it could fill the universe, but there, standing in its way is the Earth and its domain of influence. A great big ‘NO!’ hanging in the night. No wonder it hates us and wants to destroy us. It’s like a toddler that has been told it must stay in its bedroom. No matter that all its toys are in there: the fact that it has been told ‘no’ is enough. It wants out.”

Herb nodded. “I need some vanilla whisky.”

“I don’t think so. You’re becoming dependent on that stuff. Have a nice cup of tea instead.”

“It’s stewed.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll get it for you. Ship! Cup of tea for Herb, please.”

Herb fiddled with the elastic waistband of his ship shorts. “I still don’t see why it’s worried. It could destroy us easily.”

Johnston laughed. “I don’t think so. We’re cleverer than it is.”

“Cleverer? How? Those ayletts it released will have reproduced time after time. The original AI must have redesigned itself over and over again, built new and more sophisticated containers for its intelligence. It’s had far more resources than any Earth AI at its disposal. It must be far cleverer.”

Robert picked up his hat and placed it on his head. A silver machine lay on the coffee table where the hat had sat. It looked like a Swiss army knife that had been opened up and then stripped of anything that wasn’t a blade. It looked sharp, lean, and evil.

“Herb. I thought you were intelligent. If you thought about the problem, you’d realize how the Environment Agency could defeat the Enemy Domain. A greater intelligence will always defeat a lesser one. It can be done with this.”

He pointed to the silver device that lay on the table.

“Victory is certain,” he whispered, then sat back with a smile. “Well, pretty certain. Nothing is ever one hundred percent.”