Part 10 (1/2)

There had to be some way of being sure. Then as his shoulder touched the closet door, he remembered the padded mailer.

He turned toward the closet, opened the door, and reached up to feel along the shelf. The mailer was still there. He took it down and read the address on the front: Sandra Parnell, 2754 Cunningham Court, Bayswater, London W.2, U.K. His hands started trembling when he saw that it had been stamped and mailed in the U.S.A. He turned the mailer over and read on the back:

Sender: Mrs. Lisa Stone Box 3683 Las Vegas Nevada 89109

A strangled moan escaped his lips as the mailer dropped to the floor. But his anguish was not due to remorse over Lisa or the realization that Sandra didn't exist. It was due to pure terror.

For all of a sudden he knew why Sandra was always away, but always managed to be free when he himself was away from home, and he knew why she had needed to leave early on Friday, what Max's flymobile had been doing outside the house, and where the infusers had come from. But what was worse, he knew now why Lisa had stopped off in the bathroom on her way back from getting his cigarettes from the den, and why there were only two left when he knew there had been some full packs around the night before.

”You b.i.t.c.h!” he breathed as it all became clear in its gruesomeness. And then a senseless rage welled up at his own predicament and helplessness, and he hurled himself across the room and began pounding furiously at the unfeeling face and body. ”b.i.t.c.h! b.i.t.c.h! Bi-!” he screamed. But the words died in a gurgle in his throat as a wave of tiredness and heaviness swept suddenly over him. His body collapsed in a limp heap on top of the other. After a few seconds, another voice began speaking to fill the room with a macabre canon of out-of-phase intonations.

”. . . We regret any inconvenience. A recovery team is already on its way. . . . Please do not be alarmed. this is a malfunction of a remotely . . .”

Two lamps were flas.h.i.+ng to accompany the emergency tone sounding from a monitor panel in the control room of the Las Vegas branch of Remote-Activated Biovehicles, Inc. ”Hey, Al,” the operator called over his shoulder to the day manager, who was coming out of his office to investigate. ”I've never even seen one crash all the time I've been here. We've got two at the same time, and in adjacent cubicles.

What odds do you think the guys in town would give against the chances of something like that?

Afterword, 1996 ”Till Death Us Do Part” first appeared in the sixth of Judy-Lynn Del Rey's Stellar anthologies (1981). A second story based on the same premise, ent.i.tled ”Ident.i.ty Crisis,” was included in Stellar 7. Our thought was to produce a series of ”Rentabody” stories over the ensuing years, and then bring them all together into a single volume. Some readers sensed this and asked if they could expect to see more. As things turned out, it ended up as one of those projects that was just filed away. But who knows? It could be revived again one day.

FORTUNE COOKIE.

Preface.

Sometimes ideas come from talking to people. The following is more a thought than a story, but it ill.u.s.trates what sometimes happens. It resulted from a conversation over breakfast one morning with a computer wizard called Charles Curley, during a convention in Sacramento at which I was guest of honor.

It also cost me twenty dollars. I didn't know how thick a postcard was for the example that I use in the opening sentence, and n.o.body I called on the phone could tell me. So I went into the hardware store next door to my office and bought a micrometer to measure one (it's 0.013 inch to save anyone who's insatiably curious twenty dollars). Perhaps this also says something about how science-fiction writers think. Ideas come from asking questions, and to ask questions you have to be curious.

One year is to 4.5 billion years as a cent is to 45 million dollars, or as the thickness of a postcard is to the distance between New York and the Mississippi.

That long ago, the earth formed as one of several acc.u.mulations of matter falling together in a spinning pancake of dust and gas that had condensed from the exploding debris of an earlier generation of stars.

As the final meteorite bombardment died away and the planetary smelter processed and separated its rocky slags into mantle and crust, rain fell from the hot outga.s.sings to become the first oceans.

There, in shallows and pools invigorated by young radionuclides and a raw, uns.h.i.+elded sun, a new chemistry began of molecules too elaborate to have come together in the rarified depths of s.p.a.ce, and impossible in the plasma maelstroms of stars. Colliding, fragmenting, and recombining at quantum-mechanical speeds, billions of different combinations came and went during every second of hundreds of millions of years. Some of them proved stable and remained intact, and were able to grow into progressively more elaborate structures by further additions from the molecular constructor-kit soup.

Eventually a few, or possibly only one, hit upon a configuration that would act as a template for parts to come together in the right way to form a copy of itself. Self-replication had appeared.

In their resource-rich primeval surroundings, the replicating molecules proliferated at an exponential rate and soon extinguished the feeble compet.i.tion put up by their crude predecessors. The copies were not always accurate-mutations occurred, each yielding its own line of offspring, and the compet.i.tion came to be between different designs of replicators, all experimenting with different survival strategies. A potent strategy came with the invention of chemical warfare, which some varieties used to physically dismantle their rivals-it reduced the compet.i.tion and increased available resources at the same time. In reply to this, the replicators that survived learned to build themselves protective molecular coatings. Defense stimulated new methods of attack, which resulted in improved defenses. . . .

In the billions of years that followed, the primitive molecular coats evolved into huge, elaborate survival machines which the replicators continue to control by remote programming from secure command bunkers deep inside. When a particular survival-machine begins wearing out and slowing down, the replicators-virtually immortal experts at survival-copy themselves through into a new one. On their way down through the ages, acting through their progressively improving sequence of robot proxies, they have continued to invent new technologies that have opened up new realms of survival-enhancing resources. Early on, the blue-green algae freed themselves from dependency on food produced through slow, abiotic processes, by patenting the chlorophyll molecule and photosynthesis, which opened up the entire ocean surface as a resource. Even greater ingenuity turned the ensuing planetwide catastrophe-its inundation with the toxic, corrosive waste, oxygen-into an opportunity by evolving metabolisms which not only tolerated it, but thrived on it and harnessed it as fuel for better engines. Double-stranded instruction tapes enabled error-correction for accurate copying of the vast amounts of information necessary to build multicellular organisms; the s.e.xual mixing of instructions from the growing information pool produced new combinations much faster than coincidences of mutations ever could; and the invention of the s.p.a.cesuit in the form of the amphibian egg led to the colonization and exploitation by animals of a completely new, initially hostile, alien environment.

The progression led on through warm-blooded metabolisms, mammalian reproduction, and upright posture to binocular vision, opposable thumbs, and bigger brains. Eventually the species that represented the culmination of the process became self-aware, and learned to make tools and build artificial, inorganic survival-facilitating environments around the organic survival machines. That same self-awareness caused him to wonder where he had come from and why. He used his intelligence to construct enormous instruments, with which he scanned the remote reaches of the cosmos in search of a sign from his creator.

Eventually he found his creator in the opposite direction-at the other end of a proton microscope. And at last he decoded the sign he had been seeking, which had been written into the creation: HELP! I'M A PRISONER IN A DNA FACTORY!.

Afterword, 1996 The thing that strikes me most on rereading the above years later is its tone of blithe certainty about things that happened billions of years ago, shrouded in mists of time so deep as to defy comprehension. I wasn't around to know what went on, neither was anyone else, and the evidence to reconstruct it could fairly be called nonexistent. Speculation and conjecture abounds, of course (where else was what I wrote drawn from?), and there's nothing wrong with that-as long as we remain mindful of what it is, and don't begin confusing plausibility and pleasing self-consistency with proof of reality. Much of what I read in science these days comes across with the same oversure ring to it of expecting Nature to be somehow obliged to imitate the model, instead of the other way around. Maybe it reflects a necessity today of developing phony sales pitches to impress bureaucrats who allocate funding. This trend didn't trouble me very much ten years ago, but it's starting to now.

MORE ON REPLICATION.

I mentioned earlier in Minds, Machines and Evolution that contemporary science is satisfied that such phenomena as the emergence of life and conscious mind can be adequately explained by the laws of physics and the principle of evolution, without needing any additional guiding powers. Given variability and selection, the rest follows mechanically. Thinking about this got me intrigued by the thought of a story involving a world inhabited by a naturally evolving biosphere made up of machines. The problem was, I couldn't think of a way to get it started. We can see how abiotic molecules could a.s.semble themselves into structures that eventually came to exhibit self-replication and life, but with machines it's not so simple.

As Taya insisted in Silver Shoes for a Princess, something had to make the first machine.

Then in 1982, Rodger Cliff, an AI scientist with NASA, invited me to take part in a one-week seminar at the G.o.ddard s.p.a.ce Center which NASA was arranging to examine the role of computers in future s.p.a.ce missions. The group included people from NASA, from the academic world, and from industry.

One of the possibilities we talked about was an idea for a self-replicating lunar factory-an initial package of robots and machines to be landed on the Moon, which would grow exponentially and transform the entire lunar surface into an automated ma.s.s-production facility dedicated to supplying Earth's needs for products and materials. The implications were staggering. From an initial one-hundred-ton ”seed” system, the annual output after ten years of unrestricted, self-reproducing growth would be a million tons, and by twenty years it would exceed the entire yearly output of today's human civilization!

I'm a rather slow thinker, which is perhaps why I chose to be a writer and not a talker. The connection didn't occur to me until I was on the plane back to California. Of course! Here, possibly, was the means I'd been looking for to get a machine biosphere started. Suppose, for example, that long ago an alien civilization sent out seeds like that on an interstellar scale, and one of them had mutated and gone out of control for some reason.

This must have been genuine inspiration, because I began typing Code of the Lifemaker the very next day. Since then, a number of readers have written or told me that the prologue alone was worth the price of the book.

So, hoping among other things that it might sell a few more copies, I thought I'd include it here.

CODE OF THE.

LIFEMAKER: PROLOGUE.

THE SEARCHER.

1.1 Million Years B.C.; 1,000 Light-Years from the Solar System Had English-speaking humans existed, they would probably have translated the s.p.a.cecraft's designation as ”searcher.” Unmanned, it was almost a mile long, streamlined for descent through planetary atmospheres, and it operated fully under the control of computers. The alien civilization was an advanced one, and the computers were very sophisticated.

The planet at which the searcher arrived after a voyage of many years was the fourth in the system of a star named after the king of a mythical race of alien G.o.ds, and could appropriately be called Zeus IV. It wasn't much to look at-an airless, lifeless ball of eroded rock formations, a lot of boulders and debris from ancient meteorite impacts, and vast areas of volcanic ash and dust-but the searcher's...o...b..tal probes and surface landers found a crust rich in t.i.tanium, chromium, cobalt, copper, manganese, uranium, and many other valuable elements concentrated by thermal-fluidic processes operating early in the planet's history. Such a natural abundance of metals could support large-scale production without extensive dependence on bulk nuclear trans.m.u.tation processes-in other words, very economically-and that was precisely the kind of thing that the searcher had been designed to search for.

After completing their a.n.a.lysis of the preliminary data, the control computers selected a landing site, composed and transmitted a message home to report their findings and announce their intentions, and then activated the vessel's descent routine.

Shortly after the landing, a menagerie of surveyor robots, equipped with imagers, spectrometers, a.n.a.lyzers, chemical sensors, rock samplers, radiation monitors, and various manipulator appendages, emerged from the s.h.i.+p and dispersed across the surrounding terrain to investigate surface features selected from orbit. Their findings were transmitted back to the s.h.i.+p and processed, and shortly afterward follow-up teams of tracked, legged, and wheeled mining, drilling and transportation robots went out to begin feeding ores and other materials back to where more machines had begun to build a fusion-powered pilot extraction plant. A parts-making facility was constructed next, followed by a parts-a.s.sembly facility, and step by step the pilot plant grew itself into a fully equipped, general-purpose factory, complete with its own control. The master program from the s.h.i.+p's computers were copied into the factory's computers, which thereupon became self sufficient and a.s.sumed control of surface operations. The factory then began making more robots.

Sometimes, of course, things failed to work exactly as intended, but the alien engineers had created their own counterpart of Murphy and allowed for his law in their plans. Maintenance robots took care of breakdowns and routine wear and tear in the factory; troubleshooting programs tracked down causes of production rejects and adjusted the machines for drifting tolerances; breakdown teams brought in malfunctioning machines for repair; and specialized scavenging robots roamed the surface in search of wrecks, write-offs, discarded components, and any other likely sources of parts suitable for recycling.