Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 15

Petrolea 15g

All three mechanoids had all benefited from Victor’s ministrations. The mother and Mr. Biggles positively gleamed, and Rusty was more new material than old. The little Dragon stretched, flaking off the last of his rust, and Feroza hissed in surprise.

“What?” Victor’s head turned in his helmet. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, “but Rusty isn’t. Look. The factors are repairing him wrong.” She tried to shoo the creatures away from the tumorous mound they were constructing on the baby’s back. “There must be something wrong with their programming.”

Victor shuffled toward her. “There can’t be anything wrong with their programming. They’re plugged straight into his somatic processor.”

“Then the processor must be damaged. Its blueprint is corrupted,” said Feroza.

Rusty’s back, formerly a smooth tube of articulated iron, bulged up grotesquely. Even as Feroza watched, the repair factors added yet more material to the hump, extruding a weird, rounded protuberance like a horn behind a metal frill. Knobbed lumps of metal marched down the creature’s flanks, too symmetrical to be any kind of Petrolean cancer.

“Some kind of parasite in the code, maybe?” Feroza searched for analogies. “A mechanoid virus?”

“I’m looking at the runtime environment,” said Victor, “but there’s nothing…huh. There’s nothing new, but a whole new bunch of tags…miércoles. Tripwires.”

They both slid back from the baby. “What is the code doing?” asked Feroza. Was Rusty gestating some horrible weapon of the mechanoids’ alien masters? Would the lump on the Dragon’s back sprout claws and fangs and attack them?

But no. “It’s just shaped metal,” Feroza reassured Victor along with herself. “There’s no internal structure.”

“Well, the aliens definitely wanted their mechanoids to grow these things.” Victor turned in a slow circle. “Look. You can see lumps on the other baby and the mother too, just not as big yet.”

“They haven’t had to rebuild their entire chassis.” Feroza stared at the Dragons, which rolled on their sides to present their new growths to their…masters?

“Good God,” Feroza said. “I think they are growing saddles for us.”

Petrolea 15f

“What on earth did you do?” asked Feroza. He didn’t seem to be controlling these creatures explicitly, just calling them to assemble. And yet what naturally evolved behavior would so abrogate these animals’ interests?

That thought allowed Feroza to answer her own question. “You activated more old code, like you did to build our habitat.”

Victor nodded. “It makes sense for the aliens to build safety features into their machines as well as booby-traps. So if a miner got cut off from base, the mechanoid would build a habitat for him.” He jerked his thumb at their cozy little igloo.

Feroza looked down at the shifting shape of her Dragonlet and realized something. “Rocket-seeds are the same. They were designed for this purpose.”

“Eh?” said Victor. “What were Rocket-seeds designed for? Planetary defense? Killing humans?”

Feroza shook her head. “Spreading adaptable, programmable devices, digesting bare rock and metal and,” she gestured at their neat little home, “turning it into space habitats.”

“The mechanoids aren’t just a weapon,” Feroza said. “They are a tool.”

“These things could terraform the Solar System,” said Victor.

“Yes,” said Feroza. “Here is your value, engineer. Something much more precious than petroleum: space to live.”

“At the cost of all the infrastructure we’ve already put in space.”

“What’s more important,” she asked, “machines or people?”

“Well all right, but all this only assumes that the mechanoids won’t kill us humans on sight. Petrolean biology didn’t exactly make improvements to Xanadu Base or the orbital habitat.”

“But it did make improvements to our living arrangements,” said Feroza. “So what’s the differences between the way we treat the mechanoids and the way everyone else does?”

“Assuming they haven’t just decided to save you and me for desert,” said Victor, but Feroza knew she’d captured his imagination. “Dio, we could stop the sporulation and send out a warning and go home if we could control the mechanoids…and we can!” The Dragons’ snouts followed him as he jumped for joy.

Petrolea 15e

“Let’s think about this,” said Feroza. “If you learn to love Dragons, I’ll learn to love people.”

His head jerked up. “Which people, exactly?”

“I don’t know,” Feroza raised an eyebrow behind her visor. “Do you think I should start with the aggregate and work my way down to the individual, or the reverse?”

Victor grinned at her.

So did Rusty. Or at least, it gaped its slavering mandibles, and the new buzz-saw and soldering torch clicked into place.

“I think his feeding apparatus might handle some live prey,” said Feroza. “I ought to go hunting.”

“Wait,” said Victor. “I had an idea before…well. Before. And I wanted to test it. Now that we have three big carnivores guarding us, I think the experiment might be safe.”

“An experiment?” asked Feroza.

“More of a proof-of-concept.” Victor wiggled his fingers and lights blinked on across the blasted landscape of the Leviathan’s carapace. “I’ve been trying to figure out how much control we can get out of this thing.”

“‘This thing’ being a fundamentally decentralized communal mechanoid with no more executive function than a colony of pyrosomes.”

“I have no idea what that means,” he said, still air-typing.

“The Leviathan is a like a slum, right?” said Feroza. “No mayor to bribe?”

“In that case, I have held elections,” said Victor. “Watch this.”

He tapped his finger on the air and Mechanoids scuttled out of cracks in the Leviathan’s armor. The little creatures converged on Feroza and Victor in an eerie repetition of the day they had landed here. But rather than attacking, the mechanoids climbed up onto the Dragons’ backs, clamping their legs donating their factors wholesale into the Dragons’ swarms.

“I have my control programs installed in every factor the Leviathan produces,” said Victor. “By now, almost every parasite and processor cluster’s bugged. I could make the Leviathan’s proboscis wave hello to you, but I thought this would be more impressive.”

Rusty grew before Feroza’s eyes, his skeleton elongating as other mechanoids fused themselves to him.

Petrolea 15d

Feroza stood up and shuffled to Victor. She put her own arms around him. Cold comfort in an environment suit, but still. “I promise I shall find a way to protect humanity from Petrolea.”

“And I will help fix these creatures.” Victor extended an arm to the rusty Dragon, and it tried to bite him.

He swore and waved his handshake gauntlet like a demented South American wizard, and soon the wounded creature lolled under a blanket of Victor’s slave factors. The little robots swept back and forth across the ruined chassis, clustering around the places where she’d cut away the worst of the rust, soldering, welding, reconnecting, ferrying raw materials from the piles of metal shavings and hydrocarbon pap Feroza had prepared for them.

Victor amused himself by playing with his camouflage, removing rusty flanges and cages of wire from his suit, examining the reactions of the other Dragonlet.

“What are you going to do when the Dragon recognizes you as human and its trip-wire program comes on?” Feroza asked.

“I’ll hold it still while I command the slave factors to rebuild my suit,” he said, “as if that were obvious.”Hm. Yes, it’s definitely the arms that Dragons don’t like. When I let it see my real profile with two arms, the tripwire program blinks on. But…” he folded his arms behind his back and the Dragon visibly relaxed. “Maybe these things’ original masters had no arms? How’s it going over there with Rusty?”

“Rusty?”

“Well, if it’s going to be your pet, he should have a name.”

“By that logic…” Feroza looked at Victor capering before his Dragon. “Yours reminds me of a fat and friendly pony I used to know. I shall call him ‘Mr. Biggles.'”

“I am not calling him Mr. Biggles. He isn’t fat, he isn’t friendly, and he isn’t my Dragon. He’s a poorly-optimized machine.”

She shook her head. “Think of him that way and you’ll never understand his behavior.”

“I don’t want to understand his behavior.”

“Of course you do. That’s why you’re experimenting with your camouflage, trying to understand his instincts, behavior, and ancient coding.”

“I suppose,” grunted Victor.

Petrolea 15a

Chapter 15

“Welcome home.” Feroza did not straighten from her crouch, but continued to crawl, keeping her body in the serpentine position forced upon her by the shape of their tunnel-airlock.

“Feroza, get back,” Victor whispered. “Stay still until I’ve got slave factors into her.”

But the mother Dragon was already stretching her neck out to give Feroza her own nutritional ablution.

“There is no need. My camouflage works,” Feroza said, rubbing her hands over the Dragon’s snout. “But why are you here, I wonder?”

Her eye caught movement on the ground. One of the Dragonlets came chugging around the curve of the hut.

“They’re looking for more food, I’m sure,” Victor said. “Like cats coming back to the woman who gave them scraps. Or tigers.” He made shooing noises at the baby, which snapped at his fingers.

“Stop teasing the Dragons, Victor,” said Feroza walking around their habitat. “I wonder if the other baby is here.”

“What does it matter?” broadcast Victor. “As soon as I get my bugs back in these creatures, they’re all flying back to their aerie. And if you won’t help me defeat Petrolea, you can fly back with them.”

“Don’t tempt me,” said Feroza. “And stop talking about defeating Petrolea. You don’t defeat an ancient alarm system. You avoid tripping it. If humans just stay away from this place, everything will be fine.”

That only got him swearing in child-friendly Spanish again. Victor was too emotional to listen to her, which was fine because suddenly Feroza had more important things to do than to listen to him. She had found the second Dragonlet.

The little heap of metal lay on the carapace when the mother must have dropped it. It heaved with labored breathing, much too small, and entirely the wrong color.

Feroza’s first, human-centric thought was skin condition. But there were no metal-eating fungi on Petrolea, no viruses that might give a mechanoid the pox. Feroza could see no parasite factors crawling on the Dragonlet’s mottled, brownish armor. What could cause those rotten patches? They were like mange or bread mold or…

“It’s rust.” Feroza backed away as if she might catch the same infection, but of course that was impossible. This was no infection, but oxidation.

Petrolea 14d

“The enlightened thing to do,” said Victor, trying to keep his voice low, “is to stop this threat to the lives of millions of people.”

“Thousands of people at most, if we are still discussing the off-Earth population. And just how shall we stop Petrolea? By interfering with it more? This place was entirely quiescent until humans landed here, and it took us just two years to antagonize the ecosystem to the point of threatening our civilization. And now you want to pile even more folly and arrogance on top of that?”

“You’re talking like you think humans will just leave Petrolea alone.” Victor spread his hands and waved them, miming their boss back in Dubai: “Oh, we just lost an entire extraction facility and orbital station. I’m sure that that’s nothing we should investigate!” He dropped back into his normal voice. “They will come to rescue us.”

She grimaced at him. “That is not the topic I thought we were discussing.”

“Oh no,” said Victor, “because you won that argument didn’t you? You think you can just stay here and heal the animals and hug the trees. And when you come back to the rustic hut, oh, it’s Victor waiting for you with a pot of Petrolean stew and a big wet kiss.”

Feroza snorted. “Who kissed whom? I didn’t ask you to claim me as your jungle bride. I didn’t ask you to follow me or–“

“Or save your life?”

“Victor, we’ve both saved each other’s lives such a lot of times. Do you really want to keep a running tally of the debt?”

Victor couldn’t think of a way to respond to that without sounding like an asshole, so he decided it was time to storm off.

Given their living situation, that wasn’t easy. Victor had to spend a frosty five minutes strapping himself into his environment suit again. And crawling on his hands and knees through the airlock tube was humiliating.

But at least Feroza didn’t see the Dragon knock him over.

Victor’s helmet didn’t even have a chance to warn him before the conical head caught him in the side and bowled him over. Victor flailed on his back like an overturned cockroach while the metallic face rushed toward him again. Headlights and stiff tactile antennae swept over him. Mouthparts unlatched themselves and reached out towards him. The feeding tube extended.

With a gurgle, the mother Dragon poured jet fuel over Victor’s head.

Petrolea 14c

“Of course.” Feroza’s lips thinned. “So what happens if the attack does not only fails, but also further antagonizes the ecosystem?”

“Let them,” said Victor. “Now that we know what’s happening, we’ll fight back. The only reason a Rocket-seed destroyed the orbital station was because they didn’t see it coming. A real battle between humans and some ancient mutant robot ecosystem–“

Feroza made a ball with her hands and exploded it with a “Poosh!”

“Exactly,” said Victor. “We’d win. We’d blow the damn moon to pieces!”

“No,” said Feroza. “I meant ‘poosh, we would cause the moon to sporulate.'”

And again his mental map lead him to a dead end. A cliff over a waterfall with sharp rocks at the bottom. Victor closed his eyes. “I don’t know what ‘sporulate’ means.”

“Imagine more than one rocket launching at the same time,” said Feroza. “Imagine all of them launching all at once.”

Obediently, horribly, Victor did imagine it. A puff of silver specks flying out from Titan like the seeds from a dandelion. But not drifting randomly on the winds of space. These Rocket-seeds would direct themselves toward orbital stations, ships, even groundside bases in the inner system. Human weapons might blow apart a rocket, but so what? Its payload of mechanoids would spread out through space, waiting until the little robots hit a metallic asteroid or something else digestible, like a space-craft. He imagined waves of factors overwhelming a trans-Jovian liner, an iron spider-crab clicking across a Martian dome.

“It would make sense in many ways,” said Feroza. “Both scatter your genetic material and reduce your competition.”

“We have to warn someone,” said Victor. “Even if,” it was physically impossible to say “if no rescue comes,” his throat would not open to let the words through. They could not be true. “No matter what happens. If this place…sporulates, it could threaten people all over the solar system. Hell, what if one of those things falls on Earth?”

Feroza looked thoughtful. “The mechanoids inside would probably die of oxidation.”

“Well, alright, but what about the Jovian stations, or Mars or any of the other habitats? Not to mention uninhabited asteroids. These things could digest the solar system right out from under us! We have to get the word out so they can–“

“What,” said Feroza, “put Petrolea in the autoclave and sterilize the place? Because that’s what we do with competitors, don’t we, stupid apes that we are. The second our precious patch of real estate is in danger, we drop all our enlightened talk of peaceful research and start clawing and biting.”

[image error]

Petrolea 14b

“That’s not a design of mechanoid I’ve seen before,” said Feroza. “Note the magnetic couplers on its feet, the de-emphasis on support in favor of tensile strength. Those microgravity adaptations cannot be the result of natural selection. More tripwire programming, I wonder?”

Victor shuddered with the effort of suppressing the horror. “The aliens who designed these creatures, they hid instructions that turns them into damn…space pirates?”

Feroza removed the helmet from her head. “Of course they did. They knew that threats to their project could come from nowhere but space.”

“We’re a threat?”

“To the aliens’ interests, of course. Anyone with the technology to come to Titan is a potential competitor.” Feroza ran her hands through her sweat-matted hair. “I had thought the Rocket-seeds a recent exaption of some sort of planetary defense system, but now I see they have always served a reproductive role.”

“What?” said Victor, nearly blind with panic. “People are dead. ¡pucha! Everyone is dead! And, if you’re right about this, any humans or human technology that break atmosphere is in danger. Including any rescue parties they might send down.”

“‘They’?” Feroza focused back on him, frowning. “Victor, nobody is rescuing us.”

She might have kicked Victor’s legs from under him. Or jumped up from the floor to drive her helmeted head into his gut. That would have been less painful.

Orbital stations didn’t just get annihilated by missile attacks and waves of flesh-eating robots. Victor knew what made sense in the world and what didn’t, and that map told him that there were people up there who would rescue him. There must be.

“I can,” he swallowed and tried again. “I can get out the warning.”

“How?” said Feroza. “No ground-based antenna can beam a message to…whom do you plan on alerting? The refugees from the orbital station presumably know that Petrolea is dangerous.”

“They don’t know the whole story,” said Victor. “If I can get a relay satellite into orbit…”

“Even if that were possible, even if you had a big red button you could press and tell everyone on Earth about the big bad mechanoids coming to get them, what would happen?”

“Why,” Victor blinked. “The people would nuke Petrolea from orbit.”

“I’m not certain radiation would do much to a mechanoid, but yes,” Feroza said. “Humans would want to destroy the Petrolean ecosystem along with its inconvenient defenses, then come down and extract whatever was left.”

“Alright,” said Victor, “of course.”

[image error]

Petrolea 14a

Chapter 14

“Petrolea shot them?”

“It makes sense,” said Feroza.

“No, it doesn’t,” said Victor. “It doesn’t make any sense at all! Petrolea shot them. With a rocket. ¡Pucha!“

Feroza sucked in a breath and for a second, Victor wondered if he’d slipped and said puta. But his eyes resolved the shapes moving in the visor of her helmet and he knew she wasn’t reacting to him at all. Feroza was watching the footage from the orbital station again. Blurry and reversed though the footage was, Victor needed only a little prompting to remember what it showed.

The video was garbled and full of the off-center focus and jerky jump-cuts of an AI editor, but the dreadful course of events was clear. Most of the crew of Xanadu Base had escaped to the orbital station, but then…

The plume of gas rising above Titan, the speck growing in the feed from the station’s external cameras. The impact.

Victor had nearly vomited at the sight of the horizontal tornado of air rushing out of what must have been an enormous hull breach. Next came images of people running, fighting, lying motionless on the floor. The lifeboat detaching, just ahead of the tide of little metallic bodies sweeping down the corridor. Then nothing but mechanoids picking their way through the desolation. The camera obediently tracking the helmet of a suited body as it was lifted and peeled apart by frost-rimed pincers.

The mechanoid’s own cameras had focused on the head in its clutches, mouthparts drumming as if wondering what the tough, glassy globe might have once been. Tiny torches ignited, delicate saws spun, and the creature nibbled, scored, and cut the human artifact into something it might use.

Petrolea 13d

“What do you want, Feroza?” Victor asked. “To become a martyr for the anti-exploiters? To be eaten by the mechanical rainforest? To be one with nature? To stay out of prison? To save Petrolea? Or just prevent the deaths of the next idiots who come here?”

“Yes,” said Feroza. “There’s no reason I can’t do all of those things. Just some of them…later than others. We will have some time to decide.” She put her arms around him, rested her head against his chest. “It will be alright.”

He shifted against her, hugging back. “What if I think we can do more good for Petrolea up there than down here?”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Telling people what we know. Going on the media. Lobbying.”

“What on Earth do you know about lobbying?”

“Well,” said Victor. “We’ll be in a position to save people’s lives at least. Tell them about the tripwire program buried in the brains of every Petrolean creature.”

“Now that they’re sensitized to humans and human technology, extraction will become much more difficult,” mused Feroza.

“So maybe there won’t be any exploiters to lobby against at all,” said Victor. “Maybe we’ll have to find some other source of hydrocarbons in the outer system. Some other way to crack space open.”

He sounded so disappointed at the prospect. Feroza imagined factories in space, sending energy and goods down to an unpolluted Earth. Dense cities separated by vast swaths of uninhabited wilderness. In a way, Victor’s hyper-technological fantasy was a better, greener vision of the future than her own back-to-the-wilderness dream. But if her future could come about only after the deaths of nine tenths of the human population, Victor’s was dependent on technology that didn’t exist. To build an extraterrestrial industrial base, one would need…

“Factors!”

“What?” Victor mumbled, as if woken from a doze.

“All your wilderness survival!” crowed Feroza. “It wasn’t wilderness at all! A cave-man learning how to steal food from a vending machine. Victor, that’s what the mechanoids are for!”

“What are they for?”

“Think about it,” said Feroza. “They make life-support facilities, food, radios. They build habitats. They carry people around. My goodness, they even collect metals and hydrocarbons together, pack them onto rockets, and blast them off into space! They couldn’t be more perfect for space industry if they were specifically designed for it.”

“Except for when they eat people.”

“But don’t you see?” Feroza propped herself up on his chest and turned around so she could look at him. “The tripwire program means that they are still obeying their original instructions. All of the instincts and behaviors they’ve evolved can be overridden.”

Victor slowly nodded. “What if instead of killing the mechanoids, we domesticated them?”

It was actually rather sad. The animals became equipment far more completely and fundamentally than any battery farm hen or feedlot cow. Was Feroza a fool for devoting her life to these creatures, which were really nothing but the toys of departed masters? Or had she found the solution, the compromise, that would save her life’s work?

“Just how could we go about doing that?” she asked.

“Well, the camouflage is a good start,” said Victor. “But we don’t want to hide from the old tripwires, we want to fool them. Spoof the mechanoids into thinking we’re the old masters come back. Hit the right combination of cues, and the whole place might just open up to us. Dio, what could I do with user-friendly behavioral programming.”

“What would those cues look like?” asked Feroza.

“Let’s think about that.”

They spun their castles in the air until the visor of Victor’s helmet lit up red.

SOS. The message from the orbital station scrolled down the visor. SOS. SOS.