manifest itself in the copies of copies of copies passed on to later
generations, and the new factories, along with their mixed populations of robot
progeny, diverged further in form and function.
Material resources were scarce almost everywhere, which resulted in the
emergence of competitive pressures that the alien system designers had never
intended. The factory-robot communities that happened to include a balanced mix
of surveyor, procurement, and scavenger robots with "appetites" appropriate to
their factories' needs, and which enjoyed favorable sites on the surface,
usually managed to survive if not flourish. Factory Ten, for example, occupied
the center of an ancient meteorite crater twelve miles across, where the heat
and shock of the impact had exposed metal-bearing bedrock from below the ice;
Factory Thirteen established itself inside a deep fissure where the ice beneath
was relatively thin, and was able to melt a shaft down to the denser core
material; and Factory Fifteen resorted to nuclear transmutation processes to
build heavier nuclei from lighter ones frozen in solution in the ice crust. But
many were like Factory Nineteen, which began to take shape on an ill-chosen spot
far out on a bleak ice field, and ground to a halt when its deep-drilling robots
and transmutation reactors failed to function, and its supply of vital materials
ran out.
The scavenger and parts-salvaging robots assumed a crucial role in shaping the
strange metabolism that was coming into being. Regardless of what the Schedulers
in the various factories would have liked to see made, the only things that
could be assembled readily were the ones for which parts were available, and
that depended to a large degree on the ability of the scavengers to locate them,
or alternatively to locate assemblies suitable for breaking down—"digesting"—and
rebuilding into something useful. Factory Twenty-four was an extreme case.
Unable to "metabolize" parts directly from any source of raw materials because
of the complete failure of its materials-procurement workforce, it relied
totally on its scavengers. Factory Thirty-two, on the other hand, could acquire
raw materials but couldn't use them since it had been built without a processing
facility at all. Its robots delivered instead to Forty-seven, which happened to
produce parts for some of the scavengers being manufactured by Thirty-two, and
the two factory-robot organisms managed to coexist happily in their bizarre form
of symbiosis.
The piles of assorted junk, which shouldn't have accumulated from the earlier
phases of the process but had, were eaten up; the machines that broke down were
eaten up; and the carcasses of defunct factories were eaten up. When those
sources of materials had been exhausted, some of the machines began to eat each
other.
The scavengers had been designed, as they had to be, to discriminate between
properly functioning machines and desirable products on the one hand and rejects
in need of recycling on the other. However, as with everything else in the
whole, messed-up project, this function worked well in some cases, not so well
in others, and often not at all. Some of the models turned out to be as likely
to attempt the dismantling of a live, walking-around Fred as of a dead,
flat-on-its-back one. Many of the victims were indifferent to this kind of
treatment and soon died out, but others succeeded in developing effective
fight-or-flee responses to preserve themselves, thus marking the beginnings of
specialized prey and predators in the form of "lithovores" and "artifactovores."
This development was not always an advantage, especially when the loss of
discrimination was total. Factory Fifty was consumed by its own offspring, who
began dismantling it at its output end as soon as they came off the assembly
line, and then proceeded proudly to deliver the pieces back to its input end.
Its internal repair robots were unable to undo the undoings fast enough, and it
ground to a halt to become plunder for marauders from Thirty-six and
Fifty-three. The most successful factory-robot organisms protected themselves by
evolving aggressive armies of "antibody" defenders, which would recognize their
own factory and its "kind" and leave them alone, but attack and attempt to
destroy any "foreign" models that ventured too close. This gradually became the
dominant form of organism, usually associated with a distinct territory which
its members cooperated in protecting collectively.
By this time only a few holes in the ground remained at opposite ends of the
rocky shelf to mark where Factories One and Two had once stood. They had failed
to keep up with the times, and the area had become the domain of Factory
Sixty-five. The only trace left of the searcher spacecraft was a long, rounded
depression in the ice beach below, on the shore of the liquid methane sea.
The alien engineers had designed the system to enjoy full planetary
communications coverage by means of satellites and surface relays, but the idea
hadn't worked too well since nothing had been put into orbit and surface relays
tended not to last very long. This enabled some of the organisms without strong
defenses to remain protected, for a while, from the more metal-hungry empires by
sheer distance. But, to allow for communications blackouts and interference, the
aliens had also provided a backup method of program and data exchange between
robots and factories, which took the form of direct, physical, electrical
interconnection. This was a much slower process than using radiolinks,
naturally, since it required that the robots travel physically to the factories
for reprograming and reporting, but in a self-sustaining operation far from home
the method was a lot better than nothing. And it kept the accountants happy by
protecting the return on the investment.
With defects and deficiencies of every description appearing somewhere or other,
it was inevitable that some of the organisms would exhibit partial or total
communications breakdowns. Factory Seventy-three, built without radio
facilities, was started up by programs carried overland from Sixty-six. None of
its robots ever used anything but backup mode, and the factories that it spawned
continued the tradition. But this very fact meant that their operating ranges
were extended dramatically.
So the "defect" turned out to be not so much of a defect after all. Foraging
parties were able to roam farther afield, greatly enlarging their catchment
areas, and they frequently picked up as prizes one or more of the territories
previously protected by geographical remoteness. Furthermore, selective
pressures steadily improved the autonomy of the robots that operated in this
fashion. The autodirected types, relying on their comparatively small, local
processors, tended to apply simple solutions to the problems they encountered,
but their close-coupled mode of interaction with their environment meant that
the solutions were applied quickly: They evolved efficient "reflexes." The
teledirected types, by contrast, tied to the larger but remote central
computers, were inclined to attempt more comprehens
ive and sophisticated
solutions, but —as often as not—too late to do any good. Autodirection thus
conferred a behavioral superiority and gradually asserted itself as the norm,
while teledirection declined and survived only in a few isolated areas.
The periodic instinct to communicate genetic half-subfiles back to their
factories had long become a universal trait among the robots— there could be
descendants only of ancestors who left descendants—and they responded to the
decline of radio as a means of communication by evolving a compulsion to journey
at intervals back to the places whence they had come, to return, as it were, to
their "spawning grounds." But this method of reproduction had its problems and
posed new challenges to the evolutionary process.
The main problem was that an individual could deliver only half its genome to
the factory, after which the Supervisor would have to store the information away
until another robot of the same type as the first happened to show up with a
matching half; only then could the Supervisor pass a complete copy to its
Scheduler. If, as frequently happened, the Supervisor found itself saturated by
a peak workload during the intervening period, it was quite likely to delete the
half-subfile and allocate the memory space to other, more urgent things—bad news
for the Fred that the data had come from, who would thus have enacted the whole
reproductive ritual for nothing. The successful response to this problem came
with the appearance of a new mode of genetic recombination, which, quite
coincidentally, also provided the solution to an "information crisis" that had
begun to restrict the pool of genetic variation available for competitive
selection to draw on for further improvement.
Some mutant forms of robot knew they were supposed to output their half-subfiles
somewhere, but weren't all that sure, or perhaps weren't too particular, about
what they were supposed to output it into. Anything with the right electrical
connections and compatible internal software was good enough, which usually
meant other robots of the same basic type. And since a robot that had completed
its assigned tasks was in a receptive state to external reprograming, i.e.,
ready for fresh input that would normally come from the factory system, an
aspiring donor had little trouble in finding a cooperative acceptor, provided
the approach was made at the right time. So to begin with, the roles adopted
were largely a matter of circumstance and accidental temperament.
Although the robots' local memories were becoming larger than those contained in
their earlier ancestors, the operating programs were growing in size and
complexity too, with the result that an acceptor still didn't possess enough
free space to hold an entire "How to Make a Fred" subfile. The donor's half,
therefore, could be accommodated only by overwriting some of the code already
residing in the acceptor. How this was accomplished depended on the responses of
the programs carried inside the various robot types.
In some cases the incoming code from the donor was allowed to overwrite entire
program modules inside the acceptor, with the total loss to the acceptor of the
functions which those modules controlled. This was usually fatal, and no
descendants came into being to repeat such mistakes. The successful alternative
was to create space by trimming nonessential code from many modules, which
tended to leave the acceptor robot with some degradation in performance—usually
manifesting itself as a reduction in agility, dexterity, and defensive
abilities— but at least still functioning. The sacrifice was only temporary
since the acceptor robot would be reprogramed with replacement modules when it
delivered its genetic package at the factory.
But in return for these complications and superficial penalties came the immense
benefit that the subfiles presented at the factories were complete ones—suitable
for dispatch to the Schedulers without delay and the attendant risk of being
deleted by overworked Supervisors. The new method thus solved the reliability
problem that had plagued the formerly universal "asexual" mode of reproduction.
The information crisis that it also solved had developed through the
"inbreeding" caused by the various Supervisors having only the gene pools of
their respective "tribes" available to work with, which made recombination
difficult because of the restrictive rules imposed by the alien programers. But
the robots swapping genes out on the surface were not always averse to
adventuring beyond the tribal limits, knew nothing and cared less about
programers' rules, since nothing approaching intelligence or awareness was
operative yet in what was unfolding, and proceeded to bring half-subfiles
together haphazardly in ways that the aliens' rules didn't permit and which the
Supervisors would never have imagined. Most of the offspring resulting from
these experiments didn't work and were scrapped before leaving the factories;
but the ones that did radiated functionally outward in all directions to launch
a whole new, qualitatively distinct phase of the evolutionary process.
The demands of the two sexual roles reinforced minor initial physical
differences and brought about a gradual polarization of behavioral traits. Since
a female in a "pregnant" condition suffered the loss of some measure of
self-sufficiency for the duration, her chances of delivering (literally!) were
improved considerably if her mate happened to be of a disposition to stay around
for a while and provide for the two of them generally, thus helping to protect
their joint genetic investment. Selection tended, therefore, to favor the genes
of this kind of male, and by the same token those of the females who mated
preferentially with them. As a consequence a female trait emerged of being
"choosy" in this respect, and in response the males evolved various repertoires
of rituals, displays, and demonstrations to improve their eligibility.
The population had thus come to exhibit genetic variability and recombination,
competition, selection, and adaptation—all the essentials for continuing
evolution. The form of life—for it was, wasn't it?—was admittedly somewhat
strange by terrestrial standards, with the individuals that it comprised sharing
common, external reproductive, digestive, and immune systems instead of
separate, internal ones . . . and of course there were no chains of complicated
carbon chemistry figuring anywhere in the scheme of things. ... But then, after
all, what is there apart from chauvinism to say it shouldn't have been so?
1
KARL ZAMBENDORF STOOD GAZING DOWN OVER SEVENTH AVENUE from the window of his
penthouse suite in the New York Hilton. He was a tall man in his early fifties,
a little on the portly side but with an erect and imposing bearing, graying hair
worn collar-length and flowing, bright, piercing eyes, and hawklike features
rendered biblically patriarchal by a pointed beard that he bleached white for
effect. Although the time was late in the morning, Zambendorf's breakfast tray
on the side table beside the window had only recently been discarded, and he was
&
nbsp; still in his shirt-sleeves from sleeping in after his team's late-night return
from its just completed Argentina tour.
A prominent Argentine news magazine had featured him as THE AUSTRIAN
MIRACLE-WORKER on its cover for the previous week's issue, and the hostess of
one of the major talk shows on Buenos Aires TV had introduced him as "Perhaps
one of the most baffling men of the twenty-first century, the scientifically
authenticated superpsychic ..." Thus had Latin America greeted the man who was
already a media sensation across the northern continent and Western Europe, and
whose ability to read minds, foretell the future, influence distant events, and
divine information inaccessible to the human senses had been proved, the public
was assured, by repeated tests to be beyond the power of science to explain.
"Karl, I don't like it," Otto Abaquaan said from behind him. Zam-bendorf pursed
his lips and whistled silently to himself while he waited for Abaquaan to
continue. The exchange had become a ritual over the years they had worked
together. Abaquaan would voice all the reasons why they shouldn't get involved
and couldn't afford the risks, and Zam-bendorf would explain all the reasons why
they didn't have any choice. Abaquaan would then reconsider, and eventually,
grudgingly, he would concede. Having disposed of the academic issues, they would
then proceed somehow to resolve the crisis. It happened that way about once a
week. Abaquaan went on, "We'd be out of our minds to get mixed up in it. The
whole situation would involve too much of the wrong kind of exposure. We don't
need risks like that."
Zambendorf turned away from the window and thrust out his chin. "It was reported
as if it were our idea in the first place, and it received a lot of news
coverage," he said. "We can't afford to be seen to back down now. On top of
that, it would destroy our credibility not only with a lot of the public, but
with GSEC . . . and GSEC can do us a lot of good, Otto. So the situation didn't
work out as we expected. What's new? We're stuck with it, but we can handle it."
Otto Abaquaan, a handsomely lean and swarthy Armenian with black hair, a droopy
mustache, and deep brown, liquid eyes, rubbed his nose with a knuckle while he
considered the statement, then shook his head and sighed. "Why the hell did you