Creations (19 page)

Max thought for a second. “It reminds me of what the old seventeenth century scientists used to think, that the difference between living things and dead matter was some kind of supernatural force. They thought that only high order creatures like horses and humans could reproduce, and that low order animals like frogs and worms would just appear spontaneously out of mud and water. Even two hundred years later, people were still putting electricity through wet clay to try and make insects appear. Order out of disorder, animate out of inanimate. I wonder what they’d have thought if they could see what we’re doing here.”

“It’s hardly the same thing,” Safi said. “It’s not as if we’ve made something that’s alive.”

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

They went to bed after that, Safi in the single cabin below deck, Max on one of the padded benches up top. She’d wanted to toss a coin for it but he insisted.

She was halfway down the stairs when she stopped and turned as if about to say something. They stood frozen in place while she hovered hesitantly, seemingly unsure whether to share what was on her mind. She snapped out of it after a couple of seconds; whatever it was, it seemed she’d thought better of it.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Max. Sleep well.”

Just for a moment, the discomfort had been thick enough to feel it in the air. “Sure,” he said, wondering what the hell it might have been. “Sleep well.”

* * *

The next morning, Max was the first to wake up. He got himself some food from one of the storage lockers, then went to see how the replication was progressing.

The new machine was already recognisable as a copy of its parent. The rear five percent of the thing was almost complete, including the manipulator arms that would connect the sections together when it was creating its own copies. Max leant over the side to get a closer look at how well these parts had been built. They were the first mechanical parts, the first real challenge for the process, and as far as he could see everything had been built correctly, including the physical and electrical connectors that mated each watertight unit to its neighbours. The arms’ rotating joints were the most difficult, and even those looked good.

“How’s it going?” Safi asked from behind him. He hadn’t heard her coming up onto the deck.

“Pretty good. We won’t know until it’s switched on but I think it’s working out.”

“Great. Funny how it looks a different colour in the daylight.”

Max hadn’t noticed up until then, but the structure of the thing was definitely a different shade of green to its parent. In addition the surface was slightly mottled, as if the quality of the materials refinement had varied from one section to another.

“Ross said we could expect things like this though,” Safi continued. “There’s always going to be a few impurities in the cellulose mix. Depends what flavour of algae it picks up.”

“Yeah, I hope that’s the only difference.”

“It will be. We’ve got another two hours before they expect us back at base. I’ll give them a call, make sure our relief crew is ready.”

* * *

The next ten days came and went, with the replication process kept under continuous surveillance. At every stage its progress was compared with the plans and simulations to make sure it was behaving as expected. No one was certain exactly how long it would take, but the estimates were repeatedly fine tuned as the new Prospector got closer to completion. They only knew for sure when the last of the vessel’s sections began to appear in the layering chamber, which gave them approximately five hours to go. And this time they weren’t so lucky with the timing, as it became clear that the activation of the new machine would take place in darkness. And so, as Max, Safi, Ross and Victor watched on their screens on the island, the observers on the boat turned their floodlights onto the two Prospectors and waited for the moment of activation.

When the final piece was slotted into place and the machine came to life, it behaved just as its predecessor had, aligning its sails to what little wind there was, and slowly moving off toward the collection site it had chosen for itself. Then the first Prospector, its task for now complete, turned the other way and steered a course toward the island, while the observers on the boat manoeuvred themselves to keep out of both machines’ way. In spite of the lateness, the operations room was as full as it had been when the first Prospector had been activated, and the sight of the new arrival heading off to do its duty sparked a round of
applause from the onlookers. Even Max felt a sense of pride at what he was seeing, which surprised him. He guessed Safi must have been feeling the same thing.

Then everyone’s attention switched back to the first craft, as it prepared to complete its first operating cycle by delivering the cargo it had been carrying. It took fifteen minutes to reach the drop site, and all that could be seen of the delivery was the Prospector steering a wide arc through the site before heading back out into open sea. But if everything had gone to plan, and so far everything else had, somewhere on that shallow seabed was the package it had left behind.

Finding it took another ten minutes. Later, when deliveries were being dropped off continuously, automated minisubs would literally rake them in off the seabed, but for this first one a pair of ESOS divers were sent out to retrieve it. The crowd moved down to the lab where it would be brought in, and waited for it to arrive.

When it did appear, Ross took over to handle the processing, another job that would be automated later on. The object itself was a thin flexible strip, like yellow plastic, about three inches long and half an inch wide, with electrodes at each end. One end was weighted to allow it to stay put when dropped to the seabed. Between the two electrodes were a set of uneven stripes, as if different coloured inks had been soaked into the material and allowed to smear along its length by different amounts. One of these bands of colour had a slight purple tint, and this, according to Ross, was where the gold lay.

Carefully he scraped the material off the strip onto the sterile surface of the workbench. Against the white background the stuff looked almost black, a tiny pile of black powder in the middle of an expanse of white. No one was saying a word as Ross worked, gathering the material together for the next stage. He even laughed when he looked round and saw the intense expressions on everyone’s faces. “Relax, guys,” he said. “I’m the
one who needs to be concentrating.” Then he dropped the powder into a ceramic container, placed it in a small electric furnace mounted in the wall, and shut the toughened glass door. The bricks lining the tiny cavity were glowing orange from the heat, and there was a brief flash of flame as some impurities were burned off. When the remaining material had melted, he took it out and poured it onto a ceramic mat, where it solidified almost instantly into a small sphere less than a millimetre across. And then, at last, there it was, and this time the colour was unmistakable. Their first delivery of gold, no bigger than the first grain of rice on Shere Khan’s chessboard. But like that grain of rice, it was the first of many.

Ross picked it up between his finger and thumb and held it up for everyone to see. Then Victor stepped forward and took it carefully from him. “Take a look people,” he said. “This is why we’re doing this. This is why we’re here.”

It was amazing, Max thought, how quickly they got into the habit of doing absolutely nothing. Compared to the relentless activity of designing and building the first of the Prospectors, the job of overseeing their operation was positively relaxed. Most days would involve an hour or two in the operations room watching the Prospector population at work, followed perhaps by a visit to the processing centre to see the finished product mounting up. So far the collection wasn’t huge, but it was big enough to need locking away. Other than that, their time was their own.

The island’s beaches were a great attraction for all the inhabitants, especially Ross, whose knowledge of sports and beach games seemed endless. And Victor was happy to let him organise the ESOS workforce into leagues and tournaments if it was good for morale and helped pass the time. The nearest inhabited island was over two hours away by boat, so they had to make the most of what was around them.

Max, Safi and Doug Chowdry were resting at the top of one of the island’s remoter beaches when Ross wandered over and joined them. Doug had come out just three days earlier, at Max’s invitation, so that he could see for himself what he’d helped to produce. Safi and he were sitting on the sand facing out to sea, but Max was off to the side, teaching Gillian how to throw crude wooden spears into a dead tree trunk he’d chosen as a target. He’d found a piece of driftwood shaped like an old spear thrower, and he‘d soon remembered the knack of launching the long wooden darts, using their flexibility and elasticity to amplify the force of his arm. In the right hands it could bring down a bison at fifty feet, or so his anthropology teacher had claimed when she’d taught the class how to use them. The gouge marks in the tree were certainly a good indication of their power.

“You’re getting pretty lethal with that thing you know, Max,” Ross said when he reached them.

“I used to be better. We had competitions at college, I was usually in the top three.”

“What’s it called again?”

“It’s an atlatl. That’s what the Aztecs called them.”

“Cool. You’ll have to show me how to use it, in case I ever run into Oliver again.”

Max laughed. “I think you’ll be joining the queue for that one.” Then he gathered up the spears that he’d thrown and paced back out for Gillian to have a try. Ross sat down next to Safi and Doug.

“How long do you reckon those things will be running?” Doug was asking. Off in the distance the drop site was visible and a steady procession of Prospectors was sailing through it, dropping their cargoes as they went. They were unmissable now; Victor had belatedly realised that employees’ families could never be kept out of the secret once the things were operating in force, and had signed the entire island onto the non-disclosure agreement. Gillian hadn’t had the nerve to tell him she already knew the whole thing.

“We think we’ve got another four months,” Safi said. “Then we can wind the program up.”

“Geez,” Doug said. “It’s going to get crowded out there.”

“It already is.”

Even as they spoke, another two vehicles appeared on the horizon and started to curve in toward the drop site.

“So what are you guys going to do all that time?” Doug said.

“I’ll be needed in the operations room,” Safi said. “And we’re planning to capture one of the later generation machines to check it over. I’ll be needed for that too. I don’t know about anyone else though.”

“We may not be sticking around here much longer,” Max said, as he and Gillian finally sat down. “I was in line for some survey
work before I came here and I had some pet projects worked into the itinerary. I may use this downtime to go work on those.”

“That applies to both of you I guess?”

“Yeah, me too,” Gillian said. “I’m starting to feel as if I’ve made the most of being here, in terms of my artwork that is. And the treatments are pretty much done too.” She ran her hand over her upper arm as she spoke, where the implant had been sitting for over a month now, a small hard lump just under the skin. “Time for nature to take its own course.”

“So you’ll be off counting bugs in swamps again, Max?” Doug said. “I thought you’d grown out of that kind of thing.”

“Just trying to get back to my roots, Doug. You know me.”

“True. But don’t you have your own little food chain to study now, from the comfort of your office chair?”

“I do, but real life is far more interesting.”

Ross shifted his position to stretch out on the sand, and propped himself up on one elbow facing the others.

“You never know, Max,” he said, grinning. “Cambria may have developed its own intelligent life while you were away. Even now they might be waiting for their creator to return, wondering where you’ve got to.”

“Intelligent? No, not much chance of that. If we ran it for a few million years, maybe then. But the way it’s going these days, I doubt it.”

“Really?” Ross said. “You’ve got some pretty complex behaviour in there already, from what I’ve seen. Doesn’t that count as intelligent?”

“No more than the contents of the nearest anthill,” Max said. “The social interaction within each species is impressive, but don’t read too much into it.”

“But what about the predators and the food chains, all the hunting strategies that have emerged? You can’t say that’s not an achievement.”

“An achievement? Sure, different species, different behaviours,
all competing with each other, all wiping each other out as if that’s the only way they can stay on top. Some achievement.” If he was trying to hide his views on the subject, he’d failed.

“I thought you’d be glad to see that kind of complexity,” Ross said. “After all, it was meant to happen that way, wasn’t it?”

“No, it wasn’t meant to happen, not like that anyway. We wanted to see complex, social life forms developing, but not the organised carnage that’s going on now. It’s as if we took all the right ingredients, put them together, and suddenly all hell broke loose. It’s almost as if the rate of evolution is itself a stable, evolved system, and trying to speed things up artificially will always be a mistake.”

In fact Max could still remember the day the first predator had appeared, about three years into the project. At first it had looked almost comical, that lone creature striding round the landscape, picking up rocks and mechanically smashing them down on any other creatures it came across, all because of a random fluke in its behaviour rules. It had looked like some kind of sick, gratuitous cartoon. The first victims hadn’t even tried to move away, but had simply stood there unaware of what was happening to them until it was too late. In the end each one became a free meal for its killer. Predatory behaviour wasn’t bad in itself, but that creature had been the first step in the path that led to modern day Cambria. It had become the fittest, so survival would follow. Its descendants would share in its fortune.