Creations (22 page)

“Victor and the others are in the workshop bay,” Max was told by the boat driver. “They’ve pulled one out of the water to strip it down. I think Dr. Biehn has taken charge.”

So Safi had volunteered to lead the investigation. She was probably the best one for the job, Max thought. He, on the other hand, had no interest whatsoever in seeing one of the machines that had almost killed him, or in facing Victor and the others. All he wanted to do was sleep. He decided to leave them to it and went straight home. Gillian was already in bed and he took his place next to her without waking her up.

* * *

The autopsy, as they’d named it, yielded some interesting results. Once they were together again, in the workshops, Safi took them through what she’d discovered.

“We cut this section out of the controller,” she said, holding up a flat rectangular object about two feet in length. It was the base of one of the chemical storage tanks, but thanks to the efficiency of the printing process a dense web of circuits and control components was embedded within it. “It looks good at first sight, but look down here at these seven conductor tracks.”

Once she’d pointed it out it was obvious: seven lines of conductor, all running parallel, had been shorted out by an eighth track scrawled across them from one side to the other. It was like taking the back off a computer, picking seven wires at random, and connecting them together with a soldering iron.
Erratic behaviour was the least they could expect.

“So that’s where the problem was,” Victor said. “Now, why did it act the way it did?”

“It had effects all over the place,” she said. “The main one was that the navigation system was corrupted. That’s why it went straight through the boundary. The delivery process was disabled too, for bringing gold back to the drop site. But material collection and replication were unaffected, and, as we found out, it could still move itself around.”

“And all two hundred had the same fault?”

“Exactly the same. Take a look at this.”

She walked over to where the Prospector was sitting on the trailer and took another section of superstructure from the floor. The vehicle had a gaping hole in one side where its insides had been exposed, and the piles of components scattered around it suggested that it had been hacked apart fairly mercilessly but Max knew that Safi and her team would have been nothing if not painstaking in their investigations. Then she walked back over to where the others were standing and showed them what she’d picked up: a disk about a foot in diameter, the same dark green colour as the rest of the structure but with a reddish brown coating. She was careful to hold it by its edges.

“You’ll recognise this,” she said. “It’s where the instruction set for replication is stored, the blueprints it uses when it copies itself. The magnetic coating looks good, but I wanted to check if the contents were okay so I ran it through a decoder. And I found something interesting: the exact same error is on here, coded into the instructions. And it’s the same for all of them.”

“So all the Prospectors that got out are related,” Victor said.

“That’s right. The first bad one must have been made about eight generations ago. Ever since then the fault has been sitting there unnoticed, getting copied every time they replicated.”

“But why did they all go at the same time?” Ross said. “Some of them must have been over two months old.”

“It was a delayed effect,” Safi said. “That short circuit made the navigator’s timing signal feed into the path selector. It meant that the prioritisation of the nav commands was no longer constant, but varied with time. When the timing signal on the boundary transmitters clocked over to zero yesterday, the priorities reversed completely: doing a U-turn at the boundary went low, and biasing the planner toward high-yield waters went high. They sailed over the boundary as if it wasn’t even there.”

Max hadn’t said a word up until this point. “So let’s get this right,” he said. “The Prospector that built that first bad one carried on making more bad ones, with exactly the same fault?”

“That’s right.”

“And if just one of them hadn’t been caught, it would have carried on replicating itself, and the machines that it built would have been made the same way too?”

Safi thought for a second. “Yes, that’s true as well.”

Max picked up the controller board from the machine and looked at where the mistake had been made. Compared to the neat, ordered arrangement of the other conductors, the seven track blunder that had affected it so badly was hard to view as an improvement. However from the Prospector’s point of view, an improvement was exactly what it was. With no delivery cycle to slow it down, and no boundaries to hold it in place, it and its descendants would have had the whole ocean open to them.

Max looked out of the workshop loading bay, at the harbour and the sea beyond. “What would have happened if we hadn’t caught them in time?” he said, without taking his eyes off the scene.

“Nothing, probably,” Victor said. “We would have got them all eventually, and that would have been that.”

“And if they’d started to replicate outside? If there were even more to deal with?”

“Then we’d have got them back as well, just as easily.”

Max turned back inside and faced Victor. “Easily? I almost
died getting that last one back. You do know that, don’t you?”

“I appreciate what you had to do, Max, but I don’t think you were in any real danger.”

“You weren’t there, Victor, you didn’t see what happened.” The others were looking uncomfortable. They’d probably heard every word from Garrett while Max was being dragged alongside the Prospector. Max wondered just what Garrett had said.

“But you’re safe now, and that’s what counts,” Victor said. “And now we’ve fixed the problem we can carry on with our work. Let’s get on with it.” He turned to leave the workshop.

“You really can’t see how dangerous what you’ve created here is, can you?” Max said.

Victor turned back round, surprise on his face. “Dangerous? I don’t know what you mean. It’s a boat that sails around and sucks up seawater. What could it possibly do that’s dangerous?”

“I can’t even imagine,” Max said. “And that’s what scares me. You’ve let something loose here that you can only just control, and you still can’t see the implications. Do you know how close you were to not getting them back at all?”

“But we did, Max, so it’s alright,” Victor said.

“No, it’s not alright. You had a close call this time, and you think it’s all okay just because you caught them early. But you can’t see what might have happened, what might still happen.”

“Max, —
it’s alright.“

Max felt angrier than he thought himself capable of, as if every fear he’d had about this project had suddenly become real. Victor however was just smiling back at him blandly, as if trying to placate him. Doug cut in to try and defuse the situation.

“Guys, take it easy. You caught them and that’s the important thing. All you’ve got to do now is keep an eye on the others and make sure you catch any problems early.”

Max was still unhappy, and it obviously showed.

“Max, we’ve got a lot to thank you for here,” Victor said. “If it wasn’t for you we would never have got this far. And if it
wasn’t for the work you did on the navigation and boundary systems, we might never have got these machines back at all. You should be proud of what you’ve contributed.”

“But it was the navigation and boundary systems that failed in the first place,” Max said. “Don’t you see what that means? It doesn’t matter how careful you are in designing something like this, because it’s the design itself that starts shifting once the copying errors kick in. Nothing you can put
in
that design will ever be sacred. If something like this can happen, no matter how careful we are, then maybe the whole thing is a mistake. Maybe I should have left you to it when I said I would. Or never got involved at all.”

“And what would that have achieved?”

Max tried to imagine what would have happened if he hadn’t agreed to take part. Would they still have got the Prospectors working without his help? In all honesty they probably would, eventually. And would the machines have been more likely to fail like this if he hadn’t seen it done his way? The answer to that was probably yes as well. It didn’t make him feel any better though.

“It makes no difference now anyway,” he said. “I’m not going to be part of this any longer.”

“Max, what are you talking about?” Safi said. She looked concerned.

“It’s time I left,” he said. “I was planning to leave the island soon anyway, but after this — I don’t think I want to be involved at all. Victor, you can pay my department up until today if you want, or whatever. Just give me a week to sort out where I’m going and then I’ll be gone.”

“Max, why don’t you sleep on this, give it some more thought?”

“I’ve done nothing but think about this from the moment I heard what you were planning. No, this is enough. I hope it all works out for you, I really do. But I’m not going to be involved. Good luck.”

Anna Liu had a decision to make. For months she’d been putting out feelers, priming her trawlers to look for any other informants who could help her where Tyrell had failed. She had those three names to work on too, those mysterious new employees who had been spirited out of their homes and lives and into the depths of some ESOS facility. And then, just as it seemed that none of those lines of enquiry would give her what she needed, the name at the top of her list had surfaced: Max Lowrie, large as life, dropping straight onto the grid five thousand miles from where she would ever have expected to find him.

Breaking cover was never something to do lightly. But considering how much he must know — and the things that he didn’t know but she could tell him — he was possibly the most valuable asset she could have.

It was time to make her introductions.

* * *

“You shouldn’t look back you know, Max, you did the right thing leaving.”

“I’m not looking back, just — looking.”

Max hadn’t been aware of Gillian joining him on the rocky seashore. He’d been lost in thought for five minutes almost, his rock hammers and other tools scattered around him as he gazed out over the Pacific, his work temporarily forgotten.

“Just looking?” she said. “What? In case one of those things comes after you? We’re thousands of miles away you know, it’s hardly likely.”

Max laughed. “I know, it’s not going to happen. I still catch myself checking though.” And on one occasion, just after they’d arrived here, he’d almost convinced himself he could see those
distinctive twin sails appearing on the horizon. A trick of the light it must have been, or a yacht far in the distance. It had got his attention at the time but didn’t worry him anymore. And nor did the intimidation that had stopped him coming here all those months ago. Roy’s arrest wouldn’t stop all those other zealots from taking exception to his work, but if he was the one behind the recent threats then it was enough of a reprieve for Max to feel safe in picking up his plans. He’d flown himself and Gillian out here at ESOS’s expense, not even clearing it with Victor first. Victor hadn’t been in a position to complain.

“Come on,” Gillian said. “We’ve both got work to do. Looks like you’re nearly done with this one.”

The sea was calm today, for this part of the Chilean coast, but a cool wind was blowing in off the water and the storms of the previous night had made their mark on the cliffs behind them. Fresh rock falls were scattered all along the length of the beach, exposing the final resting places of sea creatures that hadn’t seen daylight in hundreds of millions of years, a thought that never failed to amaze Max. The spiral ammonite that he’d found was one of the best he’d ever seen, and a few more careful taps would be all he needed to separate the rock in which it was bedded from the main body of the boulder. There was nothing new to learn from a fossil type he’d seen hundreds of times before, but the shape of the ammonites still fascinated him. Everywhere he’d travelled he’d found them, that simple, mathematically precise spiral, repeated again and again, all over the world.

“Do you know there are creatures out there right now that look almost identical to the way this thing did when it was alive?” he said.

“Yes, I know, nautilus shells, that kind of thing.”

“But that’s four hundred million years with no major anatomical changes, as if evolution just can’t make them any better. They’re incredible.”

Gillian nodded.

“When Darwin was in Argentina he found remains of larger animals, horses especially,” Max continued. “If you went up to the top of those cliffs and dug there, you’d probably find the same thing. But they died out, and nothing like them was seen here again. Not until the European settlers brought horses with them a few hundred years ago. Then they spread like wildfire, down through Peru and Argentina, stripping the grasslands bare, along with the European cattle. It was a disaster. That’s how it happens when things change too quickly, new species suddenly appearing or being introduced artificially. It never works out well. But in the time it took a whole species to disappear then reappear, these little ammonites just carried on at their own pace, hardly changing. That’s the way it’s meant to work.”

“So if an ecosystem is forced to change too quickly, it always ends badly?” Mentioning adaptation and change was probably the closest she’d ever come to admitting Max’s view of the world.

“Yes, pretty much.”

“Like Cambria?”

“Exactly like Cambria.”

Until then they’d been alone on the beach, but then they heard voices behind them. A group of children had appeared, presumably from a school nearby, led by their teacher. The children were obviously local, but the teacher seemed paler, more European in appearance. They passed by close to where Max and Gillian were sitting, then headed off toward some rock pools further down the shore. Some kind of nature lesson, Max decided. As the teacher went past she glanced over at Max and Gillian, but otherwise didn’t acknowledge their presence.