Creations (42 page)

They hadn’t looked like easy words for Ariel. Max was genuinely honoured. It didn’t make him feel any better though. Ariel’s words had reminded him just how few people had managed to survive, and all that was going through his mind was the times when he’d got away and other people hadn’t. The collapsing walkways at Anchorville, the jump to the lander, the evacuation at Crisium: all those times when he was saved but others weren’t so lucky. He almost felt responsible for them. “Survivor guilt”, he’d heard it called, but putting a name on it didn’t make it any easier.

Fifty people got out, and I am one of them, he thought. Fifty people who had no reason to think when they got up that morning that they would be lucky to survive the day, and yet barely ten of them even know what happened. Is that enough to stop the same thing happening again? Or is it always going to happen? Just how long will it be before someone’s well-intentioned dabbling succeeds in creating life once again?

Life — no longer could anyone doubt that that was what they were dealing with. And all it had taken to start the process, to turn dead matter into living things, was the ability to reproduce. It was like the electric current that brought Frankenstein’s monster to life, except that no lightning bolts or supernatural forces were required. Just put the right materials in the right places, and you will have machines that can copy themselves indefinitely, evolving over time, whether you want them to or not.

It really was that simple, he thought. The atoms, the chemicals that every living thing, including himself, was built from had existed for billions of years and would do for billions more. It was just the way they happened to be put together for these few decades that allowed him to exist, as a person. Arrange them to the right plan and you could build a bacterium, or a fly, or a
human. Or you could build a machine that would sail around pulling gold out of seawater. Or, if you wanted, you could build a colony of robots that would grow and spread, replicating themselves first out of lunar dirt, then out of anything else that crossed their path. There would be no need for any mystical “life force”, and no need even for God. The laws of physics would be enough.

No need for God, he thought, and wondered what Gillian would think of that.

Then he remembered something, something that had been clear as day at the time, but which had since left his mind completely. He remembered standing in the lander, waiting for its fuel tanks to fill so that they could take off and leave the destruction behind once and for all. He remembered wishing and hoping for the refuelling to finish, knowing that there was nothing he could do to make it happen faster and that for once his survival was in someone else’s hands. And he also remembered what exactly had gone through his mind as he’d stood there, eyes tightly shut. I can’t die here, he had thought. We’ve got to get away.
I’ve
got to get away.

God wouldn’t let me get this far just to kill me
.

He had thought it clearly, and what was more, he had believed it.

He tried to shake the idea from his head. It was a natural reaction after all, to call on God for help when life was in danger. It bore no relationship to his real beliefs, his real ideals. Somehow, though, he didn’t manage to convince himself. He tried instead to think what Safi would have said if she’d been there too, but that only brought back bad memories — and one memory in particular. In fact, that final image of her falling from the lander was so predominant that even her face was beginning to fade from his mind. He was almost starting to forget what she looked like.

It was mad, he told himself; he’d only been with her a few
days previously, but already he could only picture her in vague, indistinct terms. It was almost as if his mind was trying to block out that last memory of her, but everything else about her was going too. Nothing was left: her body, her possessions, by now all of them would be part of that still growing colony.

Then he remembered, not everything of hers had gone. He got out of bed, went over to where his clothes were piled up and reached into the pocket of his trousers. Her omni was still there, and he’d brought it back for a reason.

Her whole life would be stored in that little bracelet’s memory cells: all her pictures, all the films she’d watched, the music she liked, the messages she’d sent and received, everything she’d ever bought, everything she’d ever worked on. However, it would be her most recent entries that would justify the risks he’d taken in going back for it.

He activated the unit and looked at the top level of its storage. Personal and private data were further down and he wouldn’t dream of trying to look there unless the colony recordings weren’t obvious, but as it turned out he didn’t need to. The pictures and video clips were there, right at the top. He opened a couple up to check they’d recorded okay. It took a while to get used to her omni control conventions; like his, selections were made by tracing shapes and letters in the air next to it, but she’d set hers up differently. He soon figured it out, though, and reviewed what she’d been able to capture. He hoped it would be enough; short of having an ‘ESOS’ logo stamped on every machine, this was probably the best evidence he could wish for.

Then he noticed something else in the top level storage. The report — the document she’d been working on before the flight — that was in there too, along with all its accompanying notes and drafts. As a recipe for how to create life from rock and metal he was tempted to delete it there and then, but he knew that would be wrong. He opened it up instead, purely to see how far through it she was and what she’d really written, and whether there was
any other person or organisation more entitled than himself to decide what to do with it.

How to build replicators, and how to look for them. Those two threads seemed to run right through what she’d written so far and looking at her notes, Max could finally see the connection between the two. For not only was this a construction manual, a how-to guide on making self-replicating machines from scratch; she was also laying out, in some degree of detail, what people should look for if evidence of replicators from elsewhere was to be found. The only question was where to look for the signs. And it seemed that, for her, the airless, low-gravity environment of ore-rich asteroids had been the obvious choice. And what was more, she’d expected to find those signs herself, within decades if not years.

Max was just scrolling through the pages now, his eyes wandering over the words in front of him. It was then that something else caught his eye, some word or phrase that must have meant something to his subconscious, but which was still hidden from the rest of him even with the text in front of his face. He backed up and began to read the section from the top, this time slowly, taking in every word.

It was something about building replicators for unfamiliar environments, how to maximise their chances if it wasn’t known what kind of gravity, radiation levels or chemical resources they would be surrounded by. There was a proof, mathematical at first, but then summarised in the text, showing that machines whose components were of a similar scale to the basic blocks of raw material surrounding them would be by far and away the most likely to succeed. They would replicate more easily and their design would be easier to tailor to whatever job they were intended to do. There was only one way to genuinely achieve this, she had decided, and that was to build machines at the molecular scale. In this way they could take in and filter the parts they needed directly from their surroundings, with no complex
chemical extraction or processing required, then put them together to make whatever they were asked to make, including copies of themselves. She had then laid down a plan, more of a rough template than a finished blueprint, of how such a machine could code its own design using chains of atoms and molecules, then pull in more of those molecules to grow and reproduce according to what its design code told it. A machine of this type, running on chemical reactions rather than motors and mechanisms, would be the easiest design to optimise for the widest range of operating environments.
In fact
, she wrote,
with a sufficiently versatile coding scheme for growth and replication, and the ability to replicate with minimal processing of incoming materials
,
machines of this type would represent the ultimate in replicative efficiency. For not only would the shape and function of these devices be infinitely variable; in the extreme case, even their internal functioning need not be set in stone
.

Max put the omni down and closed his eyes.
Set in stone
, his mind was repeating to him again and again,
set in stone
. Then he opened his eyes and sat up straight. An image had just appeared to him, or rather two images, of two entirely separate objects in two entirely different places, that had no business whatsoever looking the same as each other but that still somehow did. One of them he’d seen over twelve months ago; the other, just three days.

He got up quickly, almost staggering as the blood left his head, then he cleared his senses and started to get dressed. What were the chances? he asked himself, pulling his clothes on. What were the chances of something like that falling into his hands so easily? And after all the time and effort that she’d spent looking millions of miles away from Earth, when all the time the proof was all around her? She was even part of it herself. There would have to have been thousands of the things, of course, millions more like, but to find one after all this time; he might even have picked it up and held it in his hands; just how likely was that?

He left the room and headed downstairs. Gillian was on her
way up carrying a tray, but he passed her by and ran toward the door.

“Max, where are you going?” she called after him.

“I have to go to work,” he said, stopping briefly and looking back at her. “There’s something I’ve got to do.”

“But Max!”

He got into the car and drove himself to UCLA, still trying to clear the sleep and fatigue from his head, then parked up on the street and ran inside, down toward the basement labs. He found the room he wanted and went in, still running. John Olson was there, but Max didn’t even give him time to react.

“John, those x-rays you sent me of the rocks, where are they?”

“The scans? What do you want those for? Max, are you sure you should be —”

“Just show them to me. I need to see them.”

John paused slightly in indecision, then went over to one of the terminals and brought the images up one by one. Max recognised them from the files John had sent him on the island but on the larger screen of the terminal they were much clearer, much more defined. There was one in particular he was looking for though, and when it flashed up in front of him he reached over and froze the screen.

“Is that what you’re looking for?” John said. “What’s so special about it?”

Max pointed at part of the image, at one of the shapes bedded into the rock — a narrow line, about three inches long, slightly bulbous toward one end — and said, “That is.”

John peered in close to the screen, as if trying to discern it from the crystalline deposits surrounding it. “What is it?”

“Split it along that seam and I’ll show you.”

John still had no idea what Max was getting at, but didn’t seem to want to question him. Instead he checked the catalogue number for the rock in the picture, then took it from its storage box and carried it over to one of the benches along the side wall
of the lab. There were tools there, hammers, diamond saws and chisels, plus other rocks from the collection, lying in pieces where they had already been broken along the natural faults separating the layered bacterial mats that had formed them. John put the rock in a clamp, looked at the scans again to check the location of the seam and split it in two.

Max stepped forward and picked up the two halves, turning them so that the cut surfaces were uppermost. And there, lying amongst the calcite and trapped sediment of the ocean floor it had fallen onto, was a three inch long needle, sharp at each tip and rounded in the middle, its shape slightly disguised by the mineral growths that had formed around it, but otherwise as smooth and pristine as the day it was made, whenever that was. What it was made for was another mystery, but, Max at least thought he could guess.

They were out at New Venice beach, near Gillian’s gallery, walking along the seafront as the cold November wind came in from the west. Few other walkers were out but Max had only just got back from the Crisium enquiry board, and having to relive those events one more time had made him want to breathe safe, fresh air at every opportunity.

“So let me ask you the question you’ve always asked us poor, stupid, Christians,” Gillian said. “If life here was started by some intelligent creator, what created them?”

It was a good question, Max thought, and in the circumstances a fair one. “Somewhere, at some time in the past, life really did start by chance. The Karman-Lowrie number is only an estimate, but it gives an idea of how often it must happen, how many planets you would need for one spontaneous emergence to occur every billion years. But wherever it did happen, we know something intelligent grew up as a result. And when it decided it wanted to spread out into the cosmos, it hit on the best method imaginable of turning as many of the planets around it as possible into habitable environments. They probably fired those things out trillions at a time, hoping that some small percentage would hit somewhere viable. Isotope analysis of the needle’s surface suggests it was in interstellar space for up to ten thousand years before it even reached Earth. It could have covered tens of light-years before it got here, hundreds even, with its cargo of bacteria in deep freeze the whole time.”

Gillian still didn’t seem to believe what he was telling her. “I just never thought I’d hear stuff like this from someone like you. I thought you were a Darwin man, through and through.”

“I still am, and I always will be. The way different species and life forms developed from those beginnings is purely down to evolution and nothing else. Darwin got it right, and no one will
ever take that away. It’s where Earth’s first precursor life forms came from that was the big unanswered question. And this seems to be the answer.”