The Prometheus Project (10 page)

Ryan and Regan held on to each other, helpless, and braced for the end.

The insects cut a careful path around them to get to the other pieces of the globe.

Around them?

Ryan saw an opening! In their present formation he might just be able to jump beyond the swarm. He launched himself forward with all of his might.

He realized with a sickening feeling that he wasn’t going to make it.

But just as he was about to land on thousands of the insects at the edge of the swarm they scattered, leaving him an open space.

Could it be?
He took a step toward the center of the swarm.

And they scattered once again. Again, his foot landed on empty floor.

“Look!” he yelled excitedly to Regan. “They’re not trying to eat us. They’re
avoiding
us.”

In seconds Regan had verified what her brother had said. In fact, it was
impossible
to touch one of the scurrying insects. They managed to completely avoid the two kids while going about their business of devouring every piece of the strange broken globe. And then, while Ryan and Regan looked on in astonishment, thousands of the bugs packed themselves into a tight ball. They stayed in this position for only a few seconds and then fell away again to reveal a perfect, intact, glass globe.

Ryan’s hypothesis had been tested, after all,
and it was wrong
. The insects weren’t the
defense
crew. They were the
repair
crew.

Ryan could tell from the look on his sister’s face that she had reached the same conclusion he had. Although he still hadn’t entirely lost his fear of the ferocious looking creatures, he decided to bend down to get a closer look at them. But as he began to do so the bugs chewed several holes into the floor and scurried into them, almost faster than his eyes could follow. The holes instantly filled up again to match the rest of the floor, and other than the repaired globe, no sign remained that the insects were ever there.

Unbelievable
.

“You know what this means,” said Regan in elation. “It means that Mom and Dad and the other scientists are alive! Those things
couldn’t
have eaten them.”

Ryan’s eyes widened. Regan was absolutely right! He allowed himself a glimmer of hope for the first time since the group of Prometheus scientists had disappeared.

But Regan’s spirits sank once again as she remembered her mom’s desperate condition. “They must have found out the bugs wouldn’t hurt them and ran to take Mom to the hospital. By the time we got back, they and the bugs were gone.”

“We never even looked to see if they’d repaired the staircase,” said Ryan. Knowing that the bugs were the repair crew and not the defense crew cleared up several mysteries, but many others remained. “But this still doesn’t explain what happened to all the
equipment
in the room,” he pointed out. “Or how so many people could have left a room so quickly while carrying Mom,” he added. “And we still don’t know where they are and why the entrance to the city is gone.”

“Maybe not,” said Regan, “but things are certainly looking up. It would be a lot harder for us to solve these mysteries if we were bug food right now.”

Ryan smiled. “You’ve definitely got a point there,” he admitted.

“Let’s get out of here,” she suggested.

Ryan eyed the hologram floating in space, now only a few feet in front of him. This had been his goal when he had left the chair in the first place. “Okay,” he said. “But I want to try something first. Holograms were used as controls for that tram we were in. Maybe these are controls too.” He walked over to the hologram and touched the image of the large triangle suspended in air.

They gasped in alarm as the hologram disappeared and they were suddenly floating in deep space, surrounded by nothing but endless blackness and billions of stars.

Where were they?

They couldn’t survive in deep space
.

It gradually dawned on them that they hadn’t
gone
anywhere. Their surroundings were just a perfect illusion. The small hologram with the triangles had just been replaced by a far larger one of deep space, extending as far as they could see in every direction. It totally surrounded them and was breathtakingly realistic.

Suddenly the holographic galaxy raced past them, although it seemed to them that
they
were the ones moving—hurtling toward a tiny grouping of stars at unimaginable speed. After only a few seconds the hologram came to an abrupt halt. In front of them, far off in the starry distance, two glowing, semi-molten planets of different sizes were hurtling toward each other. They collided an instant later, unleashing more energy in few terrible seconds than a billion nuclear bombs. A massive spray of matter exploded thousands of miles into space as the planets liquefied further and became a single, sun-like body.

Their perspective shifted again. This time a large planetary body floated in front of them encircled by spectacular rings. It could well have been Saturn.

“Hello, children,”
a disembodied voice said gently in perfect English.
“Do you like the view?
”

For some reason, the voice didn’t startle either of them. And it should have. But there was something else that was strange about the voice, thought Ryan. What was it?

A chill went up his spine as he realized the truth. The words had not been spoken aloud. They had been spoken directly into his mind! In fact, he could feel an unmistakably foreign presence and a strange tingle in his brain. Whatever had spoken to them had used telepathy.

“Who are you?” stammered Ryan nervously.

“
Why . . . I’m the Teacher, of course,”
answered the voice. There was a pause.
“What would you like to learn today?
”

Chapter 21

The Universe-Wide-Web

Ryan’s jaw dropped open. His sister had been right again! This
was
a schoolhouse.

“Regan,” he said, “are you ah . . .
hearing
this also?”

Regan nodded.

“I use mental telepathy, but you both ‘hear’ the same thing,”
explained the Teacher.

“Where are you?” asked Ryan.

“I’m interwoven into the fabric of this city. You might think of me as a computer, although one far more advanced and evolved than the simple computers that humans have so far developed. You can ask me anything you like and I will try and answer if I can.”

“How do you know English?” asked Regan.

“I know it because you know it.”

Ryan digested this answer for a moment and then asked, “Why are we surrounded by a hologram of space?”

“I thought you might appreciate the beauty and majesty of your galaxy. And I wanted to give you the chance to see what many of your scientists consider the most important event in the history of the formation of your planet and moon.”
There was a pause.
“Also, floating in space can be quite calming.”

The Teacher was absolutely right about two of its three statements, thought Regan, as their surroundings continued to gently morph from one view of stars, galaxies, and planets to another: each more spectacular than the last. Space was indescribably beautiful, and the illusion of floating in the infinite majesty of the cosmos
was
calming. But she was sure she had misunderstood the Teacher’s other statement. “Wait a second,” she said. “Are you saying that the collision we just saw was between the Earth and the Moon?”

“No. It was a simulation of the most popular theory among your scientists as to how your moon was formed. It’s called the ‘Giant Impact Hypothesis’. The idea is that 4.5 billion years ago, a planet the size of Mars smashed into your planet. The debris from the collision eventually gathered into orbit around Earth and later formed your moon.”

“That’s really what happened?” said Ryan in awe.

“It hasn’t been absolutely proven,”
answered the Teacher.
“But a majority of your scientists certainly believe this is the case.”

To think that a cataclysmic event of this magnitude had really happened, and had been responsible for the creation of the moon, was very, very cool. Ryan wondered why he had never learned this before, and was dying to know more, but decided he needed to ask more pressing questions. “What is this city?” he said. “And can you tell us how it got here?”

“This is an observation post. It was built by a race called the Qwervy. The Qwervy seed these around the galaxy on planets that they think have promising species on them. They visit them occasionally to check on their progress—say once every hundred years. When a species has achieved a certain level of maturity, the Qwervy make themselves known.”

“Is humanity mature enough yet?” asked Ryan.

“I’m afraid not. Although you are making much faster progress than the Qwervy ever thought you would. You have tremendous potential as a species. The fact that your species found this outpost and found a way to get inside is remarkable—and quite unexpected.”

“Hold on a second,” complained Regan. “You’re telling us that this gigantic city is an observation post that is only visited every hundred years. Why would they build an entire huge, elaborate city just for that?”

“Why not? It’s just as easy for the Qwervy to build a city this size as it is to build a small building.”

“What?” said Regan. “How is that possible?” She realized at just that instant that her head was beginning to feel funny, as if her brain was running a marathon and was becoming fatigued, sore, and even overheated. From the slightly pained expression on her brother’s face she guessed that he was feeling the same way.

“Oh, they don’t build anything themselves,”
answered the Teacher.
“They use what you would call nano-robots.”

Suddenly they were no longer in space. Instead, they were standing in front of a hologram of a six-foot model of the insects they had encountered twice. Magnified in this way they could now see that their bodies were really made up of tiny gears and motors and their mandibles, antenna, and mouths were all obviously precision tools of unknown types.

“The insects aren’t alive,” gasped Ryan in amazement. “They’re miniature robots.”

“Exactly. Nano-robots. ‘Nano’ essentially means very small. In fact, the Qwervy have invented nano-robots billions of times smaller even than these. Your scientists are attempting to do the same. When the Qwervy visit a planet that has a promising species, they drop one of these off. It builds the city for them.
”

“Did you say one?” said Regan. “They drop
one
of these off?”

“That’s correct. One. A single nano-robot tunnels deep into the ground. It uses whatever it finds as food—rocks and things—and converts these raw materials into whatever it needs to build an exact copy of itself. It then makes the copy and you get two nano-robots. They both do the same, eat rock and make exact copies of themselves, and then you have four of them.”

“How can they convert something like rock into everything they need to build tiny, complex robots?” asked Ryan.

“Why not? Your body does the same thing with the food you eat. Food gives you energy, yes, but it is also the only source of building material for your body. You have to grow from a tiny baby into an adult. Somewhere in the ice-cream, peanut butter, pizza and broccoli that you eat your body finds the raw materials it needs to make muscle cells and heart cells and brain cells. Although I have to admit,”
teased the Teacher,
“I’m detecting far less evidence that either of you use broccoli as a raw material than the other foods I mentioned.”

Both kids smiled broadly.

“In any event,”
concluded the Teacher,
“you should be aware that part of your current body used to be mashed potatoes and popcorn.”

“I guess that’s true,” said Ryan, absentmindedly rubbing his temples and trying to ignore the increasing discomfort in his brain. “I never really thought about it that way.”

“The nano-robots keep eating rock and converting it into more of themselves in this way until there are trillions of them—it doesn’t take long.”

“Trillions?” said Ryan in disbelief.

“Again I ask you, why not? Your body started from a single cell and you have trillions of cells in you. It’s called exponential growth. If you start with a penny and double what you have every day, so you have two cents tomorrow, four cents the next day, eight cents the next, and so on, you would have more than a dollar on the eighth day, and more than a million dollars in less than thirty days. Try it on a calculator sometime.”

The hologram of the nano-robot disappeared and was replaced by a movie of the nano-robots building the city.
“After a large enough number of them are made, they convert rock and dirt and other materials they find in the ground into what they need to build the city. The entire set of instructions they need are programmed into each one of them.”

The hologram of multiplying nano-robots now surrounded them. The tiny workers ate and multiplied at fantastic speeds. Every so often huge numbers of them would split off from the main swarm and perform a specific job like digging, or construction, or waste removal.

“This is exactly what happens in our bodies, isn’t it?” said Ryan excitedly. “Mom explained it to me. Every cell in our body has the programming to make an entire person. A person starts from just one cell and as that one divides and makes more, at some point, following their instructions, the cells start doing different jobs. Some become heart cells, and some become eye cells, and so on.”

“Exactly. So you see, the Qwervy just have to drop off one nano-robot and leave. The nano-robot does the rest. It doesn’t take any extra effort on their part, and they get to stay in a full-blown city when they come to visit. Just as it would take the same effort on your part to grow a single blade of grass or a mighty oak tree—just stick a seed into the ground and walk away. The programming in the seed takes care of the rest.”