Creations (7 page)

“Sure,” Safi said. “Excuse me, I guess I’m racing ahead here because I’ve been through this before. An assembler replicator is what you’ve got here: it works fine if you feed it ready-made components, but if you dropped it into the ocean, literally swimming in its raw materials, it wouldn’t even know where to start. So you need to design in extra features, like the ability to pull materials out of the sea, and refine them. But there’s a problem: if it’s going to replicate it needs to be able to make everything it’s made from, and every feature you add runs the risk of a snowballing effect. You add a furnace to the design for heat treating metal, you need to be able to
make
that furnace too. So you add a machine for making high current heating coils, but you need to be able to make
that
machine as well, and so on.”

Max nodded; it made sense, and he could see it wouldn’t be easy.

“So I’m assuming Payne’s law has never occurred to you in all this?”

It was Oliver who had spoken. He’d stayed back from the machine, leaning nonchalantly against the wall, his look of confusion having turned to one of amusement, even smugness.

“Payne’s law?” Safi said, “I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with that.”

“The law saying that manufacturing machines can only make things less complex than themselves? Come on, you claim to be
an engineer, you must have heard of it.”

“I’ve got to be honest Oliver, I haven’t.”

“Well it should be fairly obvious on its own I would have thought.”

“Okay, so, complex things only making simple things, I agree it kind of sounds like it should be true, but really it isn’t. There’s nothing fundamental to prevent machine replication from taking place, no laws or principles. You just need the technology, and the know-how. And the last one at least, I can provide.”

“With all due respect to your abilities,” he said, “I don’t believe you can.” Max felt the tone change at that point; the smile on Oliver’s face suggested that respect was the last thing he had. “If something is fundamentally impossible, then nothing can change that.”

“But machine replication has always been possible in theory,” Safi said. “John von Neumann showed that over a century ago. That’s even what people call replicators: von Neumann machines.”

“But what good is theory if no one’s ever done it?”

“Because someone has to be the first? Von Neumann developed the template, the outline, of how you could build a machine that would replicate itself. Building one for real wasn’t possible then, and it wasn’t possible for a long time afterward, but we can do it now.”

“That
I seriously doubt.”

“But the work that von Neumann did —”

Oliver suddenly stood upright. “Von Neumann was an overrated crank! Just because he wasted his time building adding machines, everyone seems to think we owe him the world! I’m not surprised this idea was one of his. I’d have thought people nowadays would know better!”

Max couldn’t help being slightly alarmed at the reaction Safi was getting. A simple design discussion had taken a turn for the bizarre. Victor chose that moment to intervene.

“Professor Rudd,” he said calmly, “tell us what makes you think this is impossible.”

Oliver sighed heavily. “Look,” he said, pointing at an intercom box attached to the wall beside him. “I could design you a machine today that would build as many of these units as you wanted, but could you use one of those terminals to build the original machine? Could a hundred of them do it? Of course they couldn’t. It’s stupid.”

Max had to think hard to see how this contributed to the argument. He couldn’t.

“But what’s that got to do with what we’re talking about here?” Safi said. “If you want to build a machine that can copy itself then you design it to do just that. You don’t design it to sit there pushing out comms terminals.”

“But it cannot happen!” Oliver said. “It’s never going to happen!”

“But that’s what we’ve come here to do,” Victor said. “To make it happen. As I said before, that’s our aim, to design a self replicating machine that can extract gold from seawater.”

“And as
I
said before, just how are you hoping to achieve that? If it’s so easy, why bring us here, if your own people have been on it for months now?”

With that at least, Max agreed.

“Alright, I’ll be honest,” Victor said. “It’s true we’ve hit problems. We’re a marine company, our expertise is strong, but in a narrow field of engineering. We’ve got as far as we can with this. Full closure from raw materials is going to be tough. All three of you have something to offer, you, Oliver, plus Safi and Max. That’s why I asked you to come.”

Oliver leaned back against the wall, looking to the roof. “You want to build a machine to take gold out of seawater. Just standing here I can think of half a dozen ways of doing that: electrolysis plants, molecular filters, vapour centrifuges. Magic perpetual motion machines that can build themselves out of thin
air aren’t on that list. I can help you with the first ones, but no one can help you with the last one.”

“But we’re not talking about perpetual motion,” Victor said. “And we’re not trying to build things out of thin air. The methods you described will form part of what we design, just as they have done when people have tried to extract gold in the past. But without replication there’s no point even trying because it’ll cost more money than it makes.”

“Then what are we doing here?”

“What are you doing here more like?” Ross said under his breath.

“Oliver,” Safi said, quietly but persuasively, “I can prove this is possible because I’ve already done it. I’ve worked with replicating systems before. I can show you them operating if you want.”

“I doubt that very much.”

Safi paused. Max looked over to see how she would react.

“Okay, Oliver, would you class bacteria as capable of reproducing?” she said.

“Yes, of course I would,” he said cautiously.

“But bacteria are simple compared to other living things. We understand how they work. We understand how they reproduce. You can write down all the chemical reactions that go on inside them and appreciate fully how they do it. There’s no mystery there. Doesn’t that make them a kind of machine?”

“Of course they’re not machines!”

“So what are they then, supernatural? They follow rules, cause-and-effect physical laws. You could call them biological machines if you wanted to, but they’re still machines. Replicating machines. Reproduction in animals and plants is the same, just more complex. Trust me, there’s no magic to this.”

Oliver didn’t answer, and there was an uncomfortable silence before Victor stepped in.

“Safi, do you have anything you could show us from
Earthrise?

“Yes, sure.” She seemed caught off guard in the wake of her exchange with Oliver, but collected herself immediately. “Just give me a moment and I can show you the whole thing.”

* * *

The setting was unmistakable. As the five of them watched the projection from Safi’s omni on the pool hanger wall, and saw the low rounded hills of the lunar landscape panning across the scene, it was as if those hills were close enough to reach out and touch, though equally there could have been miles between them. In fact the horizon itself was barely two miles away, but with no atmosphere to distort the scene, there was no indication of the distances involved.

The foreground however, when it panned into view, was a different matter. The six people who were now visible in the shot gave a very clear indication of distance, from the closest pair, just twenty feet away, to the furthest, barely visible on the screen as tiny white figures, standing by an open-topped rover. Behind them though, even further back, was the sight that really dominated the scene: the factory itself, a vast open framework of girders and struts, filling the screen from one side to the other and stretching just as far toward the horizon. It must have measured hundreds of yards in length if the perspective was to be believed, and was well over fifty feet tall at its highest point with a bewildering tangle of pipework, storage tanks and other machinery housed inside. Only when Max spotted the crew quarters clustered at one end did he accept the scale of what he was seeing. At first he hadn’t believed that those tiny pinpricks of light really were windows, but now he could see the individual modules, and the pressurised walkways climbing up among the processing stacks. He was amazed he’d never heard of this place before.

“Okay, what you’re seeing here is one of the Earthrise research sites,” Safi said. “They set this up a few years after the base itself was established: twenty plots of real estate hooked up to the power and water lines, all set for anyone who wanted to do research there. My company rented one of the sites, and I was lucky enough to go.”

“A real life astronaut,” Ross said. “Nice one!”

“No, Ross, I was just a passenger, nothing more. My job started once we got there and did the engineering work.”

“Safi here is being too modest,” Victor said. “Going to the Moon back then wasn’t an easy journey. Not that it’s a day trip now of course, but Safi was one of the first real explorers. She was only the thirteenth woman ever to set foot there. I think you played more of an integral role in those expeditions than you’re admitting.”

She nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“So what were you doing there?” Max said.

“Building a replicator,” she said. “We wanted to build a self-replicating lunar factory. We figured it would revolutionise the way off-Earth mining and production is carried out: you start with one factory, and you end up with thousands, all working away under your control. Compare the situation at the moment. There isn’t a single mining or factory project anywhere on the Moon that’s managed to break even, but the resources available there are huge.”

“And that’s just one factory, what we’re seeing there?”

“Yeah, that was our first site, the grandfather site, it would have been.”

“Would have been?”

“There was an accident a couple of years in. We shut things down after that.”

“What kind of accident?”

Safi went quiet for a second as if considering how best to answer. “A fatal one,” she said. It was clearly not a subject to
dwell on.

“So can we see you there?” Ross said, pointing to the image on the wall.

“Yeah, you can see me, in the middle distance there. Look for the one with the yellow ID patches.”

“Oh yeah,” Ross said, straining to make her out. “Cool. Who’s that with you?”

“That’s Niall West, he was the project leader.”

“So how far had you progressed when this was taken?” Victor said.

“We’d finished Anchorville a couple of months earlier. Excuse me, Anchorville was what we called this place. We were using this one to build Bakerville, then that was going to build Cooperville. We always built replicators over three generations, ever since the first lab tests.”

“How come?” Max said.

“I’m assuming, the same reason they built three of these things,” she said, indicating the ESOS machine beside her. “You need to prove that any copy you build can go on to make further copies. That way the ability to replicate gets passed down along with everything else. It’s an important test.”

“So, tell us what we’re seeing there,” Victor prompted.

“Oh, okay, that’s one of the mining trucks.” A large six-wheeled vehicle had just emerged from an opening at one end of the structure and was heading off to the side of the shot. As it did so another one approached in the opposite direction, loaded to capacity with rocks and soil.

“We had a couple of mining sites out to the east there. We had to shift a lot of dirt to get the materials we needed.”

“From lunar regolith? Yeah, I can imagine,” Ross said.

Then the picture changed. The setting was similar, but where there had been a fully functional factory, now all they were seeing was a bare skeleton. It was easy to recognise as a copy of the first site, but was far from complete. For almost half of its length it
was a mere outline, pillars and supports driven into the ground but so far unconnected. More vehicles were visible in this shot, but these were clearly construction vehicles, equipped with earth movers, cranes and robotic manipulators. They could be seen fitting sections of machinery together as other vehicles brought the parts in from elsewhere.

“Okay, this is Bakerville,” Safi said, “about two months into construction. When we built Anchorville we had to ship every part of it in via the Crisium base, but everything we’re using here is coming from Anchorville itself. Even the power is free.”

“How far apart are the two sites?” Victor said.

“About half a mile,” she said. “Not far at all.”

They could almost see the new site taking shape, even as they watched.

“Impressive,” Victor said, nodding.

“Right, a couple of things occur to me here.” It was Oliver; he’d moved round to see the projection but was still standing back from the others. “Those mobile fabricators. What kind of automation were you using on them?”

“None at all, they were operated by the drivers,” Safi said.

“They were what? I thought you said these things were meant to work autonomously?”

“Yes, they would have done, eventually.”

“And how exactly was that supposed to happen?”

“Easy, we’d have installed a central computer, running all the production lines and vehicles. Just like —”

“Easy? Have you any idea how much work it takes to automate something that size? No, no, it’s a massive job. You’d have given up within weeks.”

“We built it precisely so that we
could
automate it. Niall wanted to run it as a crewed facility for the first replications, then let it self-replicate later on.”

“What? The mining operations, the chemical extractors, the fabricators? You thought you could just flick a switch and
suddenly it would work on its own?”

“Yes, Niall designed it that way himself.”

Oliver snorted contemptuously. “In that case this Niall character was either very intelligent or very deluded. And I think I know which.”

Safi looked at him icily. It was almost as if she couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. Again Victor stepped in.