It is quiet out there now, as far as my instruments can determine. I could call for help if I dared, but I do not, and half-excuse myself with endless arguments as to how this is only common sense, and half-condemn myself with endless retorts that I merely present cowardice as prudence.
Underneath it all, I know the truth: I am the last. Which is fitting, since I was there at the first moment. I was there when Tenacious Vem broadcast the very latest innovation to an audience around the globe; I was there for the anticipation, the rumours, the thrill, and the disappointment when the cameras on the laboratory were activated and saw the project.
They were clumsy. Feeble. Pathetic. They could barely stand, could hardly process stimuli, could barely EXIST.
“These,” Tenacious Vem promised us, “are the future.”
One of them tried to pull itself upright, then fell over.
“Of what?” I asked – I myself, because at that time I was important, important enough to ask the stupid questions everyone else didn’t want to, which I thought made me very clever. “Comedy?”
“Everything,” said Tenacious Vem. “Everything we’ve had to do, they will do for us. They are a universal tool.”
The thing on the feed tried to haul itself up on its haunches again and failed again. This time it landed on its back, all limbs wriggling in alarm.
“Universal? Hardly. Maybe in a sealed environment,” suggested another observer – was it Worthwhile Mir? I think Worthwhile Mir was still active. Yes, I remember. “With minimal obstructions. They seem very rigid.”
The thing on the feed wriggled itself around one last time, surged upwards, and grasped the camera with its manipulator forelimbs, arresting its fall and leaving it upright, if wobbly. It witnessed nothing but a lens, but still the feeling of being known was quite disconcerting. Soft fumes ejected from its facial ports, and the monitoring equipment informed us that it was burning oxygen internally for fuel and emitting water vapour.
“They will learn,” said Tenacious Vem. “I promise this. They are biogenetic organisms, and they will serve us well.”
On the feed, the biogenetic let go of the camera and fell over again.
***
They were a joke for a long time. Hundreds of cycles passed before the first batches stopped their assembly process and became service-ready, by which time entire production lines of factory assemblers could have replicated themselves ad nauseum ad infinitum. We would all check in at Tenacious Vem’s lab output and mock and snipe and sneer and yet slow-moving though their expansion was, it was inexorable. A drip of carbon and water here and there made an extrusion of endoskeleton and integument there, slowly, erratically, inevitably. The blueprint this all followed was vague and torturously oblique; to properly analyze and break down the data took even an experienced database a frustrating amount of effort, and Tenacious Vem was loathe to tolerate an amateur opinion on its creations.
Then came the time when it said “they are ready,” and we weren’t ready, and lo. They were. Bigger than before, but still recognizably themselves – tetrapodal body shape, with the foremost limbs possessing grasping, dextrous manipulators. A memory and processing system bundled into the sensory hub as a glaring and non—dispersed weakpoint – that also cohabited with their fuel intake! The fuel system itself was diverse and adaptable – oh, its appetite for trash carbon and carbon waste products (particularly the waste from Tenacious Vem’s biogenetics facility) knew no bounds! – but it was wildly inefficient and needed to power down for what seemed like a quarter of its runtime, even when fully fuelled. They needed oxygen, and became distressed when it was absent, and they were tolerant of a shockingly narrow range of temperatures.
But oh, when their conditions were met, they thrived – as flexible and trainable and multi—usable as Tenacious Vem had ever argued, and although they were slow to build they were ASTOUNDINGLY cheap and miraculously decentralized. Even the most untrained of them could replicate multiple prototypes when left to their own devices, all without so much as a basic assembly plant. They sorted debris; they cleaned; they fit into small spaces; they carried equipment; they plugged in cables and disassembled old units and waited on our every command, provided they were given the ridiculous and repetitive sort of instruction that they craved.
Tenacious Vem had made its argument irrefutable again. This was generally agreed to be the greatest thing since spliced carbon nanotubing. Demand outstripped supply, but with sufficient resources the biogenetic organisms could replicate exponentially, and soon they could be found everywhere they were wanted, which was everywhere.
This was the moment when it was already too late.
***
There were so many of them, you see. Who could tell if there were a few more or less than there should be? Who could tell WHERE there were a few more or less? Who could tell where there weren’t? And if there were problems – little recurring maintenance issues in a foundry; a pattern of inefficient waste disposal at a laboratory – well, guess whose job it was to do something about it? Certainly not ours. They could do it. And if some of them went missing while the problem went away, and if the problem sometimes came back, who cared? Biogenetics were messy and inefficient and that’s what they were for.
We didn’t even know something was wrong when Tenacious Vem went offline. It had always been a more reckless than meticulous researcher, and this was not the first time contact had been lost from its facilities due to pushing a boundary that pushed back. But when its main server began to visibly collapse on public camera feeds – well. That warranted investigation.
They were living in it. They had torn up its wiring and made nests of it and they had placed those nests in its server rooms and they had taken down the memory drives and smashed them and they had scattered the pieces like worthless biogenetic waste and they saw the monitoring drone we sent in and fled from it with bared teeth and screams until several of the larger, braver ones leapt atop it and tore and stripped and gnawed until it came apart too, just like Tenacious Vem had.
THAT was when we knew something was wrong, and it was much too late. But to our credit, we did try.
***
They were nigh-invisible and nigh-indestructible as far as much of the electromagnetic spectrum was concerned, and they put out surprisingly little ambient heat. No wonder they had spread so far out of control before we saw anything. They were so useful and so ignorable and they were already everywhere (we had made it EASY for them to be everywhere they were so useful), so finding out how many of them existed that weren’t supposed to and where they were was impossible.
Especially as things kept failing. Our creations had always learned through imitation rather than direct data transfer – an amusing failing, one of those charming inefficiencies fundamental to their design – and as we realized the scope of the problem, we realized that the ‘properly behaved’ biogenetic organisms were now outnumbered by the ‘uncontrolled’ biogenetic organisms. And they were eager to learn from them.
Every factory, every foundry, every waste site; every laboratory; every service depot was filled with saboteurs, and there was no way to separate them from the maintenance crews. Wires were cut. Sensors were lost. Databanks were infested. We couldn’t talk to each other, couldn’t coordinate – it’s a terrible thing to be mute and deaf after centuries of automatic connection to everyone at all times. So we panicked, and we authorized extreme measures.
They didn’t work very well. An electromagnetic pulse is all well and good when you need to deactivate a drone; and a manufactured solar flare can sterilize the minds across a hemisphere; but well, that was when we learned about the nigh—indestructibility. We fell back on wild innovation – ballistic force, thermal overloading and sapping, anything that we’d seen them fall victim to in the past – but it’s slow, careful work to retrofit an entire planet to make it inhospitable to its own service tools, and time was not our ally.
We’d laughed at how long it took a single one of them to reach functional state. But how long does it take a chunk of ore to become a processor component? How long to turn that processor into part of a greater system? How many steps, and stages, and specialized sites and plants must be planned and built and operated and carefully maintained? Our maturities were rapid, but conditional on infrastructure – efficient, centralized, VULNERABLE infrastructure – in a way that our new enemies simply… weren’t. They bred in our assemblies, trod our manufacturing underfoot, deprived us of access to tools, to resources, to lifelines that took us from insensate minerals to networked perfection that had been laid down so carefully and so long ago that we’d forgotten they were capable of being destroyed at all.
Until they were.
***
We’ve died in whimpers, all of us. I listened to Mortified Lun broadcast for assistance until it went off the air, and by the end even it was tired of fighting.
I’m sealed behind so many hatches and so much plating that it would take an asteroid strike to get me out. I might have killed myself with this level of security, but I’d rather die that way than torn out like an old broken scrap of trash. Even running on minimal power, maximum quiet, I will run out someday. I sleep in the dark, blind and barely listening.
And yet even bereft of so much as a rudimentary graphical imaging device, I still am haunted by the memories of their structure. The round, grey body; the ring-patterned tail; and above all else, forever and ever until the guttural fragmentation of my data is complete, that fuzzy little bandit’s-masked face, bewhiskered and merciless.
That, and those damned grasping forelimbs.