The Dreaming Stars by Tim Pratt

Author:Tim Pratt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2018-09-03T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

There was a moment of shocked silence, which Callie broke, rather inelegantly, by saying, “Wait. What?”

“Based on my limited observation of the swarm’s activity, I’ve made some extrapolations,” Shall said. “The swarm was devouring its way through the asteroid belt, but along a fairly narrow path. The swarm doesn’t seem to be following the ring around, which would keep it occupied for a long time. Instead, it’s chewing its way straight through. I think it’s just devouring the asteroid belt along the way to its actual target: Owain itself.”

“How the hell does a swarm of dust-sized machines even know there’s a planet in the system?” Callie said. “I thought the swarm was purely reactive, just eating anything in its path?”

“In its path,” Lantern said. “That suggests it has a path. The Axiom have a bridgehead here. They had charts of the system. Even their automated systems are smart enough to examine the available data and direct the swarm accordingly. Owain is the greatest conglomeration of matter in the system, and is the obvious target. Converting an entire planetary mass would be faster and more efficient than picking at asteroids here and there. A planet’s worth of mass spread across thousands of kilometers of space in a huge orbital ring is harder to convert than a planet’s worth of mass neatly compacted into an oblate spheroid. The swarm is just consuming and converting anything it encounters on the way to Owain, because that is convenient.”

Callie did not like this theory. She’d been feeling pretty smart and pleased with herself for figuring out why the swarm had spared them, and now she felt two steps behind again. “Are we sure the swarm has a plan? Maybe it’s just some ancient machinery that got turned on accidentally, and it’s just drifting around eating what it finds. Hell, it could have been chewing on the asteroid belt for decades, and it’s just that nobody noticed until surveyors stumbled on it and went missing. Right?”

“Ah, no,” Shall said. “Not right. Wrong. Because of exponential growth.”

“Yes,” Lantern said.

“That’s true,” Ashok agreed.

Callie scowled. “Use your words, people.”

“The swarm should be larger than it is,” Shall said. “Much larger. If it’s been operating in the asteroid belt for a minimum of six weeks, it’s converted countless metric tons of matter into copies of itself already. The cloud should get bigger with every asteroid it eats, and once it’s bigger, it can eat even more asteroids even more quickly, and so on, exponentially, until it goes from consuming a few asteroids an hour to a few asteroids per minute to a few per second – and so on. The classic exponential growth curve for self-replicating machines was laid out by the ancient philosopher Eric Drexler, who posited a single such machine, making copies of itself, with every subsequent copy making copies of themselves. Say it takes a thousand seconds to make one copy – in the first thousand seconds, one copy is created. In the next thousand seconds, each of the two replicators makes another copy of itself.

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