Sorry I've gone quiet for a few days on this. This story turned out to be nearly three times longer than my average so far, so I couldn't keep to my usual schedule. Fingers crossed for the future!
Tomorrow's word is 'tea party' (picked by my wife's sister-in-law) and the random genre is 'suspense' - in my personal experience, these are not two words that often sit together!
If any more of my blog readers want to suggest a word, I'll write you a story too! (as always, the genre will get randomly picked out of a list).
So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you - "Adaptations".
Adaptations
The skeletal
building dissolved in front of Ellen's eyes, softening and shifting
and sliding back into sand; she made a note on her pad and popped
another sweet into her mouth, never taking her eyes off the
spectacle. When the building was finally gone, she left the squat
grocery shop that served as her hide, picked up her backpack and
trotted smartly across the car park to where the strange construction
had stood. As she got closer, she could see mounds of sand still
shivering uneasily, as if the things inside were rousing themselves
from a bad dream.
Ellen knelt and
unzipped her backpack. For a woman dressed in primitive hiking
clothes, the contents of her worn bag were more impressive. One at a
time, she lifted out spherical beacons, each the size of her fist,
and switched them on with a recessed toggle on the top. She imagined
the data they were each transmitting through the air was audible: a
high-pitched, chattering whine, perhaps. They would have to be her
eyes and ears: she couldn't stay here, but they could.
She quickly
scattered them all over the increasingly turbulent sand, just now
beginning to crackle and spark with static electricity. The swarm had
reached a decision and it was going to try again. The crackle of
their activity, escalating to a roar, chased her back across the car
park as she retreated to the supermarket that served as her hide for
this study.
Ellen settled back
down in the fresh produce section of the supermarket, popped another
sweet in her mouth and watched plumes of sand start spraying upwards
in huge belches. A new structure tentatively began to rise from the
ground, something more developed than the one just fallen. She made a
note on her pad and checked that the data from the spherical beacons
was reaching her computer. It was. She crunched down on the sweet in
her mouth and made another note.
Days passed like
this. Eventually, through much trial and error, the swarm decided
what they wanted to build: a two-hundred-metre high helical cone,
tapering to a structure at the pinnacle that was too indistinct to
see from the ground. All in all, it was a job well done, Ellen
decided, once they got it stable.
She was less pleased
with her expedition partner, Gerek. He was late and he had the
sweets: chewing on her pen lid wasn't cutting it. Also, the static
discharges from the swarm were screwing with her computer and she
needed Gerek to repair it. First though, the delicious jewels of
sugar.
When he came through
the door, she carried on with her observations, ignoring him utterly
to show her irritation.
“Hello,” he
said. “I got distracted.”
“You were supposed
to be setting up an automated monitoring station around that Swarm
near the harbour,” she said. “Did you manage that before you 'got
distracted'? More importantly: where are my sweets?”
Gerek settled into
one of the camp chairs, opened his backpack and, after a minute of
exploratory rooting, threw a bag of sweets in front of her as a peace
offering. Finally, Ellen turned away from the spire and forgave him.
“Yes,” he said
as she sat down. “ I completed my task well. I did. The harbour
swarm's bigger than this one and highly aggressive: a different and
more successful species. Best you stay away from them for now. What
have you found here?”
Ellen jerked her
thumb at a crude analysis table she'd set up on a checkout conveyor
belt. From this distance, all Gerek could see were glowing lamps, a
forest of pronged metal instruments and several boxes sprouting
strange hairstyles of fibre optic cables.
He wandered over to
take a look. Under the brightest lamp was a specimen of this smaller
swarm: a small, metal cube an inch big. Each edge sprouted sensors
and grippers and delicate manipulators and on every face was printed
the phrase “EZ-BUILD”. The font was soft and inaccurate, like
it'd been copied from an original again and again by someone who had
no idea what writing was.
“Evolving?” he
asked. “Aggressive?”
“Yes, they're
evolving, but slowly. They've not done badly from where they
started,” she replied, feeling strangely defensive of her little
colony. “Four hundred years to go from non-sentient building blocks
to semi-sentient creators isn't bad. No, they're not aggressive. They
get agitated when I've gone near a hive under construction, but
that's about it. They remind me of honeybees in a lot of ways. What
about your swarm near the harbour?”
“They're
InstaHome, I think. Very rapid evolving and incredibly aggressive,
but they've not built any structures of their own. They've just
occupied some of the warehouses along the waterfront. If yours are
honeybees, then we'll call mine wasps.”
She nodded and made
a note on her pad. Ellen found this whole planet intriguing.
Centuries ago, this star's UV output spiked, enough to scour away
every spark of life from the surface. Everyone was evacuated on short
notice, but the UV spike was milder than predicted; the abandoned
planet thrived, especially all automated systems left behind, now
loosed from direct control, but no-one wanted this one back except
scientific expedition teams. There were better, more modern planets
now, ones without creepy clusters of independent robots.
Ellen turned her
attention back to the spire, feeling a little proud. Those little
robots had gone a long way from assembling cheap houses. She slipped
a sweet into her mouth and crunched it, as she always did when she
was thinking hard, but her thoughts were interrupted by the flavour.
“Hey, this is a
lime sweet!” she said. “You never leave me the lime sweets!”
Gerek shrugged.
“I've given them
up.”
Ellen stared at him.
“Every weekly
supply drop for the last year, you've stolen the lime sweets. Every
single time. I used to dream about getting to one before you. And
now...you've given them up?”
Gerek shrugged
again, his broad face blank. Ellen wasn't really annoyed by his
lateness - it was all part of the game they'd both played throughout
their little expedition - but this new passivity was both disturbing
and irritating.
“Tell me more
about the honeybees,” he said.
Ellen gave him a
long look before flipping back through her notes.
“Well, as
expected, the fragments of core code I've managed to examine show
heavy degradation over time. Those structures they build should be
exclusively EZ-Build robots linking together, but they're using other
materials now too. Even more exciting, they've cracked
self-replication.”
She beamed widely,
like a proud parent.
“They can copy
themselves?” Gerek said evenly.
“Yeah.
Construction minibots shouldn't be able to do that, but these ones
can. I haven't decided whether they worked it out through
experimentation or whether a code error unlocked something it
shouldn't have, but this swarm has grown by almost three per cent in
the last week. Did you see anything like that with your wasps?”
“No,” he said
quietly.
“Good thing too,
if they're as aggressive as you say,” she smiled.
Gerek did not smile
back.
“Can we take a
look at this corrupted code then?” he asked, nodding stiffly at the
robot on the analysis table.
“Ah, there's a
story!” Ellen smiled, popping another lime sweet into her mouth.
“There's no code inside the minibots any more – I checked. It's
all transmitted wirelessly from somewhere inside the hive.”
Gerek leant
forwards.
“I think...” she
said, pausing for dramatic effect. “That they've built themselves a
'queen': a code repository!”
Her colleague smiled
thinly, a nasty expression that she'd never seen before. She looked
away, unwilling to meet his gaze. Gerek was usually a happy man,
perhaps a bit slipshod when he settled into an expedition, but jovial
and convivial to a fault.
“Did something
happen out there?” she asked, still avoiding his gaze. “Is there
someone else on the planet? Did you have a near-miss with the wasps?”
“Have you seen the
queen yourself?” Gerek asked, ignoring her question.
“No, but I've
tried. Whenever I got close, they tried to shock me with mild static
discharges. It wasn't pleasant, but it wasn't life-threatening. Why
are you being so strange? What's happened?”
It was then that she
noticed that Gerek wasn't fidgeting. He always fidgeted when he
wasn't out exploring, but now, he sat there precisely and exactly
still.
Then she noticed
that he wasn't breathing either.
“We thought it
would be the impersonal speech that alerted you,” Gerek said,
noticing her scrutiny. “It's so difficult to keep everything as it
should be.”
“What?” Ellen
said, alarmed and backing away.
Gerek's face rippled
blockily, opening up geometrically perfect black lines across his
skin, his eyes, his mouth. Each line revealed a glimpse of the
interior: a black, chaotically twitching space. He stepped towards
her and a cube dislodged from his chest body, falling to the floor,
like the clatter of a dice. The colour of his clothes, the colour of
his skin was only a fraction of a millimetre thick; inside were the
erratic grasping of tiny claws and tools searching for their lost
comrade. The cube on the floor flipped upright, before scuttling back
to his foot on tiny pincers, climbing back up his leg and slotting
back into its previously position. Once it was home, the join was
seamless, the mimicry near perfect.
“The wasps got
Gerek then,” she said, backing further away down an aisle. “You
must've been very quick to get him; he was very good.”
Another thin smile
from the loosening mass of shifting blocks. No wonder he hadn't moved
much. This thing could barely hold together; every step prompted
fresh black seams to open in the construction's façade.
“He underestimated
us,” the shifting mass said. “He knew that we couldn't build
structures for ourselves or self-replicate so he thought us stupid.
He underestimated our intelligence and especially our ability to
mimic what we sense. He underestimated our hunger.”
Ellen was almost at
the door leading to the store room at the back of the shop. The door
was centuries old, but it might...
“If you take
another step backwards,” the mass said. “We'll deconstruct you.
It will be neither neat or quick.”
The block-mass
snapped its millions of minuscule pincers shut en masse to make its
point crystal clear; she froze instantly.
“If you do not
assist, we will dissemble you like we did the man. We want your
help,” the shifting mass said, extending an appendage to point at
the towering spire. “We want their code.”
***
Ellen stumbled
across the car park, concentrating so hard on the mass behind her
that she seemed to trip over every pothole. Every time she did, there
was an angry crackle of millions of tiny claws snapping at her heels.
Every time she heard that, she imagined poor Gerek's fate, though she
tried hard not to.
It needed to know
the way to the 'queen' because it needed to steal their
self-replication code; once they succeeded, they'd replicate
uncontrollably and spread and attack. There would be no other new
species, no new cultures, no new architecture: everything not wasp
would be smashed apart, leaving a world-spanning monotonous grey sea
of tumbling blocks.
The hive loomed
closer, revealing new details. The honeybee swarm were filling in the
gaps between the two spirals of the helix with incredibly intricate
geometric patterns, some of them changing colour whenever the wind
blew.
It was art, she
released, hairs on the backs of her arms standing on. They were
independently creating their own art.
“Faster,” the
cubes behind her said mechanically, all pretence at a human voice now
abandoned.
Ellen complied. What
else could she do? Really, the wasps didn't need her at all. Once
they were inside the hive, they could easily murder their way through
millions of docile EZ-Build minibots until they found the code
repository by themselves. Keeping her alive would cut down on the
time it took to find the code, that was all.
They were almost at
the hive's entrance now: a tide of tiny cubes surged in and out,
carrying in resources and returning for more. The human buildings
here weren't being torn down like she'd predicted. They were being
very delicately harvested: walls were shaved down to a fraction of
their former thickness, but remained; copper wires were gently pulled
out of conduits, like someone handling an overcooked spaghetti strand
and paints were delicately scraped off and collected, but any writing
or words were ignored.
Was this intelligent
behaviour emerging?
She couldn't let
them die.
Ellen turned to face
the wasp mass behind her but before she could move, it hit her in the
chest with a heavy extension that hit as hard as a tonne of dice. The
impact knocked her off her feet and onto her back; she felt something
crack.
“How
disappointing,” it said, managed a passable sneer. “Weak species,
poorly evolved.”
It stomped towards
the hive's entrance and all she could do was watch. Her body was only
responding with bright red pain; it was a broken machine.
“Don't!” she
cried weakly, not really sure who she was talking to. “Don't!”
As the vaguely
humanoid shape reached the hive's entrance, there was a bright flash
against its face: a small static discharge. The shape slapped a
club-like appendage against its cheek and a little EZ honeybee dogged
to the ground, smashed beyond repair.
The shape roared
with a crude approximation of human laughter and although it was an
alien intelligence, Ellen knew what it was thinking. This was it?
This was the best defence that could be mustered?
It took another few
steps. There was a flash against its head again and two more against
its chest. Three more EZ honeybees fell dead, crushed. Another step.
More flashes. More and more. An increasing number with every step.
More dead. More and more. Piles upon piles. EZ honeybees were pouring
out of the hive in a tumbling tidal wave. A surging arc of hundreds
hit the wasp cluster in the chest in a barrage of tiny lighting
strikes which forced it back a step, but they all fell dead.
Ellen levered
herself up on her elbows to watch. Pain flayed her side.
The wasp human was
covered in tiny minibots now, each shocking the construction
furiously with no regard to their own safety. The pile was sparking
with energy. The wasp conglomerate slipped and stumbled on the heaps
of dead bees. More struck the crackling mound, building it higher and
thicker until the interloper couldn't be seen at all.
The growing mountain
pulsed and flashed and surged; spent minibots were snow tumbling down
its flanks.
The mountain sagged.
The mountain was
still.
The pile of EZ
honeybees started to move away, back to their business as if nothing
untoward had happened. Little by little, the body emerged as if from
a retreating tide.
It looked like
Gerek, but vaguely, as if rendered by a clumsy artist in wet clay.
It didn't move.
A small swarm of EZ
honeybees crept up on the wasp conglomerate, seized it by the heel
and, with the greatest of care, pulled it into the hive. That
familiar, yet unfamiliar face slid away into the shadows, inch by
inch, as if it was a piece of driftwood being coaxed away by the
tide. Behind the fallen aggressor, little EZ honeybees formed a
little procession: each held aloft one of their fallen comrades.
Everything would be reverently dismantled, studied and used again.
Ellen smiled and sank back to the ground again. They would learn and
adapt; they would survive; they would create.
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