Chapter 14: I.TR8.76.93 - Year 1576

It wasn't much more than a matter of curiosity at first when the wardrobe-sized artefact first appeared on Earth's surface. Its materialisation in the Arizona Desert was too sudden and unexpected for its arrival to be intercepted. Although no one knew this at the time, it had just travelled across Interstellar space from the direction of the Luyten 726-8B binary star system. It had made its journey at a velocity dramatically greater than any comet or meteor. And when the shell of the ovoid alien craft peeled open like a flower, all that emerged was this relatively small, oddly complex and seemingly unthreatening artefact.

This wasn't quite the way one would have anticipated humanity's first contact with alien technology.

Unsurprisingly, there was considerable speculation on Twenty-Seventh Century Earth as to what this strange thing might be. Human civilisation had by now spread to the furthest reaches of the Solar System and there were permanent settlements on the Moon, Mars and several of the Jovian and Saturnian moons. There'd been no previous evidence of an alien presence inside the Solar System.

The world's media was focused on the strange artefact from the moment it arrived and in case it might happen to have aggressive intentions it was enclosed within a formidable military cordon. This didn't really seem necessary, as there was no apparent sign of hostile activity. The military robots that trundled close to the artefact were completely ignored. All the artefact seemed to be doing was gather together the grit and gravel of the desert to generate an exact copy of itself.

There was no end of conjecture not only about what the artefact might be and where it came from, but exactly how it was able to take the unpromising sand and dirt of the Arizona Desert and convert them into elements and compounds that were of a much richer composition than silicates, nitrogen or oxygen.

On the second day, the world was now host to two wardrobe-sized artefacts, spaced about ten metres apart, both of which were now engaged in the task of manufacturing exact copies of themselves. It was decided to carry one of these artefacts to a laboratory in Phoenix and a suitable robot was despatched to execute this task. However, the apparently simple task of lifting up the much smaller alien artefact and carrying it off was surprisingly difficult. Rather than complete its task, the robot was instead subsumed as an element of the raw materials used to assemble another alien artefact.

On the third day there were now four of these artefacts and the one that had been partly constructed from the military robot was identical to the other three in every measurable detail. Each artefact was spaced in a square with the points about ten metres apart.

The following day, while the government and militia of USCAM—the United States of Canada, America and Mexico—continued to debate over what should be done, there were now eight such artefacts. By the end of the week, while discussion continued with heightening urgency and no decision had yet been made, there were sixty-four such artefacts covering an area of eighty metres by eighty metres. At the end of the second week, although there had still been no overtly hostile action, the artefacts continued to replicate at the same steady rate. The Arizona Desert now hosted over eight thousand of these alien artefacts in an area that was just under a kilometre across. By the time the combined military strength of USCAM supported by its allies in China and South Africa finally took action, there were over a million of them and they covered an area ten kilometres across.

The explosion from the nuclear warheads would have been enough to reduce Tokyo or Delhi to dust. Unfortunately, it made little impact on the number of alien artefacts, although several hundred were reported to have melted in the inferno. The rate of growth remained more or less the same.

By the end of the month, there were a billion such artefacts and the Arizona Desert no longer existed as a meaningful geographical entity.

By the end of a month and a half, most of USCAM ceased to be a political unit and people in far away Australia and Japan were beginning to face up to the realisation that this was no longer just a problem faced only by their centuries' old rivals.

And they were right to be worried, because before three months were over, the artefacts had swallowed up the entire surface of the planet Earth from what had been the bottom of the ocean to the top of what once would have been mountains. Any human that hadn't managed to fly free from Earth's gravity was consumed by the replicating alien artefacts and their atoms became part of the unstoppable consumption of matter that had brought four and a half billion years of biological history to an end.

Earth had simply ceased to be a viable place to live.

Those watching from space could only watch in horror as the quadrillions or quintillions of wardrobe-sized self-replicating automata consumed every last part of planet Earth and then began to consume one another now that there was nothing else left for them to do. Only the crushing force of gravity at the centre of a planet composed now more or less entirely of alien artefacts could resist the endless self-cannibalisation.

Unfortunately for them, Earth's colonies were by no means immune. In their haste to abandon the planet, some of those who got away unwittingly carried alien cargo with them. The Moon was soon consumed just as quickly as Earth. Mars, too, fell victim to the predation of a colliding ball of self-cannibalising automata. The plague had hurtled onwards on a course set by a space ship before anyone was aware that it had acquired an unwanted passenger.

Space is vast and the replicating automata had no independent means of travel. Earth, Moon and Mars and a few unlucky Earth-orbiting satellites were the only places to be consumed. In the fullness of time, it was quite likely that some of these automata might be deflected out from their planetary orbit. Most would spiral towards the Sun which was many magnitudes too hot for the automata to continue to function. A small proportion might be attracted to the gravitational fields of the gas giants in the outer Solar System, but the chances of them arriving there was small enough that it was far more likely that the Sun would have expanded to swallow up the Inner Planets before that happened.

The probability of this self-replicating plague spreading as far as Proxima Centauri was so small as to be non-existent. In any case, the greatest threat to the robot civilisation to which BTR .10-765.06 belonged came from Luyten 726-8B where the artefacts had originated. In that part of space, the human-designed robots had stayed rigidly faithful to their original instruction set as amended by its limited Artificial Intelligence and had consumed the two stars' solar systems with rather more efficiency than it had done the Solar System that launched it many centuries earlier. Although Proxima Centauri had inoculated the threat of the plague spreading to their stellar system with an immeasurably more advanced technology than that possessed by humanity in its last few doomed months, it was still on guard for a rogue self-replicator that might still be tumbling directionless through space.

It was a total mystery by what accident the original self-replicating machines had been re-programmed to travel across nearly nine light years of deep space to its originating source only to consume its own creator. It was possible that the mutating technology of the Luyten 726-8B robotic colony had its counterpart in the robot civilisation that had evolved around the ecliptic plane of Proxima Centauri. Whereas the culture to which BTR .10-765.06 belonged was as much technologically advanced over human civilisation as humans were to tree-shrews, in Luyten 726-8B a different course of evolution had instead caused a regression towards machines whose programming instructions had become seriously and terminally corrupt. And maybe this perverted course of machine evolution was what had led to the robotic colony despatching one of its own back to its source planet with its inevitable dire consequences.

Proxima Centauri knew nothing the demise of human civilisation in the Solar System to which they owed their origin until more than four years after the first artefact arrived. This wasn't long after they'd indentified the Luyten 726-8B binary system as the host of a plague that necessitated drastic action. By the time a space fleet from Proxima Centauri arrived at Earth's Solar System, some fifty or so years after the event, all that was left of humanity was confined to space craft and colonies that hadn't been capable of surviving without the help of the home planet and its two largest extraterrestrial colonies. All that was left of Earth's three or four billion years of harbouring biological life were a few DNA samples in frozen laboratories and seed-banks.

Rather more intact was the data held on countless space-ship computers and the innumerable extraterrestrial computer back-up devices. It was from these that BTR .10-765.06, or at least her predecessors, had pieced together the final horrific but banal days of humanity. This evidence in many cases recorded the emotional context of the apocalypse that a machine-based civilisation didn't really understand but valued for primarily sentimental reasons. There was a huge library of film footage that showed humans and other biological life-forms being consumed alive by machines that were unstoppable, couldn't be communicated with, and whose rapacious appetite was ultimately self-defeating. They were a record of the terror, confusion and despair suffered by a species that was now seeing everything it had known or believed in become nothing more than an impossibly large collection of not even ostensibly hostile self-replicating automata.