Because on the seventh day, all hell broke loose.
And the privileged community on Copernicus barely had a head start before this new and rapidly moving phenomenon would explode onto the rest of the world.
Reports began coming in of the discovery of what some, at first, thought was a new microbe; albeit a large one. But one look under a microscope dispelled that idea instantly. Not only wasn’t it a microbe, it wasn’t a form of life at all. It was part organic and part machine. A Borg on a microscopic level. A nanite.
These nanites were being discovered in locations around the world. And they were being fruitful and multiplying. In only a few days they would be so plentiful as to be observed, not just by biologists with powerful microscopes wondering what had contaminated their cell cultures, but by any kid with a twenty dollar microscope and a sample of air, or water, or dirt.
Nanotechnology had been all the rage now for decades. Scientists had long known of the possibilities, and potential, of manipulating matter on an atomic scale, and nanotechnology departments had become a mainstay of universities around the globe. And while considerable progress had been made, the alien nanites were far more advanced than anything humanity was capable of, although they appeared deceptively simple in construction.
As early as 1959, Richard Feynman had asked the question, what if items could be manufactured—assembled—from the bottom up, using atoms for building blocks? And in 1986, Eric Drexler had built on this to ask, what if an assembler could be designed at the nanoscale level that could not only assemble any blueprint given to it, but that could even make copies of itself? These were breathtaking visions.
And there was proof that this could be done. Endless proof. In an eagle, or an armadillo, or an oak tree, or a single blade of grass. All multicellular life on earth had been assembled in precisely this manner.
The complex entity called a human was composed of trillions of cells, and each of these trillions of cells had arisen from a single fertilized egg. This single fertilized cell, drawing half of its genes from a male donor and half from a female, was the ultimate nanite, converting bits of raw material taken in (food) into copies of itself, and doing so exponentially. And exponential growth was truly awesome in its capacity. A single cell became two, and two became four, and four became eight, and so on. But while this growth didn’t look like much in the first ten or fifteen doublings, if left unchecked, in only forty doublings this single cell would become over a trillion cells. From one to a trillion in only forty doublings.
But as impressive as this rate of growth was, a trillion identical cells would be useless; a pile of protoplasm that couldn’t walk, or watch a sunset, or write a sonnet. What was truly awe-inspiring was that a single progenitor cell had the programming necessary to make an entire human. At some point early in the process, using methods that science still didn’t fully understand, the cells would begin to differentiate—to specialize. Some in the early ball of identical cells, following a complex program in their DNA, knew to become heart cells. And some eye cells. And some brain cells. And so on. And each group of cells knew where to position themselves, and how to properly integrate themselves into the whole. All the instructions, the entire blueprint, was there in that first microscopic, fertilized cell.
An absolute miracle of nanite construction, each and every time it occurred.
And if organic material, made up of lipids and protein and DNA, could pull off a miracle, why couldn’t a manmade assembler do the same? Not for constructs as complex as a human, or even an ant, but at least for relatively uncomplicated construction; for far less demanding tasks.
This was the vision, and scientists had pursued it ever since. As early as 1989, a physicist managed to move individual atoms for the first time, and in less than two months was able to arrange thirty-five xenon atoms to spell out the letters IBM. Scientists had gone on to construct motors the size of a single molecule and found clever ways for their tiny machines to self-assemble.
The alien nanites were built precisely along the lines human scientists had long envisioned, just thirty to a hundred years more advanced than was currently possible. They were simple, which made them versatile, able to convert minute quantities of raw material into more of themselves.
Bacteria had long proven the effectiveness of simplicity of design combined with an unequaled ability to reproduce and spread. The human body harbored ten times more bacteria than it had cells of its own. In fact, more than thirty times as many bacteria could be found in an ounce of fecal matter than there were humans in the world. Bacteria inhabited almost every square inch of ground on the planet, and could be found forty miles above the surface and twenty miles below. They existed in frigid arctic climates and in boiling hot springs. On the surface of oceans and below the waves. They could thrive in oil, pesticides, and toxic waste. Bacteria teamed throughout the globe in incomprehensible numbers, and there was nowhere they couldn’t penetrate.
The alien nanites appeared to be just as unstoppable. They could chew through plastic and steel, one molecule at a time, so no barrier stopped them for long. Scientists isolated them and put them in environments containing various raw materials. At the average rate of duplication, and given the power of exponential growth, the weight of the nanites would exceed the weight of the Earth in less than two weeks.
But of course this wouldn’t happen. The nanites couldn’t grow unrestrained forever. They would run out of raw material. And they must have a purpose.
But what?
Huge numbers of them were injected into experimental animals with no effect. They were found on human skin and in human feces, also with no discernable effect. They appeared to be as harmless to terrestrial biology as the trillions of bacteria that called the human gut their home.
All of Copernicus was briefed on these emerging findings at the same time, in dozens of languages on thousands of monitors.
The race to understand the end game of the alien nanites was on. The news couldn’t be contained for much longer. The Copernicus needed to get ahead of this story, needed to find a way to fend off the panic that would inevitably come. For the alien ship hadn’t just travelled uncountable trillions of miles to assume a dead orbit and become nothing more than a fancy decoration. It had somehow disgorged a plague upon the world. The nanites could well be for the good—perhaps eventually serving as tiny MDs, entering human bloodstreams and patrolling to destroy cancer and other maladies and repair damage—but their presence, and their reproductive abilities, were terrifying.
Their purpose could also be malicious, a conclusion that the majority of the world’s population would jump to immediately. And the nanites would soon reach a point at which they were so plentiful, even if they continued to be harmless, panic would reach critical mass.
So hasty plans were made to rush nanotechnologists, roboticists, computer scientists, and software engineers to the Copernicus, and nonessential personnel were identified who would be sent home to make room. But given the ubiquity of the nanites, this time the Copernicus was not the only game in town. Each government mounted its own homegrown effort as an adjunct to the collaborative effort that would be undertaken at sea.
Within days the nanites would be so easy to find, grade schoolers would be part of the effort to unlock their mysteries.