There are low plants in the new place I settle, native to this world. They grow as cones with a reddish purple tough exterior, their interior space cool and sheltered for seed. I try not to crush them, but they are thick here, the tallest nearly a half-meter high, and it is difficult. I have designed a bright purple millipede that lives on unicells in the soil and will colonize the cone interiors; in their deaths, my number-eight millipedes decompose into nutrients that the cones require. It is a mutually beneficial arrangement, though there is a danger from too many millipedes. Even as I scatter a hundred egg packets, I build a dozen number five skinks, tiny red lizards, to keep the millipedes in check. In a few years, if I pass back this way again, I will analyze my work and see if the lizards in turn require their own predator. Balance is important, all the pieces moving together in a living dance.
It is sub-optimum that I am alone in this work. I have enough raw material to last another six standard years before resupply, though it is unclear if that will ever come. For all the complexity of the work I do, for all the size and power of my mind-engine, the politics of my builders still seem opaque to me. Perhaps in part that is because no one thought to explain to me why they were withdrawn, and Mike was either not privileged to, or did not understand, the full matter himself. It was not the sort of thing he cared much about.
In the end he grew his own cellular beast too, deep in his liver where I could not see it and he would not speak of it until it spread its inky wings throughout his body and bled his life away. He apologized to me in those last semi-lucid days, as if it was his fault I could not fix it, as if I was more than just some machine crawling across an alien world knitting data into flesh. I wonder if, at the end, he had lost sight of my nature. Or have I? I have no one to ask.
The cones grow taller and more densely clustered as I move up the steepening hill. There are also new plants here, undescribed in the incomplete surveys whose edges I now skirt, and I stop to study them at length. They are long, thin tendrils of yellow-green topped with a rounded bulb. It is unclear how they have sufficient structure to stay upright until I gently pluck one for deeper analysis. The bulb is a thin membrane that can pass atmospheric gases selectively through, inhaling the lighter ones while keeping out the heavier. With the additional heat from the sun, the bulb is just enough to keep the tiny string aloft. I scan it, section it, break apart its structure and chemistry, absorb its secrets, add it to the sum knowledge of humanity and machine.
Regardless, I have killed it, which is necessary but regrettable.
I wait patiently as the sun sets and watch a thousand balloons steadily droop until they disappear again among the cones. Then I also need to shut down and wait for morning to begin again.
Something has happened during the night.
Two of my legs bear new, erratic, faint scratches. There are also small rocks stuck in the lower joints of one. This could not have occurred by accident, nor by any mechanism I can identify as plausible. This means that I have incomplete information, and I am even less pleased by that than I am by the rocks, which my external manipulators can easily pluck free.
Not long after the team left Mike and me behind, I stopped receiving automated survey updates from orbit. A hundred and ninety-three days ago, I crossed out of their carefully mapped territory and forged my own, a meandering path of small overlapping circles strung out into the blank gray of the unknown.
Ahead of me the terrain becomes more uneven, with outcroppings of rock dominating the horizon. I could quantify the growing depth and height of cones between here and there, but none reach half the height of the scratches on my legs. I remove the rocks, place them carefully where there is bare ground between cones and balloons, and I move away to where the cones are thinner again.
I go about my day’s tasks with purpose. I am careful to separate objective goals from the subcurrent of want that I have learned can lead me into errors of judgment. I engineer cones more efficient at fixing nitrogen in the soil, which will benefit both the native and imposed ecology. I record the pattern as number one variant cone and distribute them one per thousand among the originals as I pass. However, I reserve a larger portion of the energy I generate from the suns than I normally would, and by the end of the day I have made less than half as many lizards and bugs and new cones as I might have.
Night falls. I lock myself into a stable configuration with my solar collectors aimed towards the distant dawn horizon and shut down all external lights in the local visible spectrum, modified for the differences in frequencies between this planet’s binary suns and that of a home star I left as nothing more than parts, plans, and unfulfilled dreams.
Atmospheric temperature drops. Via infrared, I can watch the gravelly sand around me cool quickly, and the small pockets of what was once cooler air at the heart of the cones become, instead, oases of warmth. There is no new data here, but there is something more satisfying about watching the gentle transition with my full array of sensors rather than simply parsing a night’s recorded data the following morning.
Against expectations there are a handful stars just visible. There are no constellations here, no mythology or history to be drawn on other than my own. And why shouldn’t I? I name one group The Wrench, and another Coffee Mug. Mike would have approved; I rarely saw him without one or the other in hand. After he died, and after I had processed his body’s data, I interred his remaining matter with his mug in a small hillside now nearly seven hundred kilometers behind me.
Tiny, glowing dots bristling with hair-like legs dig themselves up out of the sand and jump from cone to cone, like wingless fireflies, reveling in the cooler night air.
It is only after several long minutes of watching the glowdots that I realize some of the cones are also moving. For milliseconds I think I am witnessing the impossible, or some enormous flaw in the data I have painstakingly collected, before I detect minute differences between the mobile and sessile. There are fluctuations in the air around them consistent with surface respiration, and their cores are opaque, not hollow. The camouflage is near-perfect.
They are steadily if slowly converging toward me.
I have not bothered processing sound data since Mike’s death, needing no tedious soundtrack of hums and whirs from my own workings, nor finding company or solace in the low whistle of wind stirring across the plains. Now, I turn those sensors back on, seeking, but do not find anything until I get down below 10Hz. There are low vibrations coming from all around, scattered back and forth, in a call and response pattern.
There is not supposed to be intelligent life here. There were surveys years in advance of landing. Is this why the team abandoned us? If so, why not take me up with them, or give me alternate instructions, a new purpose?
I have insufficient data to determine what I should do, so I do nothing, and observe as the faux cones form small, irregular groups and come closer.
One, nearest to one of my legs, extrudes two tiny pseudopods from the base of its cone-body and picks up a pebble. More arms appear in a double column, raising the stone up the slope of its exterior like the movement of cilia, until it is balanced just below the top point. A few others are also now conveying pebbles upward.
I can now pick out the false cones from the real ones, and discover there is an epicenter to the movement that corresponds also to volume of chatter; the farther from the center of the noise, the fewer are moving. The primary radius of action is about eleven meters. Outside that circle, I watch as one of the glowdots lands on a stationary false cone. Faster than a human eye could detect, a hole opens up under the glowdot and sucks it in, closing again.