Code of the Lifemaker By James P. Hogan
Code of the Lifemaker By James P. Hogan
Prologue
THE SEARCHER
1.1 MILLION YEARS B.C.;
1,000 LIGHT-YEARS FROM THE SOLAR SYSTEM
HAD ENGLISH-SPEAKING HUMANS EXISTED, THEY WOULD PROBABLY have translated the
spacecraft’s designation as “searcher.” Unmanned, it was almost a mile long,
streamlined for descent through planetary atmospheres, and it operated fully
under the control of computers. The alien civilization was an advanced one, and
the computers were very sophisticated.
The planet at which the searcher arrived after a voyage of many years was the
fourth in the system of a star named after the king of a mythical race of alien
gods, and could appropriately be called Zeus IV. It wasn’t much to look at—an
airless, lifeless ball of eroded rock formations, a lot of boulders and debris
from ancient meteorite impacts, and vast areas of volcanic ash and dust—but the
searcher’s orbital probes and surface landers found a crust rich in titanium,
chromium, cobalt, copper, manganese, uranium, and many other valuable elements
concentrated by thermal-fluidic processes operating early in the planet’s
history. Such a natural abundance of metals could support large-scale production
without extensive dependence on bulk nuclear transmutation processes—in other
words, very economically—and that was precisely the kind of thing that the
searcher had been designed to search for. After completing their analysis of the
preliminary data, the control computers selected a landing site, composed and
transmitted a message home to report their findings and announce their
intentions, and then activated the vessel’s descent routine.
Shortly after the landing, a menagerie of surveyor robots, equipped with
imagers, spectrometers, analyzers, chemical sensors, rock samplers, radiation
monitors, and various manipulator appendages, emerged from the ship and
dispersed across the surrounding terrain to investigate surface features
selected from orbit. Their findings were transmitted back to the ship and
processed, and shortly afterward follow-up teams of tracked, legged, and wheeled
mining, drilling, and transportation robots went out to begin feeding ores and
other materials back to where more machines had begun to build a fusion-powered
pilot extraction plant. A parts-making facility was constructed next, followed
by a parts-assembly facility, and step by step the pilot plant grew itself into
a fully equipped, general-purpose factory, complete with its own control
computers. The master programs from the ship’s computers were copied into the
factory’s computers, which thereupon became self-sufficient and assumed control
of surface operations. The factory then began making more robots.
Sometimes, of course, things failed to work exactly as intended, but the alien
engineers had created their own counterpart of Murphy and allowed for his law in
their plans. Maintenance robots took care of breakdowns and routine wear and
tear in the factory; troubleshooting programs tracked down causes of production
rejects and adjusted the machines for drifting tolerances; breakdown teams
brought in malfunctioning machines for repair; and specialized scavenging robots
roamed the surface in search of wrecks, write-off’s, discarded components, and
any other likely sources of parts suitable for recycling.
Time passed, the factory hummed, and the robot population grew in number and
variety. When the population had attained a critical size, a mixed workforce
detached itself from the main center of activity and migrated a few miles away
to build a second factory, a replica of the first, using materials supplied
initially from Factory One. When Factory Two became self-sustaining, Factory
One, its primary task accomplished, switched to mass-production mode, producing
goods and materials for eventual shipment to the alien home planet.
While Factory Two was repeating the process by commencing work on Factory Three,
the labor detail from Factory One picked up its tools and moved on to begin
Factory Four. By the time Factory Four was up and running, Factories Five
through Eight were already taking shape, Factory Two was in mass-production
mode, and Factory Three was building the first of a fleet of cargo vessels to
carry home the products being stockpiled. This self-replicating pattern would
spread rapidly to transform the entire surface of Zeus IV into a totally
automated manufacturing complex dedicated to supplying the distant alien
civilization from local resources.
From within the searcher’s control computers, the Supervisor program gazed out
at the scene through its data input channels and saw that its work was good.