strange metabolism that was coming into being. Regardless of what the Schedulers
in the various factories would have liked to see made, the only things that
could be assembled readily were the ones for which parts were available, and
that depended to a large degree on the ability of the scavengers to locate them,
or alternatively to locate assemblies suitable for breaking down—”digesting”—and
rebuilding into something useful. Factory Twenty-four was an extreme case.
Unable to “metabolize” parts directly from any source of raw materials because
of the complete failure of its materials-procurement workforce, it relied
totally on its scavengers. Factory Thirty-two, on the other hand, could acquire
raw materials but couldn’t use them since it had been built without a processing
facility at all. Its robots delivered instead to Forty-seven, which happened to
produce parts for some of the scavengers being manufactured by Thirty-two, and
the two factory-robot organisms managed to coexist happily in their bizarre form
of symbiosis.
The piles of assorted junk, which shouldn’t have accumulated from the earlier
phases of the process but had, were eaten up; the machines that broke down were
eaten up; and the carcasses of defunct factories were eaten up. When those
sources of materials had been exhausted, some of the machines began to eat each
other.
The scavengers had been designed, as they had to be, to discriminate between
properly functioning machines and desirable products on the one hand and rejects
in need of recycling on the other. However, as with everything else in the
whole, messed-up project, this function worked well in some cases, not so well
in others, and often not at all. Some of the models turned out to be as likely
to attempt the dismantling of a live, walking-around Fred as of a dead,
flat-on-its-back one. Many of the victims were indifferent to this kind of
treatment and soon died out, but others succeeded in developing effective
fight-or-flee responses to preserve themselves, thus marking the beginnings of
specialized prey and predators in the form of “lithovores” and “artifactovores.”
This development was not always an advantage, especially when the loss of
discrimination was total. Factory Fifty was consumed by its own offspring, who
began dismantling it at its output end as soon as they came off the assembly
line, and then proceeded proudly to deliver the pieces back to its input end.
Its internal repair robots were unable to undo the undoings fast enough, and it
ground to a halt to become plunder for marauders from Thirty-six and
Fifty-three. The most successful factory-robot organisms protected themselves by
evolving aggressive armies of “antibody” defenders, which would recognize their
own factory and its “kind” and leave them alone, but attack and attempt to
destroy any “foreign” models that ventured too close. This gradually became the
dominant form of organism, usually associated with a distinct territory which
its members cooperated in protecting collectively.
By this time only a few holes in the ground remained at opposite ends of the
rocky shelf to mark where Factories One and Two had once stood. They had failed
to keep up with the times, and the area had become the domain of Factory
Sixty-five. The only trace left of the searcher spacecraft was a long, rounded
depression in the ice beach below, on the shore of the liquid methane sea.
The alien engineers had designed the system to enjoy full planetary
communications coverage by means of satellites and surface relays, but the idea
hadn’t worked too well since nothing had been put into orbit and surface relays
tended not to last very long. This enabled some of the organisms without strong
defenses to remain protected, for a while, from the more metal-hungry empires by
sheer distance. But, to allow for communications blackouts and interference, the
aliens had also provided a backup method of program and data exchange between
robots and factories, which took the form of direct, physical, electrical
interconnection. This was a much slower process than using radiolinks,
naturally, since it required that the robots travel physically to the factories
for reprograming and reporting, but in a self-sustaining operation far from home
the method was a lot better than nothing. And it kept the accountants happy by