nearly dead, its AI partly burned out, her cerebral link with its electronics faltering.
Maybe… maybe the best thing to do now would be to simply switch off.
Chapter 3
What is life? The old standby definitions, handed down from the dawn of modern biology, can no longer be said to provide even an approximately correct or comprehensive answer. Life metabolizes, taking in fuel and giving off waste while producing energy. The same can be said of fire. Life seeks to reproduce itself. Again, fire spreads… and the DNA and RNA molecules that are the basis for terrestrial life replicate as a part of life’s dance, without themselves being life.
Perhaps most disturbing to those seeking to define life is the evidence presented by such nonhuman species as the Web, creatures that undoubtedly perform all of the functions generally associated with life processes, including reshaping their environment, metabolizing raw materials, eliminating waste products, and reproducing themselves. The fact that all of these functions are performed by machines assembled through nanotechnic processes similar to those evolved by human industry should not prejudice us to the fact that the Web is alive.
It is simply a very different kind of life, one that we still have trouble even beginning to understand.
— The Dance of Life
P ROFESSOR E LLERY H AWKINS
C . E . 2572
Kara wasn’t ready to quit just yet, however. The magnetic field embedded in the planet’s surface was faltering, some of its circuitry disrupted, perhaps, by the detonation of the nuke. She could barely edge along, the ventral surface of her battered strider scraping and bumping across the smoking, burned-over ground. Her strider’s legs were gone. She still had some auxiliary manipulators folded up inside their storage compartments, though, and as that thundering, howling wind died away somewhat, she was able to deploy them, first to hold herself in place, then to drag her battered machine slowly across the ground.
The heat and radiation weren’t bad, considering; the ambient ionizing radiation of the Galactic Core was actually stronger by far than that released by a single micronuke, though with her energy-drinking nanoflage gone, the full brunt of protecting her warstrider’s more delicate contents now rested on its magnetic shields.
Using the strider’s Naga components to build new lenses and shove them into place, she managed to bring a suite of optical sensors back on line. The view she got was bleary, dark, and unsteady, but it showed her the classic mushroom cloud towering above the battlefield, looming high in a sky gone black, masked by windswept dust.
Astonishingly, the alien pyramid was still there, though it no longer floated in the air. Judging from the glowing cavern ripped into its side and base, it might well be crippled. Her electronic sensors were down and she couldn’t detect the play of magnetics within the alien structure, but it was resting on the ground, canted at a thirty-degree angle, as though the forces holding it aloft had abruptly snapped off and dumped it there. The play of deadly lightning had ceased as well, and as Kara watched its form emerging from the roiling pillar of the mushroom’s base, she dared to believe that she might have actually killed the thing.
The nuke’s expanding blast wave had pulverized the pyramid’s smaller cousins as well, sweeping most from the ground like clots of dust scattered by the descent of a broom and leaving the larger ones wrecked and half-melted. She scanned her tactical display. Kuso! Seventeen warstriders left operational, out of the original company of forty-eight.
“Ran!” she called over the tactical channel. His strider was still operational, thank God, the only one of her three lieutenants. She tried to stifle a small stab of relief; she had special and quite close feelings for Ran Ferris… but ones that she kept tightly reined in when they were on duty. Even the hint of
Maybe… maybe the best thing to do now would be to simply switch off.
Chapter 3
What is life? The old standby definitions, handed down from the dawn of modern biology, can no longer be said to provide even an approximately correct or comprehensive answer. Life metabolizes, taking in fuel and giving off waste while producing energy. The same can be said of fire. Life seeks to reproduce itself. Again, fire spreads… and the DNA and RNA molecules that are the basis for terrestrial life replicate as a part of life’s dance, without themselves being life.
Perhaps most disturbing to those seeking to define life is the evidence presented by such nonhuman species as the Web, creatures that undoubtedly perform all of the functions generally associated with life processes, including reshaping their environment, metabolizing raw materials, eliminating waste products, and reproducing themselves. The fact that all of these functions are performed by machines assembled through nanotechnic processes similar to those evolved by human industry should not prejudice us to the fact that the Web is alive.
It is simply a very different kind of life, one that we still have trouble even beginning to understand.
— The Dance of Life
P ROFESSOR E LLERY H AWKINS
C . E . 2572
Kara wasn’t ready to quit just yet, however. The magnetic field embedded in the planet’s surface was faltering, some of its circuitry disrupted, perhaps, by the detonation of the nuke. She could barely edge along, the ventral surface of her battered strider scraping and bumping across the smoking, burned-over ground. Her strider’s legs were gone. She still had some auxiliary manipulators folded up inside their storage compartments, though, and as that thundering, howling wind died away somewhat, she was able to deploy them, first to hold herself in place, then to drag her battered machine slowly across the ground.
The heat and radiation weren’t bad, considering; the ambient ionizing radiation of the Galactic Core was actually stronger by far than that released by a single micronuke, though with her energy-drinking nanoflage gone, the full brunt of protecting her warstrider’s more delicate contents now rested on its magnetic shields.
Using the strider’s Naga components to build new lenses and shove them into place, she managed to bring a suite of optical sensors back on line. The view she got was bleary, dark, and unsteady, but it showed her the classic mushroom cloud towering above the battlefield, looming high in a sky gone black, masked by windswept dust.
Astonishingly, the alien pyramid was still there, though it no longer floated in the air. Judging from the glowing cavern ripped into its side and base, it might well be crippled. Her electronic sensors were down and she couldn’t detect the play of magnetics within the alien structure, but it was resting on the ground, canted at a thirty-degree angle, as though the forces holding it aloft had abruptly snapped off and dumped it there. The play of deadly lightning had ceased as well, and as Kara watched its form emerging from the roiling pillar of the mushroom’s base, she dared to believe that she might have actually killed the thing.
The nuke’s expanding blast wave had pulverized the pyramid’s smaller cousins as well, sweeping most from the ground like clots of dust scattered by the descent of a broom and leaving the larger ones wrecked and half-melted. She scanned her tactical display. Kuso! Seventeen warstriders left operational, out of the original company of forty-eight.
“Ran!” she called over the tactical channel. His strider was still operational, thank God, the only one of her three lieutenants. She tried to stifle a small stab of relief; she had special and quite close feelings for Ran Ferris… but ones that she kept tightly reined in when they were on duty. Even the hint of
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