Read The Goliath Stone for Free Online

it’s been doing?”

 
    VII
Here is Plato’s man.
—DIOGENES THE CYNIC

 
    The light sail wasn’t enough to allow Briareus to match velocities. The operators took the sail apart, built some of the mass into a smaller linear motor, and sent the rest of the aluminum down its length. Efficiency was much lower, but Briareus was also decreasing the mass to be slowed. It was enough.
    All machinery withdrew into the carousel for the impact with Target One.
    At impact, the electromagnet that had been assembled in line with the linear motor struck first and slid into the shaft, and much of the energy of motion was converted to power. Suddenly everything was at full charge.
    Briareus One-a clambered out of Slot One.
    Operators, the descendants of Briareus One and One-b, flowed out of Slot Six. More than half of them had failed during the six-year voyage. The inert machines hadn’t been remade. They had been stripped for parts, which were then reassembled along the linear motor to generate more power for a faster exhaust.
    The operators crawled out onto the asteroid and dispersed. Briareus Three, the Master Computer, listened to their signals.
    The tiny devices had no room for any complicated message. Briareus One-a, though bigger, was no more complex. They tested for certain metals. They ate. Some went offline, dying of mishap. Briareus One-a proliferated. Target One was enormously more massive than the Wyndham Launch orbiter.
    Briareus Three, the computer, wrote and sent a series of signals:
Erect the telescope.
    It rose on an aluminum column. Briareus Three pointed it down at the asteroid to watch the operators’ progress.
    Most of the work was being done by Briareus One-b’s descendants. Briareus One-a’s children were not numerous yet, but they were reproducing.
Build solar collectors.
    Silver flowers sprouted from the asteroid, with nodes at their center. The nuclear power plant was near dead by now, but power began to flow into the system.
Build a linear motor.
    It looked like the two that Briareus had already built. As it grew longer, the operators built bracing spines.
    Target One was being turned to dust.
Weave a net.
    Briareus Three sent, and commanded that the dust be directed into it.
    Briareus One-a’s children had grown more numerous than the original operators … but the children of Briareus One-b were eating Briareus One-a’s children. The little ate the big. Individual operators that were still active were ignored, but anything that wasn’t moving was ipso facto supplies. Large clusters that had gone on standby to await further tasks did not deem themselves inactive, and when they were approached they took apart their prospective dismantlers, as they did with any faulty operator.
    It only takes one unforeseen circumstance to make a plan go wrong. This was why most of the people who came up with gray goo stories were in software.
    The One-b operators began joining into processing clusters to deal with what were obviously defective devices, and attacked them in packs.
    Predators had been invented.
    The One-a clusters had no programming for such an emergency, but they did have more processing power. They linked up in pairs, allowing one sector to deal with immediate events while the other observed and made plans, and restructured their functions to put all manipulators on the outside, gathering the reconstruction modules in one place, and building internal conduits for instructions and repairs. Differentiated tissues.
    All light absorbers were put on the outside as well, and were protected from the packs with diamond, scavenged from manipulators that exceeded the number that could be crammed together on the surface. Variations in power correlated with incoming objects, and this was helpful. Some of the ad-hoc structures were better than others at this, and their features were adopted for all absorbers.
    Eyes had been invented.
    Predators were seized before they noticed anything close enough to do it. All