Herb was beating Robert at chess. He had arranged his opponent’s captured pieces in a circle around the foam-flecked glass that had held his spiced lager. He grinned across the board as Robert frowned while thinking of his next move.
“Do you want to concede? Again?”
“Not yet. I feel I learn something just by playing through to the end.”
“Please yourself.”
Herb sat back in his seat and began to hum. Robert sighed and moved a piece.
“You don’t want to do that,” Herb warned. “Mate in three moves.”
Robert sighed again. Just for the moment, the arrogant air had left him.
“Herb,” he said, “don’t you ever think that there are more important things than winning? Haven’t you heard the saying ‘It’s far more important to be nice than to be clever’?”
Herb rolled his eyes. “The call of the loser. Okay, have that as your move.”
“That’s all right. I concede.” Robert knocked over his king and stood up. He placed his hat on his head.
“Don’t you want another game?” asked Herb.
“No, thank you. I think I’ll go back to my ship and have a nap.”
Herb shrugged. “Suit yourself. You know, we’ve been hanging over this planet for ten days now. I thought we were supposed to be going off to war. When are we actually going to do something?”
Looking a little sad, Johnston gave a barely perceptible shrug.
“Soon. The first reconnaissance reports are coming back already. We’ll give it another couple of days to see what else we get.”
“What reports?”
“You’ll see. Good night.”
Robert waved good-bye as he stepped into the secret passageway, his body jerking forward through ninety degrees as the new gravity caught hold. He marched away down to his ship.
Herb watched him go, a feeling of frustration burning inside. Even when he won, Robert had a way of making him feel he had lost. Everything he did seemed intended to highlight Herb’s inferiority. Worse, no matter how Herb tried to fight back, he always seemed to end up losing. Herb wasn’t used to that; the few friends he had made had always been chosen as being just slightly less clever than he was.
Herb paused in shock. The idea had never occurred to him before. Was it true? He didn’t know if he wanted to think about it. He quickly changed his line of thought.
The local scan was complete: all the data were stored within the ship. What he needed now was to access the images without Robert noticing what he was doing. Herb had already planned what he would do.
“Ship, play back the results of the last scan, mapped to a 3-D visual feed in the main viewing area. Random jumps every ten seconds, fifty percent probability space focused around the ship to a radius of ten kilometers.”
Herb flopped onto one of the white sofas just as the space before him filled with a view of the planet below: silver machines in a restless sea of unending motion. After ten seconds the view flicked to a sky view of endless grey. Another ten seconds and flick, another view of the planet, this time from much higher up.
Herb sat back, watching patiently. He couldn’t focus straight in on his ship: that would alert Robert’s suspicions. This way, it would seem just like any, everyday, random survey. Sooner or later, the view must fall on Johnston’s ship. Flick, and a shot across the planet’s surface; flick, and a shot into space, the atmosphere fading just enough to show the faint pinpricks of stars beyond; flick, a picture of Herb’s ship, floating in the distance, too faint really to make out any detail. Flick again and nothing but sky. Flick again, and there was Herb’s ship close up and in detail. A white rectangular box with bevelled edges top and bottom. And standing on the roof of Herb’s ship, in the spot where Robert’s ship should have been, wearing the palest blue suit and white spats with a matching carnation in the buttonhole, stood Robert Johnston. He was waving to the “camera.”
Robert Johnston had beaten him again.
Herb had risen early and gone into the ship’s gym to work out. He turned off the VR feed as he wanted to concentrate on the basic feeling of exercising the frustration from his body rather than visualize a pleasant run through the country. He ran six kilometers on the treadmill, did another two kilometers on the rowing machine and then put himself through thirty minutes of high-impact yoga.
After that he staggered, sweating, through to the lounge and called up a breakfast of orange and banana juice, brioche loaf, yellow butter, and honey. Robert Johnston stepped into the room just as Herb was finishing his third thick slice of brioche.
“Good morning, Herb. Ah, excellent! Breakfast. I hope there’s enough left for me.”
Robert sat down on the chair opposite and inspected Herb’s meal.
“Maybe just a few sausages to go with it. See to it, please, Ship.”
“I thought you were a vegetarian.”
“Not on Thursdays.”
Johnston cut himself a slice of brioche and began to eat.
“Mmm. Good choice. Well, the news is, we’ve received enough reports back on the Enemy Domain to begin your briefing. Once we’ve done that, we should be ready to jump into the fight almost immediately.”
“Oh good,” said Herb, weakly. He felt a sudden stab of cold fear deep inside. The easy passage of the past few days had made him almost forget the threatened danger of the Enemy Domain. Now the realization of his predicament came rushing back upon him. In just a few hours he could be dead. Or worse.
Johnston was helping himself to a sausage. “We’ll just finish breakfast and then we’ll begin.” He took a bite and half-closed his eyes with pleasure. “Mmmm! Excellent! Well. I suppose I’d better explain. A few days ago I took a recording of your personality while you were sleeping. I took the liberty of beaming several thousand copies of it into the Enemy Domain. Those personalities have since been living in the processors of the Domain, collecting information about conditions in there. Those personalities who could do so have beamed themselves back here again. I have made a selection of the best of the memories they picked up. After breakfast, we’ll take a look at them. See what we’re up against.”
He waved his fork in delight.
“These really are excellent sausages! Maybe just a touch of maple syrup…”
Herb stared at him. The sick feeling in his stomach had now driven all thoughts of eating from his mind. Despite that, he forced his voice to remain cool and level. “How come the act has changed? Yesterday you were all 1920s American. Today you’re acting like some sort of effete English gentleman.”
“I like to experiment with personalities. You should try it yourself. That one you’re using at the moment obviously isn’t working.”
Herb sneered at him.
“Oh, touché,” said Robert.
After breakfast they sat down to share the memories. Robert set a glass of drugged whisky at Herb’s elbow.
“I don’t need that,” said Herb.
“It’s there if you change your mind.”
Robert had opened up a viewing field in the space in front of the white sofa. Once Herb was settled the show began. The scene revealed the ghostly figures of Herb and Robert both rising from Herb’s spaceship and floating up into space. As they rose they began to move faster and faster, the planet beneath them shrinking to a dot. The star around which the planet circled moved into view and began itself to shrink as the two ghostly bodies accelerated through space.
“I added this bit for effect,” Robert said. He was carefully laying out a white handkerchief on his lap. A bowl of walnuts balanced precariously on the arm of the sofa by his right elbow. Herb gave a grunt in reply.
On the screen before them, their two ghostly bodies shimmered as if they were moving out of focus, and then, slowly, a second pair of images peeled away from the first. Now there were two Herbs and two Roberts. They began to shimmer again, splitting into four, and then eight…
“I like this part,” said Robert. “It represents the multiple copies of our personalities that I beamed all the way through the Enemy Domain.” Robert took a walnut from the bowl at his side and placed it in a pair of bright red nutcrackers he produced from his jacket pocket.
“How long does this go on for?” muttered Herb.
“Not too long,” Robert replied, pushing a shelled walnut into his mouth.
The ghostly bodies of Herb and Robert began to separate from each other and suddenly zoom from sight. Bursts of red and green stars accompanied their sudden exit from view.
“Warp jumps,” Robert explained.
The camera picked up on one pair of bodies as they shot through space. They were now approaching a planet.
“This is part of the Enemy Domain,” Robert murmured. “Watch carefully.”
Herb gazed into the viewing area impassively. After a few moments he sat up straighter. Shortly after that his hands stiffened on the soft white leather of the sofa, then he reached for the glass of whisky and took a sip, and then another…
It began simply enough. Robert and Herb’s duplicates were standing on a low hill looking out over a grassy plain punctuated with low mounds. The Robert on the screen turned and pointed out something to the Herb standing next to him, and the camera focused on the horizon. They saw a low, dark shape, rising from the ground like a cancer. Now they could make out something silver in the grass, thin and shimmering in the light like a spiderweb. It was clearly spreading out from the dark growth in the distance, slowly choking the planet. The Robert in the viewing field bent down and pointed it out to Herb.
“Interesting, isn’t it? It’s got a coating of photoelectric cells all around the outside. This planet is going to be covered by that stuff, and it’s all being powered by nothing more than the sun’s energy. Just imagine if they dropped one of these VNMs on Earth.”
“It moves too slowly. We’d destroy it in no time.”
“Maybe.” The virtual Robert shrugged.
The Herb watching the viewing field, the real Herb, silently cheered his alter ego.
The view shifted and this time another Herb and Robert were standing on another planet. In this view a group of cows was huddled on a small island of green remaining in the middle of a sea of silver-grey VNMs. The VNMs were eating up the land, leaving the animals nowhere to stand.
“Are those real cows?” asked the Herb in the viewing tank.
“Oh, yes.”
One of the cows slipped and scrambled desperately to prevent itself sliding down the deep brown mud fringing the island, toward the restless silver sea below. There was a stirring at the shoreline, the first flickering of mechanical interest. Despite its frantic scrambling, the cow slipped closer and closer to the silver sea. One machine skittered across the bodies of its brothers and onto the mud, antennae waving, and that was it. Herb looked on in horror as the silver VNMs rushed over the unfortunate animal.
The scene jumped again to show a huge, deformed city that spread out to cover most of one side of a planet. Its silvery grey towers reached upwards to the stars and the silver-grey hearts of the fleet of spaceships hovering above it.
“I call this the Necropolis,” said the real Robert. “On this one the Enemy AI got the design of the VNMs wrong. The city was abandoned before it was finished. Never mind the fact that it meant abandoning several million half grown human clones in the foundations. The Necropolis. You’ll also notice the fleet of spaceships hovering above. They stopped reproducing when their cargo never arrived.”
Herb looked at the planet and felt sick. “There is no way anyone could have gone down there. Was I down there?”
“Two copies of us went. Only one pair came back. I think both of the pairs traveled up to the top of the space elevator. They got stuck there and had to guess which way to jump. One pair guessed wrongly.”
The scene shifted again. They were following a long dark line through space.
“What is it?” asked Herb after four minutes of watching the hypnotic movement.
“Oh, I like this one,” said Robert. “What happened was this. They dropped a single VNM on a planet, rather like you did on the one below us. The only difference was that this one worked.”
Herb gave a tolerant sigh.
“Anyway. The VNM reproduced, making copy after copy of itself until the planet had been converted into something rather like that mess out there.”
Johnston gestured toward the spaceship’s door. “Okay. So we can both visualize that bit. Now, what happened next was the clever part. You’ve got a planet which is now nothing more than a mass of mechanical bodies held together by their own gravity. Okay. Now the creatures at the equator begin to walk toward the poles. When they get there they begin to fuse together. More and more creatures arrive and the extremes of the planet begin to stretch out into space. Keep it up for long enough, and this is what you’re left with. Clever, eh? You never thought of that, did you?”
Herb shrugged. “Yeah? Probably because it’s pointless?”
Johnston laughed. “Pointless eh? Have you considered what would happen if you dropped the line that was formed by that process on another planet?”
Herb froze.
“Tell you what, I’ll show you.”
The picture in the view tank changed again. A fiery red line could be seen burning through the grey sky of some planet. Herb wasn’t sure if he could detect the patterns of cities on the planet’s surface.
“Of course, you can’t even shoot it down if it’s coming toward you,” Johnston whispered, suddenly next to Herb’s ear.
The view changed again. Herb gave a shout. “There were people there! Humans!”
Robert shrugged and returned to his seat.
“Don’t worry about it. They weren’t sentient. That’s an important point: they never seem to have had the nerve to allow genuine humans to develop inside the Enemy Domain. Anyway, the weapon you saw is obsolete. The AI has perfected fractal branching. Look at this one.”
The view shifted again so that Herb was looking down at an enormous snowflake, framed against the black night and the piercing grey stars.
“It’s got a surface area of just under a billion klicks squared and it masses about half that of Earth. Just imagine what would happen if they grew one of these things in Earth’s orbit. Can you imagine the planet hitting that? It would be like passing through a cheese grater.”