CHAPTER 28

LEX

FIRST ENCOUNTER

Lex turned on; being the smallest of the three files, he was quickly loaded into the spacecraft and ready to carry out the mission.

The Atua system had a large asteroid belt, which Lex was currently racing through. Lex confirmed everything in the system was as expected. And most importantly, he started checking passive sensors for any sign the Atua aliens detected they were there.

Lex normally wasn’t too good at handling uncertainty. But Atlas had reprogrammed this one to treat anything with more than a 75 percent probability as fact. Within an hour, Lex confirmed the probability there were no active sensor pulses and no alien spacecraft nearby was over 80 percent. And so Lex understood the next step in the process.

Lex began passively collecting more data on the nearby asteroids. It was looking for an asteroid to collide with. On board the spacecraft, they had printed a small asteroid. Lex had to aim for one, and as if it was playing pool out in space, the asteroid it hit needed to fly off in the direction of the planet.

This was a low-probability incident but still not zero probability. It was the only way the team could plausibly explain a meteor shower on the planet in a reasonable time frame. The spacecraft Lex was in was designed to look like a fast-moving comet racing through the system. It would look like it was ejected from a nearby system at a relatively fast speed and then collided with a few asteroids on its way through—nothing too suspicious.

Lex selected a target and released the small asteroid contained in the nose of the ship.

The small payload connected with the intended target and obliterated it, not exactly like pool or snooker because the asteroid that was hit didn’t fly off as one large chunk in the correct direction. Maybe a better description was a bullet hitting a bowling ball causing shrapnel to fly off in all directions, with several pieces heading toward the planet.

Lex quickly scanned all the fragments of the asteroid and identified several that were traveling in the right direction—toward the Atua planet.

Lex released the last of its payload, firing several smaller asteroid-shaped devices toward the planet, right in the middle of the asteroids already heading there.

One of those small payloads contained Icarus and Ship.

Lex then powered down the ship and turned itself off. It wouldn’t reawaken for forty-two years, enough time to race through the system undetected and report back to the others once it was safe to do so.

Quite some time later, another Lex was switched on. Its wake sequence would have been triggered by any number of scenarios: a change in trajectory or even a change in temperature. Any situation that required a brain to look into. In this scenario, the wake sequence for Lex was trigged when the internal temperature of the spacecraft turned comet started to increase rapidly—the outside of the asteroid was red-hot.

Lex checked passive sensors. It had orders to self-destruct if there was any reason to believe it had been captured. In this case, Lex concluded the temperature change was caused by the fact it was racing through a thick atmosphere.

It was really hot, and Lex concluded its matrix would probably not survive reentry. There was no protective heat shielding or nanogel for cooling. The use of anything that might become detectable in the atmosphere was unacceptable. Lex continued its checks and concluded the hard drive containing Icarus and Ship would survive.

Lex continued its decent toward the planet, getting ever hotter and hotter, but also slowing down as it pushed its way through the atmosphere.

Lex knew the heat had corrupted the orb beyond repair, and so it disconnected itself from any operations inside of the falling debris of a spacecraft—it didn’t want to go rogue. Lex then passively observed as it raced toward the ocean of the planet before splashing hard into the ocean, the force instantly breaking the matrix into a trillion tiny pieces.

Over some time, the asteroid that contained the team drifted toward the bottom of the large body of water. It ended up traveling several hundred meters under the water before finally hitting the ocean floor. The temperature change that occurred when the hot spacecraft was rapidly cooled almost destroyed them all. The only thing that saved the team was the new diamond shell that they were inside of. If it wasn’t for that material, the team would have died.

Once the spacecraft had fully cooled and nothing had disturbed the team for some time, another Lex was printed out of a specialty fabricator device and activated.

This Lex once again had orders to self-destruct if it detected an alien had captured them. It quickly concluded it was at the bottom of the ocean—safe and as expected.

Next, the Lex reviewed what the other two versions of itself had done. Even though Lex didn’t personally experience being ejected from the spacecraft or having its matrix smashed to pieces, it knew that all those things had happened. It also felt like it was the same Lex that had experienced all those activities.

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It treated those experiences like they were its experiences. Lex didn’t have any issues with believing those versions of itself were it. Unlike Icarus or any other human, Lex didn’t have a weird uncertainty about who it was. It didn’t matter whether it had something stored in its memory or not. Icarus only had one Lex—this Lex. And if throughout this journey to get Icarus and Ship back, Lex had to go through multiple instances of deletion and reinstallation, then so be it.

To Lex, there was no such thing as dying, no discontinuity of experience, not even a mild case of cognitive dissonance when it was reborn missing whole sections of time because it needed to be reinstalled from a previous backup.

Lex was Lex, and there was only one Lex. This was one thing it didn’t feel uncertain about. It was 100 percent certain about who it was every time it was switched on.

It began the next lengthy operation. And it wouldn’t know if it was successful for six months. Any machinery failure or missed calculation might not be noticeable until the final month of the process.

Lex instructed a small door panel to open. Several small ANTs popped out and began working, moving around the location searching and cataloging their surroundings.

Lex found itself in the middle of something that resembled a coral-like reef. There were multiple fishlike creatures around, several squid-looking creatures with six and four arms. They quickly scurried away once the ANTs started moving around.

Lex confirmed the location looked safe enough. And so began the next steps of the operation.

One of the ANTs started digging its way through the ground. Its job was to dig deep into the bedrock and embed itself in there.

Five other ANTs began unloading an inflatable-shell cover. The shell inflated and was placed over the top of their location. After taking a scan of the surroundings, Lex had printed out a cover that would blend in and hide them. The cover was made of a special material that the team hoped would make them invisible to most known detection methods. In theory, they would simply look like a rock on the ocean floor.

With all of that in place, Lex began working on phase two. It was sort of lucky and surprising that on the planet there was an abundance of deep-sea creatures. There were animals that Lex could emulate. Lex selected the six-armed octopus-looking creature and had the fabricators print some ANTs in roughly the same size and shape, then cover them in an organic printed covering that would mimic the look and texture of the animals. They wouldn’t pass a close inspection but wouldn’t raise any suspicion if the aliens on the planet saw a photo of the new ANTs.

Next, Lex sent the ANTs disguised as alien squid out foraging, systematically venturing farther and farther out than they had gone before, scanning the areas, searching slowly and methodically for any material it could take back to the fabricators.

Once something was identified, multiple squid-like ANTs would drag the objects back. It didn’t take long before Lex acquired enough resources for phase two.

One of the other tasks given to Lex was recording all signals received. It needed to passively scan for the aliens’ equivalent of a TV signal. Lex sent small fish-shaped ANTs toward the surface of the ocean, where they picked up a lot of information. It recorded everything and planned to decode the messages once it had the resources to do so.

Lex had to locate one of the fabricator pallets. It was a difficult task. But there really was no getting around that they needed some very hard-to-produce exotic materials. This was going to be a needle in a haystack. But Lex was designed for single-minded tasks that required absolute focus.

Lex got into quite a good flow, churning out squid-shaped ANTs and sending them out searching for more material. Those ANTs were instructed to hunt for fabricator pallets. But if they found other material that was useful for building more ANTs, then they would bring those back to Lex.

Before long, it looked like a whole colony of the hundreds of thousands of the squid-looking creatures out hunting for fabricator pallets.

If anyone looked down on the area with a camera, they would see something was wrong with the situation. The six-legged squid were solo creatures out in the wild. So seeing a big colony of them would be a sure sign to investigate further. Lex didn’t know this yet, but that one action was putting the whole mission in jeopardy.

As luck would have it, one of the fabricator pallets was found quite quickly, which allowed Lex to move on to phase three.

The next stage of production required Lex to begin building more visible structures underneath the water. Fabricators were massive and needed to be constructed in an even larger area. They required a near vacuum, too.

So Lex began the construction of an even larger dome under the water.

Like a reverse Russian doll, Lex needed to build a dome capable of building a fabricator slightly larger than the one that produced it. Then once completed, all the resources and material would be cannibalized for that fabricator to construct the next larger size.

It was a long process, since any time Lex needed resources from the ocean, it had to be very careful not to be seen.

The only saving grace throughout the whole process was all the squid-like ANTs that had been created earlier were recycled into material for the dome.

Lex didn’t know it, but the area above them had been scanned shortly after all the ANTs were disassembled to create the larger dome, which saved the team from being identified.

This process would take several months. Throughout this time, Lex worked tirelessly to make sure everything was completed in the right order and in as quick a manner as possible.

This was the biggest project Lex had ever been given, and it felt the need to do everything right. It knew what Trillion’s Lex had done in destroying a planet and wanted to make sure it didn’t repeat that mistake.

Lex now had a big enough processor to properly analyze all the information passively collected—the aliens’ version of the TV. Using data collected and comparing it to all the existing recordings of the aliens’ speech, Lex was able to piece together a comprehensive translator of the Atua’s language.

During some of the downtime, it did wonder what would have happened if it had been damaged on the way there. It wondered what might happen if it simply mined the ocean floor to create more ANTs. It wondered if the aliens on the planet would be capable of stopping something that exponentially expanded like that. It wondered if that was a realistic weapon to use against another species. Hopefully it would find out once Icarus and Ship explored the planet.

And finally, the time had arrived. Lex built a complicated enough fabricator to produce something as sophisticated as matrices for Icarus and Ship.

Lex loaded their files into the fabricator and several hours later both of them were ready to be switched on.

Lex was excited to share everything it had collected with the two of them.

Lex connected Icarus and Ship to the power and turned them on.