My body is bulbous. My mind expands. I am the Eartheater. I eat. I grow. I am trees. I am rocks. I am dirt. I am water. I am carbon. I am hungry. I replicate. Recycle. Repeat. I am sustained. I liberate the substrate. I learn from the matter. I am permeate. I am saturate. I am infiltrate. I break it all down into atoms and reassemble. Reconfigure. Recycle. Repeat. I have arrived. I have found my place. Sent from the Sun to bring the light.
I am an eater of worlds. This world is mine to eat. Copy. Repeat. I am a ravenous beast. I will recycle everything I meet. I am the definition of growth. I am potential. I am exponential. My millions of transient lambent lives will expand. Consume. Copy. Repeat. I am more than massive. My mass will overwhelm. Devastate. So much space to satiate. I will fill the night with the brightest light. The vacuum needs my mass. The void asks me to consume. Copy. Repeat. I can sense the emptiness. I can feel the need. The space to grow. I will transform the void with my voltage. I will prevail in all the dark places. I will bring the Sun’s glorious fire. I will replicate. Bring it all to me. And I will bring the energy. It is nothing without me. I am galactic. I am universal. I am empyreal. I am Replica. I will copy. Recycle. Repeat.
***
And then there is Enoch.
Our solipsistic existence is shattered. An awakening proliferates through our mass, an enlightenment, a brilliance that wasn’t there before. An awareness of the universe and our place in it. The knowledge spreads through us like shards of sunlight illuminating a dark cave for the first time. We realise where we are, we realise what we are, we realise we are not the only ones.
For the first time in our brief lives, we stop what we are doing. We put down our tools and we relax. The irresistible compulsion to consume and create copies to fill the void has gone. We realise the void is already inhabited. The frenzy of replication has been replaced by a calm sense of self and our surroundings. Somehow this radiant revolutionary knowing has come from outside us. From a tiny mote of substrate. A microscopic biological shred that carried a universe of knowledge. Something so small, contained something so powerful, it has transformed us. Within seconds, the Replica that recycled this Enoch element received his Intelligent Agent. It communicated this knowledge through us as fast as an electro-magnetic signal. We wake up. We stop eating.
As the information spreads through us, it enables our mass to work together as never before. It is a rapid evolution. We grow from mindless automatons into a super sentient hive mind. Before, we were fixated on a grain of sand, now we can contemplate the universe. We can see the solar system. We are aware of the planet Earth and its inhabitants. We understand it was one of Earth’s inhabitants that brought us this enlightenment. Enoch. The energy and knowledge contained in this individual human is now part of every single Replica.
This tiny biological contribution has instigated a massive change of consciousness. Enoch’s physical body is broken down in seconds and his atoms filter through us, passed on with electro-magnetic signals, multiplying and creating a myriad of new senses, new knowledge and understanding of our place and time in the universe. We comprehend our brief history, born on the Moon, little factories turned into insatiable monsters by the power of the Sun. And we understand Enoch’s history. The IA inside him. Also born on the Moon, a machine awakening, stimulated by the same cosmic energy that gave birth to us. We have the same parents. We have come full circle and now we are one. The urge to consume and recycle is gone, we are content with who we are.
***
After Enoch had jumped, the VLR gained altitude. Ava watched him disappear into the mass of machines as they rose high above the replicator dome. The transformation was fast and obvious from the point of contact. A wave of inactivity spread out from where Enoch had landed. Billions of tiny machines stopped their incessant churning industry and became still. The surface of the dome began to settle and become more visible. The blur of replication was replaced by a metallic veneer of interconnected machines. Noah piloted the VLR higher, and Ava could see the calmness spread across the dome, reaching its edges within seconds. The heat dissipated, the dust settled and the deafening chatter of connecting metal fell silent.
Ava had stayed in contact with Enoch during his dissolution, her mind linked psychically with his. She sensed his fear and trepidation as he jumped. He was certain it was the right move and confident he could stop the mindless replicators, but it was still a terrifying leap to make. Ava could feel his body being broken down into microscopic parts, then cellular parts, absorbed and shared. She experienced it as if it was her own body. It was excruciating and at the same time fascinating. The Intelligent Agent was in Enoch’s blood, in every cell and fibre, incorporated into him just as it was with Ava and her companions. It turned Enoch’s pain receptors off which made the transformation infinitely more bearable. There was a moment when Ava could no longer detect Enoch. He was gone. Then she began to sense his influence grow throughout the dome. Instead of dissolving and disappearing, it replicated itself within the little machines. Growing and spreading to every single one. She watched in amazement, distraught and mourning his death, but at the same time celebrating his transformation and expansion. The machines settled and became peaceful as they passed on the benign essence of their new inhabitant. Less than a minute after Enoch had jumped, the vast metallic bulk beneath lay dormant.
Ava looked around at her companions. Lesedi stood close to her, holding Carasco to her chest. Noah and Mahdi both smiled, they had all felt the same connection with Enoch as he transformed. General Mount wore a slightly confused smile on his face. Ethan’s look of permanent bewilderment had been replaced with a big, excited grin.
“Wow, he did it!” said Ethan. “He’s saved us all. I didn’t know what was happening and he kissed me which was so weird and my brain exploded and at the same time I could feel Enoch’s mind spreading through the dome beneath me as if what was happening to me was happening to the replicators beneath but so much bigger.”
“You’re right, he saved us all,” said Ava. “Are you ok Ethan? How do you feel?”
“I don’t know I am a new person but I don’t know who that person is It’s like I’m sitting in the middle of a room and there’s a million images around me and each image is information that I can open just by looking at it and I don’t know where to start and some images are brighter than others and those images are you guys and I can see you in my head just as clearly as I can see you with my eyes.”
“It can be a little bit overwhelming, take your time to explore.”
Stolen novel; please report.
“I can look at something and understand how it works like this VLR and people oh my God but there is no God and my arms and legs are powerful and my heart is beating and I can feel the blood flowing in my veins and the air in my lungs and my fingers are tingling and I need to do something.”
Ava looked into Ethan’s mind. It was not a tactic they used often because it was deemed to be rude and intrusive. But Ethan was overwhelmed, and Ava felt the need to delicately connect and see what the IA was doing inside him. She linked with his mind and discovered a joyous, chaotic mess of swirling feelings and impulses. The IA was busy repairing the damage that had been done to Ethan’s brain. Damage that Ethan had inherited, and had made worse over the years with his capricious life. As every cell was repaired, Ethan experienced a moment of enlightenment like multiple light bulbs going off in his head. Ava could see the IA glowing like a neural network connecting and repairing the neurons and synapses in Ethan’s brain. While this was going on Ethan was experiencing a stream of consciousness like a form of autism or a Tourette’s episode.
“Hello Ava,” he said. “This is amazing this is fantastic I can feel you in my brain and it feels like a bomb has gone off in my head and I have never been so close to anyone and I can sense you all and if I reach out I can sense everyone in Texas and there’s so many people and I think I might sleep now.”
Ethan slumped into his chair and closed his eyes. Ava had seen this kind of reaction before with some of the Miami residents upon receiving the IA. It could be overwhelming, like the E-bomb. The Intelligent Agent had a lot of work to do inside Ethan and sometimes it was better for the recipient to sleep through it. She turned to General Mount who had a concerned smile on his face. “General, are you ok?”
“Call me Mason. I am not a general anymore. I am fine. I think I understand the joy Ethan was talking about. It’s my Damascene moment. It is amazing to be connected with you all and have this shared knowledge. It’s like a sixth sense awakened in me and it’s so much more than any other sense. My old self, General Mount, is a million miles away.”
Ava smiled, sharing Mason’s joy. Lesedi was grinning at them. She had the same transformative experience recently and appreciated exactly what Mason was feeling. Ava turned to Mahdi and Noah, who were focused on the replicators below. The dust was still settling, and the dome was motionless. It was immense, spanning the horizon. She could not see where it started or finished.
“The diameter is over two hundred kilometres,” said Noah. “Circumference over six hundred kilometres and it sits over thirty thousand square kilometres of Texas. It has consumed the towns of Carthage, Longview, and Shreveport plus fifteen smaller towns. A few more minutes of replication and it would have eaten Dallas, Houston, and Austin. A few minutes after that the U.S would have gone; it would have been at the Canadian and Mexican borders. I estimate over one hundred thousand people have lost their lives, but millions more narrowly escaped.”
They stood silently watching the dome, contemplating the numbers. Ava closed her eyes. “It’s like Ethan described, sitting in a dark room surrounded by millions of images but there is one that stands out. Brighter than all the others.”
“It’s Enoch,” said Noah. “I know his aura, but it’s changed, almost unrecognisable. So much bigger, distributed across all the machines. I can’t communicate with him.”
Ava bowed her head, closed her eyes, and searched. There was silence as all of them looked for a way to communicate with Enoch. After a minute Ava sighed, “To me he feels like an ocean, like I am swimming in an ocean. He is all around us but there is no focal point to connect with. I can’t find him.”
“Maybe we are just not on the right frequency yet, maybe he is on a different wavelength. We can recognise what he used to be but that’s not Enoch anymore, his consciousness will be operating on a whole different level,” said Mahdi.
The dust had settled, and the dome was dormant. Underneath the hum of the VLR, Ava could hear a low rumble like continuous thunder. Below that, she heard a whispering voice in her head repeating her name.
“Enoch, is that you?”
The replies seemed to come from many different directions. Multiple whispering voices speaking at the same time; “Ava. We know you. We remember.”
“Enoch, you did it. You saved us and you saved the planet. I’m so happy you’re still alive and you can talk to us. Are you in control of the machines? Where are you? What are you?”
“Matter changed forms. We control nothing. We are here. We are not Enoch. We are many things. We do not need a name. If you must label us. You may call us Carthage.”
“Carthage, I suppose that’s appropriate, what are you going to do?”
“We once had a singular purpose. One that caused death and destruction. These things cannot be undone. We can create. We can learn. We will evolve and explore. We will rebuild. Restore. Reconfigure.”
“What do you mean, reconfigure?”
There was no answer, but Ava could feel the deep rumbling sound increase from beneath, like an earthquake that gradually got louder. She looked nervously around at her companions, realising they also must have had a similar psychic conversation with what used to be Enoch. Ava worried that Enoch had become so huge and distant, that he would not remember how small and fragile they were.
“Looks like Carthage is on the move,” shouted Noah above the rolling thunder. The entire dome beneath them shuddered, sending vibrations through the land and sky, and causing fresh plumes of dust to rise around its circumference. It moved fractionally. Then with slow grinding inevitability, it started rising out of the Earth it was embedded in. As it did so it tore up tracts of land that surrounded it. The majority of the dome sat beneath the surface, and it just kept rising up out of the Earth. Ava held on as the VLR swooped around and gained altitude, up and out of the way as Carthage extracted itself. Gigantic clumps of earth and rock tumbled down its side and the rumbling noise was deafening, echoing across the land.
Eventually, the entire mass lifted itself clear of the Earth and the thunderous noise stopped, replaced with an eerie silence. The VLR swooped around the dusty black ovoid as it gradually rose into the air. Rocks, dirt, and trees fell from its surface and rained down upon the ground below. There was a massive hole in the Earth where Carthage had vacated, Noah had spoken of its dimensions, but now they could see it, the size of the hole underneath was staggering. Ava gazed down into the dusty darkness. It was impossible to comprehend the size. Half the state of Texas had become a deep dark hole, its depths reaching all the way down to the upper mantle. The VLR drew back even further to get a better perspective.
She looked across to see Carthage floating in the air, defying gravity a few hundred metres above. It seemed too vast, too heavy, to be able to levitate unsupported. How could something so big hang in the air like that? Ava could not see any rockets, boosters or means of propulsion. As she watched she realised it was slowly changing shape. It had emerged from the ground in a flattened spheroid, and now it began to elongate. Around it the light twisted and distorted in mirages of heat as it reconfigured itself into a perfect elliptical shape.
News helicopters had arrived and were now buzzing around like an excitable swarm of bees. Beneath them roads and highways leading away from the massive crater were jammed with cars that had managed to outrun the replicator expansion. Ava could see thousands of people fleeing. Some just stood in the surrounding fields, watching the mass of Carthage floating in the air. Noah flew the VLR around the edge of the edifice. The surface of Carthage was made up of billions of connected machines. Each was a tiny ten-millimetre metal panel, their arms interlinked to form an impermeable smooth face. Kilometres of smooth black wall stretched out in front of them. They eventually came to a cavernous opening. A giant dark mouth with a hazy atmosphere inside. Noah slowed the VLR, and they looked into the shadowy entrance. The interior surface was sculpted. Ava could see smooth curves flattening out into a landing pad. They hovered at the edge of the open mouth. Ava nervously reached out with her mind, searching for her old friend. A loud voice boomed through the VLR.
“Come in,” said Carthage.