"No one would have believed in the first years of the twenty-first century that this world was about to launch something created by a man and yet not as mortal as one; that as men and women busied themselves about their various concerns, among them one was about to change the face of the galaxy. With infinite complacency they went to and fro over this globe about their our affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to other worlds of space as sources of raw materials, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of preying upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial humans fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, a man was looking that saw the universe, and his chance to make his mark on it.
The village of Husborne Crawley, I scarcely need remind the reader, is in the northernmost portion of what used to be called the Manshead Hundred, in the middle section of Bedfordshire. It consists of a number of scattered "ends", or hamlets, with the area around the parish church little more populated than any other part of the village. But in a shed there took shape the machine that would take over the universe.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the reason the Beagle 2 experiment failed was because the Open University team involved with it inadvertently launched a barbecue to Mars - leaving Beaker 2 itself in a shed waiting for the next decent summer's day. After its discovery in 2009, it was buried quietly in an orchard until Young Keith had a brainwave. Six months of hard work in the Beaker garage completed his design. And so it was that one quiet evening in March 2012 (it being more sensible to launch rockets at night, space being easier to see) the modified Beagle 2 took off from just behind the Moot House. There was a roar of kerosene and a smell suspiciously like that of an unlikely form of solid-fuel booster - possibly involving
chicken manure and the wax melted out of vast numbers of tea lights.
The first stop was a planned one - on an innocent, relatively un-noticed but metal-rich asteroid. Using solar panels to power its painstaking work, the Beagle 2 mined the raw materials to create a new copy of itself - Beagle 3. Each created one more - Beagle 2.1 and Beagle 3.1. Then Beagle 2.2, Beagle 2.1.1, Beagles 3.2 and 3.1.1. You get the idea. Each Beagle in turn was identical. And that was enough Beagles for now and so they kicked off into space using a technology so ancient and arcane in these days, that I can't be bothered to describe it. The next stop was the swirling planetoids of the Kuyper Belt, and a host of Beagles took form - in turn harvesting the raw materials to create the next generation, and then heading into the cold wastes of inter-stellar space.
From the machines we have managed to track down, we are fairly confident that Young Keith had worked out how to power machines from the fluctuations in the quantum field that exist even in the void - a trick we suspect he learnt while wondering how to find entertainment during dull sermons. Only this could explain the speed with which the Beagles spread themselves across the universe - or the litters of half-dead cats they left in their wake. The spread of these Von Neumann Beagles across the galaxy, although slow by the standards of a human lifetime in those days, was fast in cosmological terms. Wthin a few hundreds of Earth generations, unknown to those that remained behind, the Beagles were spread out like the grains of sand on the seashore, across the speckled vastness of the Milky Way.
So it was that, when we finally attained the stars in our own right, we were shocked to discover that the Beagles had got there first. And even more shocked by the rude rhyming couplet about Drayton Parslow we found laser-etched onto the side of each Beagle. We regard Drayton as semi-divine, and all Beaker Folk of Alpha Centauri dress in Armani and have little weasly moustaches in his honour.
But greater than these shocks was the discovery of the design flaw. Just as DNA can mutate, so the Beagles are not perfect replicas. If hit by a ray of ionizing radiation just as the bootstrap program is being downloaded from parent to child Beagle, the code can change. Most of these mutations are fatal - causing the Beagle to fly in circles, or just sit on the planet surface refusing to move - which we call an "adolescent". But one Beagle downloaded the killer gene, as you carbon-based lifeforms might put it.
Why Keith chose to have a boolean variable called "Lay_waste_to_entire_planet" in the Beagle's source code is a matter for the philosophers to decide. But as long as it was set to "No", no harm could be done. Just once let a Beagle have that field set to "Yes", and the game was over. From now on, Beagles would not stop harvesting material and replicating until none of the planet was left. And then the entire fleet would sail into the void to trash the next unfortunate rock. Since they spent much more time mining than their tame siblings, the Killer-Beagles reproduced far more efficiently. And since they spread so fast, they were soon hoovering up every planet in the Milky Way. No planet could remain unaffected as they swarmed across space, dismantling planets and then moving on.
Inevitably, they eventually returned to the fragile earth itself, scooping up the metallic core, sieving out the metals from the magma, mining silicon from the rocks and the sands of the sea. They left behind a shattered husk of a planet, with only the British still clinging to their battered rock, making a cup of tea and commenting that it reminded them of the Blitz.
The once-flourishing human empire that spanned the stars is now demolished. The lights have gone out all over the Milky Way. There is not a planet left in the Galaxy besides our own. Only we are left - and then the Beagles will head out for Andromeda and beyond. Please, for our sake and that of the Universe - get out into Young Keith's garage before tea-time on 11 March 2012, and smash up the Beagle. It may alter the future of all space and time - but we will take that risk if you will join us in trying to save the Galaxy and the human race."
It's a touching and sobering thought. That simply by running round to the garage now with my cricket bat and applying a few handy cover drives, I can save the entire universe. And I'm not saying it's not tempting. But it needs some consideration. I mean, they're going to worship Drayton Parslow? In what sense do they think they've actually got a civilisation? And besides, Midsomer's on.
I must admit, a story about a Long Eared Dog, controlling the universe, makes more sense than an Anglican Arch Bishop, who has the same delusion.
ReplyDeleteAsk young Keith to develop a prototype Arch Bishop, who only want's the best for Anglicans and who frowns on the Drayton Parslow's of this world and you have the recipe for World Domination.
You don't want underscores in variable names, that's the way of the dark-side (aka Oracle) camel-case is the only true path of enlightenment. ;)
ReplyDelete