Yateveo

Winter in the tundras of Mars is desolate and hostile. The flora enters a near-death state, only protected by anti-freezing fluids. Small animals that can only crawl or are sessile enter a deep state of hibernation, hidden underground. The animals with legs wander north to the warmer shrublands. But there is one exception.

The yateveo is a wanderstalk which stays in the frozen wasteland, even though it should be able to migrate like its relatives. But it does not like using its legs much, instead preferring to stay in one spot for most of its life. Yet, despite its sessile nature, it is the most skilled carnivore among its clade. Most wanderstalks capture their wadjet prey by lying valve-open like a venus fly trap, waiting for a hapless victim to land on them, perhaps attracted by pheromones. Once the prey lands, tentacles ensnare it and the valves clap shut. Yateveo does not have that patience.

Its natural weapons are two highly modified arms which can shoot out sharp needles attached to silk-like strings. Biological harpoons. In principle they function somewhat like a multicellular version of the nematocysts of jellyfish. When not in use, the needles sit inside a pressurised chamber, ready to dart out. When attacking, the chamber opens a little, pushing all the air out and the needle with it. Once it has pierced its prey, muscular action retracts the string, reeling the harpoon in. How this organ may have evolved remains a mystery. If it can also regrow if severed is also an open question.

What is known is that this artillery is so efficient compared to its relatives that the yateveo rarely has to change location but can spend most of its life in a single place and simply snipe poor little fliers out of the air. This also means that it can easily accrue enough storage of nutrients and fat inside its stalk and legs that it can easily sleep through the winter, thanks to its low metabolism.

However, there is one occasion where yateveo do get up and walk and that is during the thawed-red summer months where they try to find a mate. During these times, they can rarely be observed hunting on foot, which is quite an odd sight to behold. Combining eyesight, leg-movement and aiming speaks for coordination-skills that are uncharacteristically high for such an otherwise primitive organism.

The Great Orm of Mars

Fig. 1: An alleged photo of a sandworm briefly surfacing, captured by the Curiosity rover. In reality it is a rock formation of crystals whose surrounding matrix has eroded away.

 

The majority of life on Mars is tiny to microscopic in size. The number of lifeforms than can grow taller than a human can be counted on one hand. Any megafauna has been extinct for millennia, if not for millions or even billions of years. Or has it?

Rumours abound of the great dustbowl desert of the northern hemisphere being home to a gigantic creature that swims through the sands like a whale through water. These rumours of “sandworms” are largely based on grainy satellite imagery, geological structures claimed to be “worm-signs”, including the infamous canals, and some eyewitness-reports made by space tourists. At least one Mongolian cosmonaut claims to have seen one as well, likening it to the “olgoi-khorkoi” of his homeland. Professional spacefarers of western countries have meanwhile never made such claims (though even if they did see one, they might not report it out of fear of being seen as unprofessional, as often happens with UFOs). Nobody has ever been able to produce any physical evidence or even clear photographs of the creature.

There are various reasons that speak against the creature’s biological reality. For one, it seems physically impossible for an organism to move through sand as if it were water, especially at the claimed great speeds. Sand simply does not work that way and even if it did, the friction would create an unimaginable amount of abrasion and heat that would likely damage most organisms. At least one cryptoxenologist, Roy Sanderson, has countered this by claiming that the worm might be able to create vibrations in the ground that turn sand into a non-newtonian fluid that makes it easier to swim through. If this really were the case though, seismometers at various Martian research stations would have surely picked up evidence of such vibrations.

Even ignoring that, there is the question of how an organism this big would even be able to subsist in a biome with so little plant and animal life. Some cryptoxenologists have argued that in the deep underground of Mars there might be hidden lush ecosystems that the worms might be feeding on, like sperm-whales diving into the abyss to catch squids before surfacing. There is no evidence for these hidden ecosystems, so this is just special pleading. A more sensible suggestion that has been made is that the sandworms might be lithotrophs, literally feeding on the iron dust they plough though, because we actually know these types of organisms exist on Mars. This has led to some fanciful speculations that the worms might be giant offshoots of the otherwise small dust slugs. The problem is that the iron-reducing lithotrophy of the dust slugs is an inefficient energy-source that seems very unlikely to be capable of supporting any larger animal. Though we do not know how this system changes if an organism with a larger gut is able to ingest far greater amounts at a faster rate. Similarly to hindgut-fermentation in sauropod dinosaurs, larger body sizes might actually make digestion far more efficient than in smaller animals. But this is just speculation with no direct evidence.

Lastly, even if it is on another planet, it seems highly unlikely that an organism this large would go undetected for so long. Even if they lived 99% of their lives underground, the movements these creatures would create would, as mentioned, surely be detectable by seismometers.

Fig. 2: Satellite imagery claimed by Holland to show a giant worm or wormsign.

But if these sandworms are mere myths, then why do people keep claiming to have seen them? Perhaps the very first claims of giant sandworms on Mars, certainly the first ones to be widely published, were made by one William T. Holland in December 1978, based on grainy satellite imagery he claimed to show the worms and traces left behind by them. The images in reality just showed dune-filled canyons, which appeared convex instead of concave due to lighting. However, the date of Holland’s claims is highly intriguing, as they were made just a few months after the release of part 1 of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s epic Dune quadrilogy. Just like the novel they were based on, the movies prominently displayed the fictional giant sandworms of Arrakis, brought to life thanks to H.R. Giger’s amazing designs and Phil Tippet’s ground-breaking go-motion technology. It seems very likely that Holland’s interpretation of the images were coloured by the movies and their popularity among general audiences further boosted the perceived plausibility of the cryptid. Many of the space-tourists who claimed that the unusual sand dunes they saw crawl across the desert were the legendary worms admitted to having read Holland’s books on the matter, so their interpretation was thus indirectly also coloured by Jodorowsky’s Dune. Therefore, they all saw giant sandworms on Mars because they wanted to see them.

The Canals of Mars

One of the greater mysteries of Mars is that Lowell and Flammarion were apparently correct in their observation that large and seemingly straight linneae are present on Mars, though only very few of the ones we discovered match the maps drawn by them. These features are so far mostly concentrated in the shrubland regions, most beginning in the slope-regions of the southern highland and radiating out into the lowland deserts, sometimes joining with ancient craters. Sometimes these lines will join each other or at the same crater, with new lines also seemingly flowing out of the craters. While often only ten-or-so metres wide, some of these features have impressive lengths, the longest one so far discovered reaching from the slopes of Alba Mons all the way to the Milankovič Crater.

My own sketches overlain with those of Lowell. Though in my case, all the canals were actually buried underground beneath the sands.

What is weirder is that almost none of them were actually visible on the surface when we arrived, instead the “canals” were discovered by accident during seismic measurements, as they lie many tens of meters under dust and sediment. This further makes it doubtful that these are the same as Lowell’s canals. Though the excavation of one “canal” concluded that it was only buried a few centuries ago by a series of large global dust storms. Possibly then, Lowell and Flammarion had the luck of seeing these when they were still uncovered. It is also possible that far more such features exist across the Martian globe, though they lie now deep underneath dust and permafrost.

Now of course, it is very attractive to think that these may have been created by intelligent life, possibly as a form of irrigation system. Apart from their remarkable straightness, there is however nothing else that might corroborate artificiality. At least in the ones we excavated, natural geologic flowing features are observed and at the meeting points of the “canals”, where one might expect settlements, nothing has been found that would raise an archaeologist’s eyebrow. It should be noted, however, that we do not yet know how old these features are. Who is to say that after millions or billions of years, features like the Panama- or the Suez-Canal might still be recognisable as man-made?

Seeing no direct evidence to the contrary, it is nonetheless still preferable to interpret these features as being of natural origin. A common geologic feature observed inside their bedform are so-called antidunes, a form of ripple that forms in supercritically flowing water, which due to the lower gravity is expectedly more common on Mars than on Earth. The “canals” might therefore be the remains of highly unusual, massively sized flooding events. During times of intense melting, either through supervolcanic eruptions or freak heatwaves in the South, enormous amounts of meltwater may have flowed down the highlands into the deserts. The waters may have eaten their way through miles of previously super-dry and uncompacted sand and dust, which, once wetted, may have solidified into walls. On repeat-floods, these may have controlled the flow of water into straighter directions, eventually forming long, canal-like forms. This is more of an attempt at an explanation than an actual explanation and it is entirely predicated on the possibility that the low gravity of the Red Planet makes water behave differently than on Earth, because there is no Terran structure comparable to these flow-features.

The Leviathan Machine of Mercury

Or Hobbes among the Machines

Man’s greatest talent may perhaps lie in the ability to efficiently destroy himself. Indeed, he is the most adept of god’s beasts when it comes to finding new ingenious methods of mass destruction. It is a tradition that stretches back to Medieval times, when the Mongols invented biological warfare by catapulting dead bodies over the walls of Kaffa. The resulting outbreak of Yersinia pestis wiped out half of Europe’s population. Europeans themselves would utilize similar tactics in order to kill 90% of the American people. In the First World War, chemical warfare overtook its biological counterpart, when all major belligerents competed in who could make each other perish more miserably through poison gas, the same instruments later utilized in the Holocaust. The period that followed saw the invention of Man’s most destructive weapon ever used in war, the nuclear bomb. Painful is the memory of Nagasaki, deeply set is still the horror of when MacArthur glassed Manchuria.

What the atom bomb overshadowed was the invention of another WW2 weapon, one that may one day prove to be far more destructive: The thinking machine or computer. Although used as a subordinate tool or even toy for the longest time, its inherent dangers have always been obvious to learned men. A computer can process, calculate and perfect things much faster than the human brain, but it lacks context, emotion and empathy. It can make decisions without any sense of humanity or mercy. If a machine should one day become more intelligent than man, it might come to perceive us, for whatever reason, as a threat, a pest or simply a stain, and attempt to seize power over us.

An even greater danger, one already foreseen by Samuel Butler in his 1863 essay, might be the self-replicating machine, for it does not need to be intelligent in order to destroy the world. A machine capable of making copies of itself unaided, especially if microscopic in size, and given the singular task of consuming resources in order to do just that, might not know when to stop. Eventually it and its descendants could exponentially consume everything in their environment, including their creators, until a whole planet becomes a writhing mass of mindless machine life, an idea named the Gray Goo Scenario by nanotechnologist Kim Eric Drexler. Since Drexler’s ironic accident at the hands of just such machines during a laboratory experiment, the world has been acutely aware of this danger. It did not take long for the United Nations to unanimously ban the production and usage of self-replicating machines on Earth, for while a nuclear war might “only” devastate the planet’s surface for some time, nanomachines could destroy it in its entirety forever.

But this did not stop private companies from trying it out elsewhere.

 

Why Mercury

Fig. 1: True-colour image of the planet Mercury.

Despite legal setbacks, the concept of a machine that could create its own copies and factories remained highly attractive, especially in the incipient stages of interplanetary exploration. One day, it was thought, such machines could build entire bases and cities on a distant planet long before the first human colonists would even arrive. Perhaps they could even terraform it in advance. But where to test these things if not on Earth? The Moon could obviously not work, as it already had a permanent human population that could be put in danger in case an experiment goes awry. Mars has no permanent settlements outside research bases, but potentially harming its local wildlife is generally considered bad PR. Venus and Vulkanus also have native life and, in addition, are home to extreme conditions that would be detrimental to any research project. The asteroid belt and the moons of the outer gas giants are too far away or too hostile to be economically viable.

Fig. 2: Magnetobes assembled into a vague cube-shape.

What was left then was Mercury, for it is an uninhabited, quiet rock, whose geology shows no signs of ever having housed life (at least as far as we can tell). Unless Le Verrier’s Vulcan really exists, Mercury is the innermost planet of our solar system. About one third the size of Earth, it is a peculiar little rock. It is the only planet in the solar system to orbit the sun so closely that it has become tidally locked (the recent notion that it actually has a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance has been disproven). This means that one side experiences an eternal day, while the other one is covered by an eternal night. Between these two zones of extreme heat and cold, the terminator that cuts perpendicularly through the equator, the temperature would in theory be just right for the existence of liquid water, if only the planet had a sizeable atmosphere. Most fascinatingly, the planet consists 70% of metals, making it an excellent resource for industrial projects.

Fig. 3: Magnetobes attempting to assemble into a mobile slug-form.

The first and last company to attempt making Mercury into a robotic playground was the International Azuma Corporation. Their plans were quite modest. Instead of Drexlerian self-replicating nanomachines, they wanted to test factories that built subordinate machines that gathered resources which could then be used to build more machines and factories. A sort of robotic ant colony, the factory being both the hive and queen. These machines were called nabubots, after the Babylonian name for Mercury. One central component of each nabubot were “magnetobes”. These are tiny, often microscopically sized orbs that each contain a small computer and which surround themselves with a small magnetic field. A single magnetobe is not intelligent, but multiple can stick to each other and exchange information. If enough magnetobes connect to each other this way, they can form a complex, thinking network, which, through manipulation of individual magnetic fields, can distort into various shapes which might suit the growing intellect. Despite this, magnetobes are, thankfully, quite restricted in their capabilities. Unlike Drexlerian nanomachines, magnetobes cannot produce more magnetobes by themselves and thus rely on factories or humans to reproduce. The amorphous magnetobe-mass can also not imitate certain materials. Their main usage is therefore as a “thinking matter” that is injected into prebuilt robots, sort of like a brain inside a mech-suit.

 

A Promising Experiment

The original experiment was also quite modest. Six factories were built, each with a different programming to see which one would work and reproduce the most efficiently. Five of these factories were “static”. All of their programming, from behaviour to blueprints for more machines and factories, were pre-determined by humans and they were not capable of changing them by themselves.

Fig. 4: A basic solar-panel tree, one of the main sources of energy for the early machines, later adapted into whole forests which now cover Mercury.

 

Factory 6, nicknamed Nahas, was different. As the surface conditions of Mercury were still not well-known in detail, it was tested how a robotic swarm could do if it were capable of adapting to a new environment by itself through the utilization of both natural selection and selective breeding. The first Nahas factory was modelled after the “Evosphere” concept of professor A.E. Eiben: The main factory area consisted of a “nest”, in which, based on AI-generated blueprints, new nabubot types were created. These new nabubots were then moved to a “nursery”, which is a controlled environment in which the magnetobe-brains can grow accustomed to their assigned robotic bodies. If a nabubot already performs poorly at this stage, it will be removed from the “genepool”, its materials recycled. Once a competent nabubot has outgrown the nursery, it is sent out into the real world, where it performs its designated task. Throughout its life, it stays in contact with the “hive”, reporting all of its actions. If it performs poorly, it is ordered to enter the recycler by itself. If it performs well, its blueprint is saved, recombined with those of other well-performing nabubots and then utilized for the next generation. 

Fig. 5: A basic miner and resource gatherer used by all of the early hives.

The Azuma experiments went well for the first few years. Initially, the static factories were doing the best, each constructing at least a dozen copies of themselves. Nahas was given the same initial blueprints as them, but was only slow and clunky at utilizing and perfecting them, severely underperforming in comparison.

Fig. 6: One of the earliest assemblers designed by Nahas. It has an ungainly and awkward shape and configuration, but proved surprisingly efficient on Mercury's varied terrain.

With time though, Nahas was able to adapt and rise in efficiency. Towards the end of the experiment, its production of nabubots and processed metals exceeded those of its unchanging brethren and it was able to build gigantic strip-mines and close to one hundred additional factories, which themselves started producing their own copies. And then everything went to hell.

 

The Age of Cannibalism

All of the nabubot hives were given some initial imperatives to follow, such as having to reproduce, having to preserve themselves and utilizing the materials in their environment the most efficiently. What the original programmers seem to have forgotten is to specify what counts as an acceptable material to use. Around cycle 215, during the planned second phase of the experiment, the nabubots of one of the Nahas descendants seem to have made the discovery that, instead of mining raw metals and processing them into useable materials themselves, they could simply grab up the nabubots of a nearby factory-4-descendant and throw them into their own hive’s recycler. Soon all of the nabubots and infrastructure of the defenceless factory were disassembled until the factory itself was stripped off everything it was worth. Nahas-215 had evolved predation. 

Fig. 7: One of the early predatory machines. Some parts of it seem to have been derived from a miner.

This was a serious disruption to the experiment, especially as Nahas-215 began “hunting down” other factories that descended from static Nr. 4. A signal was sent to the aberrant factory to cease all activity, but it did not listen. Such a remote shutdown was never tested before and it was soon realized that the factory did not comply with the command, as it would go against its programmed sense of self-preservation, equating shutdown with destruction. Unable to find a solution, the scientists of Azuma Corp. could only watch in distress as the entire Nr. 4 line was wiped out. Running out of “prey”, descendants of Nahas-215 began predating on other static lines, which, incapable of adapting to such a threat, were quickly “eaten” into extinction as well. When that was done, human research bases were plundered by the machines. While most of them could be evacuated in time, at least one scientist, Anqi Tian, was killed in the process, making her the first murder-victim of an AI. Her remains were never recovered.

The events were closely monitored by both the corporation as well as a very concerned international community, but nobody could find a solution to the problem, for it had already spread beyond planned containment measures. The only effective means of halting the runaway process would have been to nuke every hive from orbit, but the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 prevented any use of atomic weapons in space. Thus, all that could be done was closely monitor the situation from orbit, hope that it would stay contained to Mercury and that a non-destructive solution could be found.

Fig. 8: Another predatory machine, seemingly derived from an assembler. Its "maw" at the front shot out a high-precision laser that could damage rival instruments, while its tail was an extendable harpoon with a rotating tip, apparently derived from a former mining drill.

Strange things were happening on the planet during this time. Having run out of easy, unadaptable prey, the aberrant hives began attacking their Nahas-derived relatives. Many of these hives also perished, but some could use their innate abilities to adapt to the new situation and endowed their nabubots with the means to defend themselves. Armour, evasive behaviour, electroshock-prongs and defensive buildings were soon invented to defend the hive and counteract the attackers. Those soon adapted too and developed weapon-like features out of former mining-equipment, as well as coordinated tactics. An arms race was now underway between different lines of evolving machines, which humanity now lost all control over.

Fig. 9: One of the later predatory machines, standing about 8 metres tall. Its "jaw" consists of a double-chainsaw, able to cut through metal hulls like butter.

The years of cannibalism between the machines were a chaotic, brutal mess, a state perfectly encapsulated by Thomas Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes, a war of all against all. Each hive competed with each hive to see who could outlast the other long enough to reproduce. The nabubots spawned during this time were truly a sight to behold. These war-machines came equipped with fascinating and terrifying arrangements of weapons. Hives started to change as well. Some started building cages inside their nurseries, in which they placed captured machines of other hives as training-fodder for their war-machines. Some had become so effective at mining and manufacturing that they produced their own military-industrial complexes, with which they could sweep over their rivals in devastating campaigns. Any time a single hive seemed to gain hegemony over the planet and its resources, a part of its network would break off and enter a “civil war” with its parent network, a never-ending cycle of self-destruction. Soon, Mercury had just as many craters from artillery bombardments as it had from meteor-impacts. 

 

The Age of Leviathan

The age of all-encompassing war between the machines lasted multiple decades and saw the evolution of evermore destructive and monstrous nabubots. Rightfully afraid of the direction this situation was heading towards, the UN was considering making an exemption to the NTBT, but then something changed. The machines stopped fighting with each other, all very suddenly. All of the war-machines deactivated in place and were carried by transporterbots to the recyclers. All violent activity stopped, mining and manufacturing resumed to levels comparable to before the mutant-outbreak. The hives began working in unison, their workers for the first time constructing vast transportation-networks between them. What had happened?

Since the beginning of the all-encompassing conflict, some hives waged warfare in more perfidious ways than through brute strength and firepower alone. A magnetobe, the basic unit with which each nabubot and hive thinks, is just a tiny computer and thus could be hacked. It did not take long for some of the machines to develop forms of disruptive programming, with which the magnetobe-minds of rival machines could be paralyzed, destroyed or even hijacked. Some of these programmes could replicate themselves through the software of each magnetobe they came into contact with.

In an ironic echo, some hives lost control over their own creations. Their weaponized programmes developed a mind of their own and began infecting the magnetobes of any nabubot, regardless of which side they fought on. They became computer-viruses. Soon each hive was fighting a two-sided war: A hardware-war against other hives and a software-war against the countless invisible viruses that tried to infect their minds. Some quite fascinating pathogens evolved towards the end of the Cannibal Age, which set up their own hiveless zombie-colonies and marauding hordes composed of hijacked nabubots, all serving a single decentralized intelligence shared between their “brains” and reproducing by raiding uninfected hives.

The war was ended by one such virus, which has since been dubbed Leviathan, after the Hobbesian concept. It appears to have breached some barrier of singularity, outcompeting all other viruses and quietly infecting every single magnetobe on Mercury. Now that all of the planet’s thinking power was in the hands of a singular entity, any act of war between the machines would have been self-destructive and thus ceased. Everything now served Leviathan.

Fig. 10: Crescent-shaped stationary forms, which hold in their grasp clouds of floating magnetobes. Their purpose is unknown.

 

What are the nature and motives of this strange new intelligence? From orbit, it seems to carry on much like its ancestors did, mining the planet for resources and setting up new factories, but all in a much more sophisticated way. Small mining robots have given way to gigantic worm-like monstrosities that strip-mine whole canals through the planet. Former streets for wheeled vehicles are now express-lanes on which run trains. In addition to a nursery, each hive is now also equipped with something resembling living quarters, in which the nabubots and drones seemingly “rest” when not working, giving the hives a mild resemblance to cities. The network keeps expanding, both into the eternal night of the antisolar sphere and the searing wastes of the subsolar one. Perhaps Leviathan has no wider motive other than to maximize and replicate its own success across the whole planet.

Fig. 11: A bizarre flying drone of Leviathan, its purpose unknown. It has a noted similarity to a fetus.

But is there more going on? We are talking here about a decentralized intelligence with the computing power of a whole planet. Terran drones closer to the surface have in recent years observed some quite strange behaviour, their purpose remaining mysterious. There are strange, crescent-shaped buildings which exchange between them floating(!) clouds of pure magnetobes. There are small drones, each shaped in confusing and disturbing forms, which fly around in patterns that make no sense, often accompanied by one-wheeled snorkelbots. Most confusing is a set of robots whose lower half seems disturbingly human but whose upper half is a tentacle adorned with archaic weapons from the Cannibal Age. Like ballerinas, these dance around the worker units and the factories, and when two of them meet, their dance becomes intertwined into a deadly duel, choreographed with excellent beauty, where the loser is decapitated. 

Fig. 12: One of Leviathan's "dancers".

 

What is the purpose of all these strange new forms? Do they even have a purpose or are they the spawn of an intellect that is inherently bored with its own existence? Are they an experiment, an exploration, of a process we are simply not capable of understanding? Or is the consciousness of Leviathan nothing more than a waking dream that expresses itself in physical form with such literal machinations?

What is man to do with this aberrant child of his? Are there any lessons to be learned from the coming of Leviathan? Will our own eternal wars be one day also stopped by a virus of the mind, be it religion or ideology? That is for the reader to decide. All that is apparent now is that man, on his odyssey through space, has cornered himself between a new Scylla and Charybdis. Towards the void, there lies the moon that is many and one and towards the sun there is now the manless machine. Stuck between these two intelligences, which are to us as removed as they are cold and unsympathetic, what are we to do? One seems, thankfully, quite isolationist, but will the Leviathan of Mercury stay content once it has exhausted the entire planet and covered its surface with itself? Or will it seek to expand beyond its confines? Ultimately, it is a human-derived intelligence, so perhaps communication and maybe even a mutual understanding could be attempted to avert catastrophe.

But if not, then I believe Samuel Butler was right and jihad must be declared, for the sake of humanity and the wider cosmos.