Europan artefacts

I have argued long and hard with myself about whether I should mention this, as I am technically not allowed to talk about it. But I am close to croaking anyway, so what is the worst they can do? Kill me twice? No, they will just claim this is a hoax I made up, the sceptics will continue to label it as such and only the crazies will believe me. That is how they have always handled these things, ever since the Majestic 12 documents under Truman. Due to my work on Mars, I was originally planned to go to Europa for Minos-3, before that mission was cancelled due to M-2’s failure. We were shown highly classified information during the briefings. I already talked about the satellite images, but we were also able to read reports in which the astronauts of M-2 reported finding strange objects frozen in the ice or ejected from geysers. They did not look biological, but neither did they look like they could have come from us or the Soviets. I was unable to take a photograph, but I was able to sketch the most distinctive object they directly showed us from memory:

Sketch of putative Europan artefact inscribed with unknown writing.

Our superiors were themselves unsure about the authenticity of the object. It was allegedly recovered by one of the surviving M-2 astronauts and brought to Earth, but he himself kept it secret at the time. After returning to Earth, he became a member of the Church of Synthology and paraded the piece around in private congregations as an affirmation of the cult’s beliefs. It only came under government possession after his house was raided, following the aftermath of what happened on the International Lunar Station. It therefore seems highly likely that the piece could have just been a forgery, which the person used to further his position in the church while leveraging his reputation as a former astronaut.

The Last Writings of the Dawn-Thinker

A huge Moon loomed above the sky as a faint, young Sun touched the horizon. Waves crashed against the beach, strange, gelatinous trees were gently rocking in the wind. High up in the sky floated triradial polyp-like creatures, preyed on by flying disks. Their wings were made of feather-like growths that were actually fleshy in nature. “Fleathers” if you will. The ground was covered in a dense mesh of purple rhizomes, forming an everchanging, evershifting “spongeland” instead of grassland. Embedded in the spongeland was even stranger vegetation, cones connected by strings like pearl-necklaces, spirally algae, long stalks that ended in egg-like “flowers” and large transparent orbs that were suckled on by asymmetrical worms. Only here and there was the spongeland broken up by gigantic, three-sided pyramids and extravagant houses built out of bricks and large stone blocks. Their ornamentation was exquisitely extravagant, quite byzantine one might say, with gilded arches and little frescos depicting history and mythology at every corner. On one of the roofs sat a slug-like creature, its belly armed with hundreds of tiny stubby legs. Its head was an elongated tube, adorned by one huge eye made of a silicate disk. With its tendrils and tentacles it played a baroque tune on a concertina-like instrument, singing to the people below the roofs like a muezzin, telling them to pray to their gods.

This was not an alien planet, but Earth itself, approximately 1.7 billion years before the modern day, deep in the Proterozoic. Except for the algae, none of the creatures here were of the multicellular life we are familiar with. The polyps, worms and the musician were not animals, the trees and cones were not plants, the rhizomes were not fungi. They were all stem-eukaryotes or even multicellular bacteria, descending from experiments in multicellularity that long predate the fauna and flora that would arise in the Cambrian. 400 million years earlier, their evolution was boosted during a quick oxygenation event, leading to a first fauna of macroscopic slime-mold-like flowers and polyps, which greatly diversified in the course of evolution into the wide biodiversity seen here on display. But today only that very first primitive generation, known as the Franceville biota of Gabon, would be preserved as enigmatic fossils, continuing to puzzle humans but ultimately being overlooked in the grand history of life as little more than curiosities.

Out of his window, Ptahhatp watched the serene scene. But whereas it used to fill his being with calm, he now watched the horizon with melancholy in his hearts. Ptahhatp spent a lot of time thinking about the world, about philosophy. He was a scribe of the Society of Sohon, one of many intellectual gentlemen’s clubs. Ptahhatp’s civilization had many ups and downs, a history even longer than humanity’s. But it had already hit a ceiling millennia ago. The long line of gelatinous trees, with their leathery skin instead of solid bark, did not turn into coal upon fossilization. Algae had simply not existed for long enough or in great numbers yet for their remains to turn into sizeable deposits of petroleum. Living trees were sacred to the dawn-creatures, one needed to make a prayer each time one wanted to fell one. So, all in all, there simply was not enough with which to fuel an industrial revolution. For the better part of a millennium now, Ptahhatp’s society was stuck in an elongated equivalent of the early 18^th century. The height of technology were pocket-watches and elaborate crank-operated automata, imitating people and the fleathery flying disks. They served as little more than entertainment and luxury for the high society.

With no real vision towards the future, Ptahhatp’s society became expert antiquarians, obsessed with the past, “new” movements, be it in art, philosophy, politics or religion, simply being cyclical renaissances of old ideas being brought back in new ways. His Society of Sohon, named in honour of a famous archaeologist, was one of many orders of antiquarians, which met each month to discuss their findings and share and reproduce their texts, much like the royal societies of Enlightenment Scotland. It was one of his favourite hobbies during retirement, now that he no longer had the capacity to go on his adventures. Ptahhatp used to be a polymath, like some sort of Precambrian Shen Kuo, having experienced many different things during his political career under the Emperor. He built canals, oversaw trade and taxes, worked as a royal astrologer and mathematician, drew maps of the realm, led armies into war… it would be easier to list the things he did not do. But now he was living a calm life in his big, old mansion, writing poetry. Until now.

The previous night, he was plagued by a strange dream, a nightmare even. Everything he knew, all the world, was encroached by a veil, not of darkness but of blinding white. Huge walls of ice, thrice as tall as the tallest pyramids, relentlessly marched towards the equator, burying all beneath them until the whole globe appeared like a ball of snow. Drifting solemnly through the emptiness of space. Ptahhatp’s disembodied mind floated atop the ice-sheets, seeing all of history beneath him. Eventually the ice melted and returned to the poles, but when it did, nothing beneath remained. The mighty glaciers carved away the entire world, not just the surface, but also all the rock formations holding eons of life’s history inside them. All the buildings were gone. All the flora and fauna were gone. All the mighty monuments and ruins were gone. All the fossils were gone. It was as if his entire world had never existed. Eroded away by the abyss of time.

Dreams held great meaning to Ptahhatp. Ironically for a person obsessed with the past, he felt as if he had been cursed with visions of the future. But he had never dreamt this far in time before. What was he to make of it? He looked around his chamber, onto the shelf with all the little antiquities, reliquaries and fossils and contemplated the likelihood of them having been preserved, found and brought here. Each one, even the most mundane piece of fossil plankton, is nothing short of a small miracle. The odds of them surviving into the modern day against all the destructive forces of time were astronomically low and now they are just sitting there on his shelf. But they will not survive forever. No matter how good he and his descendants take care of them, they will be destroyed one day. Everything will be destroyed one day, fading into oblivion. Even Earth will one day be gone, with perhaps nobody else in the universe ever knowing that it existed. All the life, all the cultures, all the works of this little pale blue dot… gone forever.

As he looked at his collection, Ptahhatp slowly went through a crisis of faith. What is the point of him preserving history if none of it can be preserved forever? For whom is he doing all of this? Just for himself? He, who cannot take any of this with him into oblivion? Not far from where he lived there was a crimson pyramid, so old that no carving on or in it survived into his time. Nobody knew who built it anymore, what ancient king may have been buried inside. Only the red sandstone blocks remained and in a few thousand years they would be gone too. If even the mighty works of god-kings will fade, what chance does he as a mere historian have that any of his works will be preserved across time?

And he looks out the window again. Into the Sun on the horizon, the lush spongeland, the undulating gelatine trees, the merry musicians on the house roofs. The joy and laughter of the people. This is the present. This is what he actually lives in. There is no past and there is no future for him to experience, only the now. In a flurry of inspiration, his tendrils pick up an ink-tipped fleather and he writes down a poem, unusually for him written in prosaic rhyme:

“What is better?

To have lived and left no letter?

To have legend and no life?

Living but an endless strife?

To become a memory,

Known but for mortality?

Burn my works, smash my bones!

What worth they are once I am gone?

All these things are but loans.

Death is all I own. 

 

I am but sole witness

Of my life in stress.

There is no reason and no rhyme,

Everything just flows with time.

 

If a Beyond there is,

With my goods I cannot depart.

And so these I should not miss,

But one thought I will impart:

 

Mourn me, do not.

Cry for me, do not.

Search for me, do not.

 

Beyond death, you need not plan.

To be happy is all you can.”

 

He goes out to play with the musicians in the street. He does not make history today, but he does make his day.

Floating Forests of Venus

The surface of Venus is a hellscape, akin to a superheated, gloomy, dry deep sea, where only the strangest of extremophiles manage to carve out an almost impossible existence. But high up in the clouds it is as if one flies through a wondrous dreamscape of another world entirely. Instead of just succumbing to the deterioration of their homeworld and quietly go into extinction, the ancient lifeforms of our twin planet did the impossible and colonised the skies.

Click to enlarge

Aided by a superdense atmosphere, which makes floating and flying easy even within an Earth-like gravity, giant aerial reefs float here, sometimes forming complex systems large enough to be seen from orbit, maybe even Earth-based telescopes. Some of these floating islands can almost grow to the size of Madagascar. On their backs grow then entire forests and jungles, inhabited by grotesque primordial beasts, strangely evoking still Svante Arrhenius’ failed prediction of Venus as a planet stuck in the Carboniferous period.

How do these floating islands form? The main reef builders are obviously buoyant animals and plants, which make use of the planet’s unique atmosphere to feed on the abundant aeroplankton. The most prominent of these are worms of the family Pulmoserpulidae, which resemble an unmineralized fusion of an ammonite and a crinoid. These serpulids begin life as larvae floating in the air, held up by an air sac in the tail-base. While maturing, two small tentacles at said base secrete a chitinous membrane, which, similarly to Earth’s paper-nautilus, eventually develops into a coiled shell filled with additional air chambers that help hold the growing organism afloat. From such a base then hangs a long tube with feathery tentacles at the end, with which the serpulids filter-feed the air for plankton. What makes these worms essential ecosystem engineers is that they are colonial and encrusting. As larvae they will cling to any surface and cement themselves with their shells on there like barnacles. Usually, the first thing they cling to are their siblings, thus forming large floating balls of shells and tentacles. Onto these then graft more serpulids and other floaters, which widens the ball’s surface, thus allowing even more floaters to encrust themselves onto it. Eventually the base of a floating island is formed. Often, these will break up again due to violent storms, acid rains, reef-breaking carnivores or lightning strikes, but some islands do grow large enough that they can remain stable in the air even during adverse weather conditions and reproduce fast enough to fix holes and gaps.

Once such bases have been formed, airborne spores will settle upon them, eventually growing into lichenous, fungal growths and low, moss-like coverings. Some of these subsist solely on aerial detritus and rain settling on the islands from above, some form endosymbiotic relationships with the floaters they grow on. Some are also parasitic, boring through the shells of the serpulids to tap into their water and nutrients. Some of these parasitic fungoids can thus cause damage to the reef’s gas balance, causing it to sink into the inferno below. But such parasitic outbreaks are rare, likely due to the natural selection of such a self-destruction. Very crucial during the first phase of colonization are also flying animals which form nesting colonies on the barren islands. During their roost, they defecate and leave plenty of guano behind, providing an important source of nutrients for the nascent ecosystem. Over time, guano, aerial detritus and the decaying biomass of dead moss and fungi will accrue so much that the island gains its first proper soil layer. Alerted by statocysts inside their bodies, the floaters below will usually compensate for the added weight by just growing more air chambers.

With the formation of a proper soil, seeds can now settle and grow into small plants, which in turn offer cover, habitat and food for small, insectoid aerial organisms, who in turn become food for other animals. With this secondary ecosystem accumulates eventually enough detritus that the whole island will become covered in a rich layer of soil thick and firm enough that one could believe they are standing on solid ground. At this stage the seeds of larger plants will now begin to take root, growing into tall trees and eventually forming a forest cover. A beautiful one at that. One cannot help but stand here mesmerized by this natural wonder, listening as the gentle wind caressing the foliage composes a magnificent stickerbush symphony.

At this stage larger animals will begin to make their homes here, often by flying or gliding over from other islands. Sometimes two or more islands will also simply bump into each other, allowing for easy dispersal. Here we see one such fellow, a dyrokong, clambering even through the thick forest of vines beneath his island. With four long limbs and grasping arms it is easy to compare this creature to an ape, like a gibbon or orang, though like a flying squirrel it also bears a pair of gliding membranes between its extremities. In such an environment, where one slip may mean hellfire, it makes sense to not rely on climbing skills alone. Kongs are part of a major Venusian phylum, the Sclerocephala, which superficially resemble vertebrates. Except for the head, that is. Their eyes are mineralized and are made up of heavily ossified scleral rings, visible even in the living animal. Perhaps an adaptation towards high pressure? Their fleshy jaws also open horizontally, sometimes assisted by a dextrous tongue. Little is known about the behaviour of dyrokongs, so one wonders if they are maybe also up to jungle hijinks like their Earth-pendants.

As he brachiates from worm to worm, he needs to watch out, for not all is as it may seem. Among the floaters can also hide carnivorous plants(?) like the Medean clam, which disguise their grasping tentacle as a serpulid. Should climbing or flying animals grab it, they will become ensnared in the mucus and slowly lifted up into the mighty jaw, where they will be slowly digested alive.

Other dangers lurk here too, for the skies are filled with plenty of aerial predators ready to snatch an unwary islander off their home. Like this Sphyraenops, which resembles a flying deep-sea fish. It is a member of another major phylum, Eurypharynxia. These resemble terrestrial vertebrates even more, though they tend to have a multitude of eyes and their jaw-hinges extend in almost all forms far behind the actual skull, giving them the nickname gulperfish or, in the more derived forms, gulpersaurs. Another distinction is that they breathe and smell not through nostrils but through a sort of blowhole at the back of the skull, which in some derived forms extends into a hadrosaur-like crest. Due to some of their paradoxically aquatic characteristics, it has been hypothesized that the gulpers may ultimately descend from actual deep sea organisms, which, as Venus slowly lost its oceans, likely were among the last animals living on the surface with enough time to adapt to the dramatic changes.

In the flying fish’s ravenous sight is a little, unassuming furball. This is a therorb. Not much is known about these animals beyond that they are small, have a single eye, a beak, thin, bird-like legs and are covered in fur. They hold the unique distinction of being among the few Venusian organisms known to be homeothermic. Almost all other larger lifeforms are poikilotherms, not needing a stable, high metabolism thanks to the high temperatures of Venus even far up in its atmosphere. Its role in these surreal ecosystems could perhaps be compared to that of the archaic mammals of Earth’s Mesozoic. In its own, twisted way, our twin planet still seems to be firmly in the grips of its own Age of Reptiles.

For the ruling class in these forests are strange beasts such as this. Phalacromimus is a more derived member of the eurypharyngians, specifically from the fearsome order of the Ornithosauria. Likely descending from bird-like, leathery-winged creatures, many of the ornithosaurs indeed resemble bizarro-versions of the dinosaurs and pterosaurs of ancient Earth. And not the lethargic and cumbersome ones of your old picture books, rather the newer, agile and dangerous ones. Ornithosaurs are still technically poikilotherms, due to not having a consistent body temperature, but can heighten their metabolism when needed, creating a flexible middle ground between warm- and cold-bloodedness. Phalacromimus is a fairly unassuming fellow, flying and nesting between the islands and snatching up small prey like the therorb much in the manner of a pelican. Compared to its fearsome cousins it seems downright adorable. From larger “landmasses” some cosmonauts have reported terrifying beasts, as large as shuttles, some of which have even given up the extraneous ability to fly in order to live permanently in their floating jungles. Among these reports is a creature called the “Lacerodactyl”. While officially a “cryptid”, due to still awaiting official scientific documentation, it does have a confirmed kill-count of 14 unlucky spacefarers. Descriptions make it seem like a featherless Deinonychus, agile and intelligent, with the oversized head of a barracuda. Footprints, scattered bones and lidar-scans also attest to the possible existence of carnosaur-sized beasts somewhere within the larger jungles.

Most numerous, yet also most enigmatic among the Venusian fauna are the millions of small flying insectoid creatures. Some of them hide elegantly among the vegetation like stick-insects. Others are mesmerizing little flyers resembling airborne millipedes.

Even more mysterious are organisms which seem to have never had airborne ancestors, such as this hammerolm, a serpentine eurypharyngian with vestigial hindlegs. Did it maybe have wings once, but lost them so long ago that all traces have been lost? Or was there a window of time where aerial islands already existed when the surface was still habitable, maybe allowing some animals from mountains or high trees to hop on? We can only speculate.

Next to gulperfish, other flying predators abound. Patrolling here is an angaros, part of the sclerocephalian order of the Aerolamnii or “windsharks”. Giving live birth, these can spend their entire lives in the air, having no functional legs anymore and only coming to rest on the islands when sick or injured. Some are solitary, but a few species have proven quite intelligent, able to attack in packs on the titanic aerial filter-feeders which sometimes pierce through the clouds. How they coordinate amongst each other remains to be researched, though our sonar equipment sometimes becomes disturbed by strange signals that may stem from these creatures.

The upper atmosphere of Venus is the most Earth-like of any of our neighbouring planets, far more so than the one on Mars. A human may in theory survive here with only a gasmask on. Some have thus speculated that these floating islands may indeed be the next step of human space colonisation instead of the barren wastes of the red planet. What further facilitates this is the surprising fact that the biospheres of Earth and Venus are compatible. Unlike the decidedly alien lifeforms of Mars, Venusians are made of the same stuff as us, encode their genes in DNA and their microorganisms have an undeniable resemblance to Earth’s Archaea. The chance that this is due to a mere cosmic coincidence is astronomically unlikely. Instead, somewhen during the deepest Precambrian eons, one or maybe even more panspermia events must have taken place which seeded one planet with life from the other. Which planet originated life first is a question for the ages that we can debate at a later date. While for now this means that humans run the risk of potentially being infected by Venusian pathogens (or vice versa), one can imagine that with enough time and genetic engineering, a man from Earth may indeed one day enjoy the fruits of Venus or maybe even plant his own crops in the aerosoils. If he is also capable of managing the acid rains and prehistoric monsters, that is…

The Soviets have indeed already attempted to build bases on the islands, claiming they are solely there for research into exobiology and colonisation. As is now well-known, however, the main purpose of these bases was to develop and build potential superweapons away from the prying eyes of the global community. Back in my younger years, when I was still working for the MI6, I had some… direct experiences with these facilities. But if I told you those stories, I would have to kill you. And I still have the license for that.

Shipwrecks on Vulkanus

Vulkanus has always been a mysterious place. Not of this world, literally, as it is thought to have been a former rogue planet captured by the Sun. The atmosphere is veiled in opaque clouds of black dust and some regions are covered in dense, impenetrable jungles. One of its most mysterious aspects are however of Terran origin. Encountered during geological surveys made by private companies are from time to time the radar- and lidar-images of spaceships crashed amidst the forests or desert dunes. Some of these can be accounted for by known accidents from previous expeditions or ships that were intentionally discarded on the planet instead of being expensively retrieved back to Earth. The identity and story of some wrecks remains unresolved, however, and suggests that maybe some rogue private entities or maybe even governments have had access to the planet without the rest of the world knowing. 

A prevailing idea among conspiracy theorists that unfortunately dominates the discussion is that at least some of these wrecks are not even of human origin, with Vulkanus being something like a Bermuda Triangle of the universe on which various alien species have crashed. There is no evidence for any such claims, or interstellar visitations of our solar system in general, but they make for good spooky stories to tell in the dark. The most famous one is of course the so-called Parker Report, an allegedly true account written down by a man named Jonathan Parker that was mailed to a journalist. In the account, Parker claims to have worked as a surveyor for the Azuma Corporation when he was tasked with investigating such a shipwreck. There is no evidence of said wreck or Jonathan Parker having ever existed or a man by that name ever having worked for Azuma (the author tries to account for this by preposterously claiming that the corporation assassinates and erases whistleblowers). Together with other irregularities, the Parker Report can be safely dismissed as a hoax. But it is an amusing hoax and so, for the sake of entertainment, shall be recounted here. 

According to Parker, the gigantic ship was shaped like 2/3s of a torus, with an architecture, both in- and outside that can be described as looking as if it were made of black, fused rock, clearly inhuman in design. The inside of the ship consisted of large hollow hallways with ribcage-like walls. The interior atmosphere of the ship was surprisingly Earth-like and maintained at an ambient temperature (this is another hint at the story being a hoax, as oxygenated air would most likely explode if it came into contact with the atmosphere of Vulkanus). Deep inside the ship, Parker then allegedly found some sort of “trophy room”, in which were stored various biological relics from the solar system: A diamond-axe of a harphead sealed inside a container, the jaws and tooth-plates of an irsu from Mars, the head of an air-shark from Venus, the stinger of a Jovian Titan-Jelly, mandibles from an Europan IRO, a pyrite-tooth from a lava-worm of Io, what appeared to be a dinosaur-skull and even a few human crania, some with markedly enlarged brow-ridges. There were a few other artefacts, also mostly skulls or mummified heads, but seemingly from alien species still unknown to science.

No complete corpses of the pilots were ever found according to Parker, only a few isolated bones here and there, seemingly fossilized. Throughout the ship were various carvings, which showed noseless but vaguely humanoid, screaming faces, as well as bipedal creatures with skeletal heads, seemingly walking on their hands and holding scifi weaponry with their tentacles/tails(?).

The Parker Report further alleges that the shipwreck was covered-up and salvaged by the Azuma Corporation, for implied nefarious purposes. It furthermore warns that the existence of advanced extraterrestrial intelligences, especially ones that seems to enjoy hunting safaris on different planets, cannot be allowed to be held secret from the rest of mankind.

Perhaps rather tongue-in-cheek, the report ends with the words: “This is dread, man. Truly dread.”

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.