From The Kingdom of Nod:
Eight gigantic copper brewing kettles lined the wall facing the parking lot. The entire west wing of the building was devoted to fabrication, and it resembled nothing so much as a small craft brewery. Adam and Seph walked along a Lexan-enclosed, elevated catwalk looking down on the staff in pale blue bunny suits, industry standard cleanroom attire. Each kettle had an associated 36-inch display mounted on the slanted Lexan pane in front of them.
The first showed a murky, viscous orange fluid that bubbled like a witch’s cauldron.
“This is the first stage. The primordial soup,” Adam said. “That kettle is full of 1,200 liters of a nutrient-rich bath containing everything the Nanozoa will be assembled from. The kettles were recycled from Hard Bargain Brewery in Culpeper. They made a pretty great IPA in their day.”
“Wait, back up,” Seph said with a wry grin. “Nanozoa?”
“Gene is our namer-in-chief,” Adam said with no expression. “You can take up any objection to our trade name with him.” He shrugged. “At least it’s not an acronym. And it’s not inaccurate. The devices will be as smart as protozoa once you’re done.”
“What’s the sludge?”
“That’s our patented growth medium—a carbonated, nutrient-rich matrix containing saline, silica salts, magnesium-gold halides, molybdenum disulfide, zirconium dioxide, and plastic microparticles.”
“Easy for you to say.” Somewhere in the back of her brain, she was running an analysis comparing it to plain old seawater. Saline and a bunch of trace elements. Also sounded like human blood. Or sweat. Or tears.
Adam laughed. He pointed to the opposite wall lined with racks of blade servers.
“That’s our subspace printer farm. Each is capable of 15 exaFLOPS, and each subspace particle translation query pattern requires seven floating-point operations. So for every atom of gold, for example, the subspace printing farm takes about .004 seconds to translate from the medium to the target Nanozoa.”
Seph said. “It transports the particles? Prints at the atomic scale?”
Adam nodded. “Using new tech discovered by Walrus Roberts at One Corporation. Subspace Particle Manipulation. Sending an instruction into subspace to change the properties of a particle; in this case its positions in x, y, and z. And then we do that for every atom in the Nanozoa’s CAD file.”
Seph pantomimed her head exploding.
“Remember, they’re tiny. We can produce a completed Nanozoa in .348 seconds. But the magic comes when there are five or more Nanozoa in the medium. They join together to manufacture themselves. Each device has a fractional particle printer component. Group five together, they become a factory, essentially a single circuit of our printer farm. They’re very small, very inefficient Von Neumann devices. Right out of the printer, they’re programmed to cluster into factories and assemble replicas with their onboard printer. They do this much more slowly than the plant printers, but after ten generations there are so many more of them—they collectively create more of themselves than our server farms do.”
He walked to the next kettle’s display. The liquid in it was still bubbling, but it was clearer, and visible glittering particles churned through the medium.
“Once they get past 100 generations, we task the printing farm to shift to the next kettle. At that point, even at their lower speed and efficiency, the Nanozoa are converting the medium to new devices faster than we can print with our current setup.”
“Jesus,” Seph said, her eyes wide. “Little Von Neumann machines. What keeps them from escaping and replicating away into the prophesied, world-ending Gray Goo ecophage monster?”
“The Lysine Contingency.” Adam replied with a straight face.
“What!?”
“They can only make replicas as long as we feed them the raw materials in the nutrient bath. When the growth medium is depleted, they wipe their replication routines, shut down, and go to sleep.”