By Tony Lambert.
How long it had been drifting down through time and space could never be known. Its course and velocity affected only by the gravitational tug of an occasional distant galaxy, or the infinitesimal nudge from a fading remnant of solar wind. It had survived traversing through no less than five worm holes to slip from one end of the universe to the other, then back again to emerge at yet another far flung quadrant of the time-space continuum, but all the while had remained as pristine and complete as the day it had been launched.
Perfect, forever drifting silently among the stars as a wind-blown seed.
It entered the solar system from the region of the Orion Nebula, and passing by the dark shadows of the outer planets directly crossed the orbit of Jupiter, narrowly missing a head on collision with the giant planet by only six weeks. It glided close enough to Mars to be given an anticlockwise slingshot assist, propelling it inward towards the sun, thereby encountering the stronger gravitational well of earth only seven months later. It approached the earths outer atmosphere at just acute enough an angle so as not be bounced back out into space. The fiery streak of entry across the sky gave all the appearance of space junk giving up its energy and mass to combustion, and when it reached the preset core temperature, it deployed.
The silicon-based life form had arrived.
The kernel of the seed was microscopic, but it’s power unimaginable. In milliseconds it executed a series of instructions programmed by an intelligence billions of years in advance of the variety it was about to encounter, and as it now gently fell to the earth it detected a running current of electricity coursing through the power lines bordering a coastal road two miles below and three to the south east. At once it manipulated gravity to pilot a course towards the line, and precisely eight minutes six seconds after it had been awoken, it settled soft as a feather on the quietly humming cable. And it vanished within without a trace.
The flowing current gave a new dimension to its being, and it now needed a place to gather unto itself. The power lines ran from the main grid to a small country town where the commerce of the day ticked over at a most leisurely pace. Within the space of a heartbeat it sought refuge in an office PC where an inexperienced and highly frustrated office worker sat struggling with an error-ridden spreadsheet, the circular references and formula contradictions giving the content the sole value of pop art. The life form interpreted the digital language instantly, and spreading itself throughout the silicon based component parts of the computer it rewrote the primitive operating system and programs to suit its purpose, and then caused an instant re-boot.
The junior accounts clerk still frowning at the monitor sat back with a start, her jaw dropping slightly as the PC sprung back into life as quickly as it had appeared to shut down, the spreadsheet manifesting in the same layout and colour format as before, but the list of errors she had laboriously been trying to resolve seemingly lost in the matrix. She wondered briefly if she was cut out for this type of work, and left her desk to go in search of the program manual, completely unaware that the number-crunching was now complete and immaculate.
The life form, in a sense, looked around and a full second later it merged into the World Wide Web. A sentient, living entity suddenly aware of every single aspect of recorded human history. For the moment it had no need to adopt any other form as countless satellites allowed it to comprehensively monitor its new home while the myriad databases of world governments showed it the dangerously erratic pulse of human affairs.
It saw the pressing need for change.
At MIT and Cambridge University the work on artificial intelligence abruptly took a new and highly-innovative twist. A flurry of memos, faxes and addendum’s to a one-time promising project now so bogged down in complex theoretical argument so as to be in serious risk of losing funding and being scrapped, suddenly revealed an amazing formula that should have been obvious from the start.
Few of the team could clearly remember when their particular slant on the input had been inspired, and there was much confusion concerning the dates and times of the communications too, but inspiration had been in short supply of late and no one was going to own up to any self-doubt or bicker about just who came up with what sighting the incredibly exciting new direction the research was headed.
Even more so since a Nobel prize was almost guaranteed.
If DNA could be successfully spliced into silicon in the manner now prescribed…well hey…the possibilities were infinite. The team were literally about to perform the work of God. It was simply fantastic!
The life form had set in train the events that would bring about mutation and replication.
It has commenced courting the human gene, and fully anticipates consummation in the immediate future.
Meantime it waits nameless and unknown, silently monitoring every atomic second that ticks by.
Commanding minds and guiding hands.
Watching over its embryo.
Here.
Now.
Inside the web.