Zapata splashed up the habitat’s population. “Seven thousand?” Kandara asked in surprise. “Are you sure?” She eyed the closest deciduous trees, which she guessed at a good fifty to sixty years old. The habitat really should have a larger population by now. Some of the larger habitats back in the Sol system were approaching populations of a quarter of a million.
“That is the information supplied by the Onysko G8Turing. It is current.”
“Strange.”
They were assigned quarters in the Gloweth residency, a ten-story ziggurat embedded in the endcap. Their apartment was on the third floor, larger than the Naima villa, but furnished in the same clinically minimalist style that had Kandara wondering if it was some kind of subtle Utopial conditioning therapy. It seemed to reinforce the feeling of middle-class conformity, which she already considered a little too prevalent in Delta Pavonis. It was as if everyone was reluctant about exposing a sign of individuality.
—
Tyle collected her for the meeting, the pair of them walking along a maze of corridors leading through the endcap. Jessika and Oistad were already waiting in the conference room when they arrived. Kandara’s mouth lifted in a gentle smile as she appreciated where they were; one wall was a bulging window curving out from the habitat’s external shell. She’d never seen anything like it; habitat shells were usually a solid hundred meters thick. Just thinking of the sleet of cosmic radiation striking the window made her nervous, as the transparent material didn’t even look particularly thick. Despite that she sat at the rock slab table filling the middle of the room and stared unashamedly. The view made her wonder why she’d ever been impressed by the sight of Nebesa.
The window was facing the Bremble asteroid, which from Kandara’s viewpoint proscribed a tight arc across the star field outside as Onysko rotated laboriously. She could see the town-sized sprawls of machinery hanging limpet-fashion to its dusty gray-brown surface, sharp light from Delta Pavonis sparking on crinkled gold-foil sheets to make it twinkle hypnotically.
Zapata splashed a visual overlay, tagging the image components with identifiers. Most of the machinery clumps were industrial stations, sending rootlike tendrils boring deep into the rock, extracting minerals for the refinery level to process before distributing them in turn to the construction units that formed the upper layer. Any elements that weren’t available amid Bremble’s complex weave of ore seams were fed in through portals linked to other asteroids and the moons of Lanivet, Delta Pavonis’s solitary gas giant.
More than half of the stations were replicating themselves, Zapata said. A fascinated Kandara watched the glittering metallic encrustations that were slowly spreading over the oddly smooth regolith like mechanical bacteria. It would take years, but eventually the entire surface would be covered, converting the huge asteroid into a giant technological bauble.
Tags were flickering across the vast free-flying factory modules drifting around Bremble in a loose cloud, the majority constructing new habitats. The layout of the modules was predicated on the elegance of simplicity: a gantry ring eight kilometers in diameter, its plain geometric struts looking crude in comparison to the segments of enigmatically dark equipment they caged. They contained massive bonding field generators, a variant of those that produced city shields. With the refineries supplying a steady flow of vaporized material, the bonding fields squeezed the atoms back into a solid form again.
She stared in admiration at the energetic starlight glimmering across the smooth obsidian-like outer shells of the prodigious cylinders as they extruded out of the factory rings. As with Bremble’s industrial stations, the process had an undeniable affinity with organic life.
And out beyond the collection of factory modules, recently completed habitats gleamed like first-magnitude stars, a swarm that was slowly dissipating across the Delta Pavonis system, traveling on decade-long trajectories that would bring them to their own asteroid, where the mining/refining/manufacturing process would begin afresh. It made her picture Bremble as a dandelion head, casting its expanding cloud of seed to propagate time and again across the hostility of interplanetary distances.
“Real Utopial von Neumannism,” Tyle said happily as sie sat next to her. Sie smiled contentedly at the vista. “Machines building machines, practically without any human intervention. Now that Onysko has G8Turings, they can manage so much more these days.”
Kandara pursed her lips as she gave Bremble a more searching assessment. It was smaller than Vesta, which was Sol’s leading space industry asteroid, but she thought the systems on show here were a lot more sophisticated. They weren’t constrained by conventional economics anymore, she realized. “Is this exponential?”