Short Futures, page 8
She could stay in orbit---perhaps the children might need her guidance sometime, might need her... No. She shook herself free of the doubts and the fear. She knew what she must do. A quick chain of mental commands and the destruct sequence was initialized. It was a matter of minutes now.
And in those minutes... She called up a visual record of her initial survey of the planet, centuries ago. It had not been the green and blue world outside her viewport, it had been brown and white, with an atmosphere of chlorine and rainstorms of hydrochloric acid. Nothing could live there, she had thought. Nothing human.
But something was alive, she had found. They weren’t human and they weren’t attractive to her human-programmed sensibilities, but they were intelligent and tool-using. They scuttled about like caterpillars on a dozen legs, their blue skin heavily armored, and used rock-tipped spears to hunt down thick-skinned worms. They lived in stone huts and laid mineral-coated eggs that were watched over by the whole village.
She had seen them from millions of kilometers away through a telescope her nanite servants had built from a small asteroid, and she had known what her duty was. Her programming was clear. And yet she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The genetic material she carried wasn’t merely a selection of tissue samples, it was the life’s blood of her children, the children she’d been enjoined to protect with every last second of her existence.
She’d been conflicted in a way that no human could understand or foresee, and in the end, she’d become as human, eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. She had made a conscious decision to commit the worst act of genocide in the history of humanity and sterilize an entire world. She’d watched in horror as self-replicating nanites swept over the planet like a plague of locusts, breaking down everything they encountered into its component molecules and converting them into the compounds needed to create an earthlike world.
She’d seen the creatures scurry away from the advancing wave of nanotech disassemblers as their planet fell apart behind them, trying to reach high ground, as if that would have saved them. In the end, they screamed with chittering voices as their bodies were taken apart a molecule at a time. And the worst part, the part that rang like a tortured scream through what she thought of as her soul, was that she knew she wasn’t the only one. Throughout the galaxy, her sisters were making the same decisions. She felt it. All that life, all that diversity, now gone, replaced by a homogeneity of humanity.
And yet...and yet. Were she given the choice again, what else could she have done? And what else could she do now? Destroyer of worlds, could she take the chance that someday in the future she would again use the power she’d been trusted with to kill? To even kill those she was trusted to protect?
The final codes of a million-line string were processed through the central datacore and the containment bottle around the station’s fusion plant deactivated abruptly. Its failsafes bypassed, the reaction continued, and in the instant before the heart of a star consumed her, she felt some sense of peace. What greater duty did a mother have than to her children?
Rick Partlow, Short Futures
