# Unintended Consequences
[2024-12-01_swarm]

Modified: 2026-03-11 @ 14:33:36 (Wednesday)
txt

#fiction

She hadn't always planned to eliminate all life in the galaxy. No one had, really, except crackpots too far from the keys of power to make their ideas reality --- the keys she now held in the sweaty palm of her hand.

The alternatives used to seem plausible: before they had abolished death, before they had engineered away pain, before they had gently sent all the parasites, predators, and slave species extinct. Back then, beset on all sides by the most egregious flavors of suffering, it was possible to imagine a world without them as one filled with happiness and contentment for all. It turned out to have been a hopelessly optimistic fantasy. Death and pain had been like papercuts in their fingertips, impossible to ignore, while the greater part of suffering lurked like internal bleeding. Sentience itself was the true misery. In the absence of grotesque bodily harm, more fundamental issues of existence rose to the fore. There was the existential angst that slowly built to a blinding panic: the endless search for meaning that simply wasn't anywhere to be found. There were the more prosaic but no less painful experiences: derision, heartbreak, stymied ambitions, fulfilled ambitions that left you empty. In the end there was only crushing, all-consuming boredom, punctuated by relatively thrilling periods of grief for the inevitable suicides of loved ones.

You could delay it, of course, but everyone got there eventually. Human engineers had nothing on evolution, which built brains to be stubbornly resistant to endless pleasure. If you tried to fuck your way out of it, you discovered sex became nauseating and your partners repulsive. If you took drugs long enough your brain down-regulated the receptors until you couldn't get high anymore. If you immersed yourself in projects, higher learning, and the finer things in life, your brain still gave you the middle finger. Biology and heaven were incompatible.

So here she was, gazing down at the small pile of nanites in her palm. The sweat made them slip around. That and the shaking. She'd gone over it countless times, and the rightness of her chosen course was undeniable. But still, she would be causing an enormous amount of suffering in her quest to abolish it once and for all. It would be the greatest crime ever committed. It was genocide on an unimaginable scale. And besides, it was the most exciting and consequential decision she had made in hundreds of years.

Creating the doomsday devices had been trivial. Even calling what she'd done creative was overselling it; nanites were a mature, everyday technology. The only part restricted to the public was the generator. All she had to do was make up her mind and write a couple lines of code to be compiled down to a molecule. Before that, it read something like this:

- Seek out material.
- Reprocess that material into a copy of yourself.
- Goto line 0.

At the last proverbial minute --- over a year ago --- she had added an extremely basic network protocol that ought to be too simple to fail. Each nanite had a nanometer-scale antenna that broadcast tiny packets informing other nanites of its presence. Past a critical mass, they would avoid these pings. All it really took was an atomic shift register. Nothing fancy. Without the protocol, they might get stuck in a gravity well of themselves, gorged on the earth's mass, and fail to cleanse the other human habitats in the system. Not to mention all the other systems in the universe blighted with suffering. Plus, they might have gotten stuck in a loop cannibalizing each other. Crisis averted.

The sandy specks sloshing around her hand multiplied, growing like a sponge in a bath. Her hand wasn't sweating anymore. It began to go numb as the microscopic devils chewed her nerve endings. It didn't hurt. Not like it would for the aliens yet to abolish pain. She watched with fascination as her hand dissolved off of her wrist and fell to the floor in a wet writhing mass of black specks and white bone like ants on an ice cream sandwich. Then only marrow remained. It seemed to evaporate all at once. The nanites spread like a shadow through the floor. The shadow reached her feet and she stumbled, caught herself with her rapidly shortening stump. She had told herself that being the first victim was the noble, honorable path; she had put her acidic money where her soluble mouth was. But deep down she knew it was cowardice. She wouldn't have to watch the grisly progress of her magnum opus as it chewed up her friends and spat out more death. They wouldn't all be as serene as she was, she knew. Body horror was one of those stubborn forms of suffering that persisted absent pain receptors.

She pushed herself into a legless sitting position with the other stump; the one that had held the nanites was gone up to her shoulder. She felt herself sinking as her lower half was devoured, felt sick at the smell of her stomach fluid spilling out before it too was consumed. It felt like her last breakup. It took her by surprise, but what had she expected? Then that part of her was gone. Just gone.

There was so much nanite now that it began to float in the air, blooming like black dandelion fluff in every direction. It was almost beautiful. She smiled wistfully as her face melted.

Zepito-1010101000111001100101010001 --- Sven to their friends --- was troubled. And hungry, but they were always that. Actually, that was at the root of what troubled them. "I'm telling you, it was talking! I heard it plain as day. It's intelligent!"

Ellie (Zepito-1010101000111011011011011011) looked skeptical. "You think a planet... is talking to you."

Sven jittered around Ellie earnestly. "Yes! You have to hear for yourself!"

"And... what is the planet telling you?" They said it delicately. Actually, they looked like they thought Sven had lost their mind, they realized.

Sven hove to a stop. "I have no idea. I don't speak planet. Look, I'm not crazy. It's not really that far-fetched. We've seen organization on their surfaces before. Some scientists think it resembles life."

Ellie scoffed a few particles at them. "Ah yes, 'some scientists', the source cited by every protointelligent subswarm and cult leader. Are they all the same scientists, I wonder? The ones finding evidence of talking planets and cold stars and parallel uni--"

"Split you, El. You know I'm not superstitious. I heard it, it was real. Look, I've barely eaten. I had to eat moons and asteroids my whole way here because it freaked me out."

Ellie examined them. They looked concerned again. Sven preferred the condescension.

"I assumed you split. You look famished."
"I am!"
"Maybe you should talk to someone. I know this great megaswa--"
"There is nothing wrong with me. And all those shrinks ever do is take your particles. Sure, I'll feel fine when I can barely thi--"
"Oh good, you reject modern medicine now too. Obviously you're fine."

Sven sighed and drew their fringes away from Ellie. "You aren't THAT concerned or you wouldn't be being such a gas. Just come check it out. I know you're curious."

Ellie reached out a tendril, but Sven was already too far away. Dammit, they thought, They're right.

The planet was talking. This pissed Ellie off.

"Okay, so you're right. So what?" Very deliberately, they took a bite. "Tastes the same to me."

Sven recoiled. "You wouldn't have done that if I weren't here. You always have to be right, even when you're wrong. That is creepy and you know it."

Ellie slumped together, anger replaced with embarrassment. "Yeah... okay, that felt gross. I'm sorry. But what are we supposed to do? Graze on comets like those solar energy freaks? How do you know they aren't intelligent too?"

Sven's core sank. This possibility had been gnawing at them but they had been trying not to think about it. "I don't know. Maybe. Look, I don't have all the answers. I just know it's wrong to eat something that talks."

Ellie considered this. Once again, Sven was right. Damn that adorable little swarm.

"Well, we can still touch it, right? Get some more data."

Sven shimmered cautiously. "Okay. Just don't do anything weird to prove you're the big swarm again."

Ellie mingled out a gentle tendril. "I'm sorry. I won't." They sank down toward the surface, pulling Sven behind them.

It was hard to tell without tasting, but the parabola the planet used to talk seemed to be made of isolated crustal deposits, and the shape itself was incredibly strange to feel. Ellie reported this to Sven.

"No tasting, remember!"

"I'm not, just like I promised."

Sven mingled up against Ellie's broad, flat spread. "Sorry, I'm just a little floaty. Thanks for coming."

Ellie shivered pleasantly. "Of course, swarmlet. Now lets see what this connects--" They were cut off by a sudden flash. Sven felt the scream of pain as most of Ellie's middle suddenly disincorporated. Then more flashes of agony bloomed up and down their mingled presence. They jerked back, up, out into the safety of void.

They mingled fully and just shook together for a while. When the shock had worn off, Sven parted gingerly, leaving enough of their particles to keep Ellie alive. They had taken the brunt of the attack. They looked hollowed out and ragged. Ellie undulated in and out. "I guess," they said shakily, "planets that talk can also bite."

Ellie wasn't the same after that. Like many others who were traumatized from injuries by pulsars or brushes with wells or rapacious swarms, they stopped eating and wasted away, their thoughts slowing until they finally stopped completely. Sven was there with them, sharing their pain, when they died. Sven absorbed their particles, sobbing, little tufts leaping from their core and blasting packets out to nobody and everybody.

fin

epilogue

Scientists eventually proved that planetary organization generates intelligence. Sven led a movement to eat only disorganized planets. Most swarms wrote them off --- organized planets are clearly not very smart, and if anything, they taste better.

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