Metal Rain: Chapter 14 - Scorched Earth

Earth.

Large parts of the planet were now covered by this metallic sludge, the machines had found the best way to spread themselves over the surface was to create huge replicating factories on land and under the surface of the sea.

These factories churned out self-replicating machines at the rate of thousands per hour, each machine was in essence a tiny reactor, capable of taking on more material and creating more of its own kind.

The factories ranged in size and design, some were only the size of a small to medium house, others were as big as skyscrapers, others still could barely be seen by the human eye.

Regardless of their form, they all had one purpose, and that was to create self-replicating machines as fast as possible.

The rate at which they learned was truly frightening, at first the machines were confined to the warmer, wetter climates and so thrived mostly in the tropics around the equator. This fact had thrown up its own set of problems, mainly that the machines were difficult to locate within the rainforests that dominated those areas, and were therefore control in many of these regions.

Those problems however paled into insignificance when they started to move south. It took around a decade and a half before they reached Antarctica where they buried themselves deep in the south-polar ice cap. Once they got to deep enough levels they extracted and broke down minerals and gasses within the ice.

The machines used the chromium and uranium to create more nuclear factories and stripped the region of silver, nickel, copper, and gold to use as raw material. This accelerated their growth and it wasn’t long before all southern hemisphere oceans were almost completely devoid of marine life.

Now the machine-sludge was moving north, slowly eating up the land over which it crawled, the scientists said that once their was nothing left for the machines to take from the ice, rock and sea, they would start taking molecules from the atmosphere. Although by that time there would be nothing alive on earth to witness this event.

Not a single day went by where Simon Austell did not think about the end of the human race, it had been a little over 700 years since human beings had reached the moon, and just under 550 since the Mars Terraform Project had ended. Yet now . . . now they were destined to be consumed by a force as destructive as it was glacially slow.

It didn’t matter though because as far as anyone could tell, these machines didn’t have a time limit for how long they could wreak their destruction.

Simon looked out over the still uncontaminated Arctic Ocean, he stood on the shores of the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard, the ancient site for the now defunct seedbank.

It was from here and many islands like it, that the evacuation was being carried out. Simon’s job was to help process people onto the hastily constructed space lift, which would take them up to a low earth orbit, whereby they would catch the next shuttle over to the arkships.

The most important part of that processing was to make sure no infected items got onboard. Some machines found were on the microscopic level. This meant they could sit on a person without being detected, just waiting for the right circumstance to fall off and start replicating.

Simon wondered when the powers that be, would realise that it was futile trying to stop these machines. They clearly came from a species far in advance of the human race, and even the scientists' best plan, to create a grey goo of their own was bound to fail.

Simon watched a ferry slip through the mirrored waters as it approached the port in which he stood. The people would disembark from the ship and immediately pass through the strong magnetic field generator. Then they would take the short journey to the other side of the island, where a large flat barge would sail them out to the floating space elevator.

The whole thing was pointless as far as Simon was concerned, these things had already shown how they could evolve and adapt to any situation that arose. How long would it be before a bunch of them adapted enough to survive the magnetic field?

Perhaps the people on Venus had already had such thoughts, there were rumours abound about new arkships not being allowed to enter the Venusian atmosphere. He pondered briefly what the Earth would look like once all the humans had gone. The thought did nothing for his sombre mood as he trudged along slippery stone towards the jetty, ready to meet the next bunch of hopefuls.

Metal Rain: Chapter 13 - Self Doubt

Metal Rain: Chapter 12 - Timeless Start

Metal Rain: Chapter 11 - Child Psychology

Metal Rain: Chapter 10 - Paradise Eaten

Metal Rain: Chapter 9 - Message From Home

Metal Rain: Chapter 8 - First Born

Metal Rain: Chapter 7 - First Contact

Metal Rain: Chapter 6 - The Impossibility Of Being

Metal Rain: Chapter 5 - Entropy Envy

Metal Rain: Chapter 4 - Vacuum Call

Metal Rain: Chapter 3 - Transformation Requiem

Metal Rain: Chapter 2 - Nanostorm

Cryptogee Chronicles Book Two: Metal Rain - Chapter 1 - Void Edge

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