I just read your "Loose Change," and was intrigued by the space travel implications. This led my writing in a direction that I'm not sure you wanted to go, with tiggers, so I decided to seek your blessing. I have no intention of posting this without your OK.
Hope you like it.
Quantum Mechanic.
!Gla*ko trained two of hir six optical sensors on the navigational display, and sighed, using two of hir three ventilation orifices, in exasperation. Se could tell where the ship was in relation to the nearby undistinguished planetary system, but where that system was, with respect to any known part of the universe, was still a mystery. Frustration mounted as the ship returned diagnostics to ser, showing that few systems had survived, unscathed. Life support and short-range sensors were available, but subspace communications and the ship's drives were in ruins. Not even the attitude and sublight engines were working. The recent encounter with a gravity wave had obviously thrown the ship into an unmapped sector of space.
The main access portal to the bridge opened with a hiss, and se shifted hir attention toward the sound. Hir life-symbiote !Xan*ki, came through, hir features troubled by consideration of their situation. How long do we have, !ko? se queried... the ^Qa!kar - the "people"- used medium-frequency electomagnetic, rather than sonic waves for interpersonal communication... Is it long enough to make repairs?
!Gla*ko shrugged Maybe, !ki, but probably not. Se indicated the nearby stellar primary. That little star has caught us in it's gravity well, and without at least the sublight engines, we will soon be dancing in it's corona. With a flick of one of hir manipulator digits, se brought attention to the third planetary body, and continued That offers an environment we could survive, without mechanical life support, if we could get there. We'll be passing it closely, but without engines, we'd not survive the landing.
Is there any kind of life there? !Xan*ki asked.
The scanners say so, !Gla*ko responded, but the visual sensors show it to be so different from us that you wouldn't recognize it. The dominant species is very strange. Their bodies are bilaterally symmetric, rather than radial. They also have many fewer limbs than we, no redundancy in ventilation systems, and only two optical sensors. The optical sensors are apparently designed to optimize stereo vision at the expense of field of view. They are also dioecious, like us, but they never transition. There is a lot of electromagnetic activity around their major populaiton centers, but little of what is being broadcast seems to contain any intelligence. None of it seems to originate from the organisms themselves, but rather from devices they have created. I can't tell how they communicate on a personal level, and I'm not at all sure we could ever understand them.
!Xan*ki considered this information. Scholars on hir home world had postulated the existence of a non-transitioning dioecious species of self-aware organisms, and had reached a number of alarming conclusions about them. They were not going to be the kind of people you wanted for neighbors. Looks like we've got no place to go, nor any way to get there. How do you propose to spend our last few hours, then? Se asked, suggestively.
!Gla*ko was, at the time, in male phase, and was therefore extremely susceptable to any suggestion of sexual congress. Se wrapped hir grasping appendages around hir life-symbiote, and demanded Do you want it here? Or in our quarters? !Xan*ki gave out the electromagnetic equivalent of a giggle, then wriggled free and ran to their cabin. They were working on yet another coital cycle when the life support systems became overloaded by the heat, and they lost consciousness. Minutes later their bodies, as well as those of their dormant supercargo, exploded, sending bits of themselves and the ship in every direction. Some of those bits went in the direction of the third planet.
The nanovirus didn't really have a name, and if it had, it probably couldn't be either spelled or pronounced, so, for brevity, it was just Nano.
Nano wasn't really alive, nor was it just a machine. It was a very tiny machine, made of the same stuff that living things are made of. Sugars, amino acids, and so forth, combined into code storage devices and other structures. Nano stored information much the same way as living things, as ribonucleic acid or desoxyribonucleic acid.
Unlike a virus, though, Nano didn't just store it's own genome, it also stored it's host's entire genome, and gene-expression information, as well. Fortunately, the nucleotides that encode genomes only have four possible base pair combinations, and that level of redundancy enables the use of very efficient compression techniques for data storage. Nano usually requires fewer than one-tenth the number of base pairs to store a genome than it's host uses, and that is handy when you need to stuff a lot of information into a small space for transport!.
Nano didn't work alone. It couldn't. One of the first tasks it would undertake, after "infecting" a host, was to create a large number of replica's of itself. Only when the number exceeded a ciritical mass Nano could really go to work. Nano wasn't really conscious, in the sense of being self-aware, and it didn't think in any manner a human could relate to. It didn't, for instance, know that at that particular moment it was drifting through interplanetary space. It could perceive that it was not in a hospitable environment, though not having motility, it could do nothing about that, except wait.
It waited patiently, as along with a small number of it's siblings it gently drifted toward bright blue world, which it could not know would offer it the opportunity to resume a place as part of an operating ecosystem. It was buffeted by the tidal pull of the single large satellite, and was heedless of the fact that a number of it's siblings were swept away, taken by a chance encounter with a bit of space debris, intent on ending it's long journey in a blazing dive to the planetary surface. Those siblings would never find a host.
Some of Nano's siblings were on a trajectory that would take them past the planet, but losing enough energy that they would again fall back into the star's gravity well. Nano was unaware of that, or of the fact that they would soon be no more.
Eventually Nano, and a few of it's siblings drifted down to the planetary surface. Some were destroyed by the elements, which bespeaks an extremely harsh environment, but Nano, and a few others, were fortunate enough to touch down in a natural impoundment, and float around in the water for a few years. Gradually, as the siblings drifted around they became widely separated, and were thus lost to each other. Nano wasn't aware of it's siblings' absence, it just lost awareness of their presence.
An undetermined amount of time passed as Nano drifted through the water, but presently Nano perceived that it was being swept into some sort of pipe. Eventually it was discharged into a large vessel, where a chemical reaction was taking place. The chemicals were binding to each other and trapping particles that were suspended in the water. If Nano were capable of worry, this would be worrisome, because Nano was a particle. A small one, but a particle, nonetheless. Nano was capable of breaking the chemical bonds, however, so despite the chemicals' best efforts, Nano remained suspended in the water, even as the flocculated chemical dragged nearly all other particles to the bottom of the vessel.
Nano was collected, along with the supernanent water, and piped to several other processes in series, but it succeeded in avoiding or disabling all chemical and physical attacks. Following all of that, it spent a very long time in transit, through pumps, pipes, and storage tanks, until it was eventually decanted into equipment that attempted to capture it with ion-exchange processes. They failed, but his fluid environment was then subjected to extreme heat, causing formation of superheated water vapor. Nano was not particularly heat-labile, but the temperature kept rising, and the endpoint was unpredictable. Eventually, if the temperature became enough, Nano would be destroyed. Fortunately though, convective forces moved Nano to the surface of the fluid, and the escaping water vapor provided enough energy to carry it to cooler parts of the machinery. The vapor condensed, and carrying Nano with it, it was collected containers to which sodium chloride was added. This solution was then decanted into flexible containers, a fixed volume in each container. Nano was also decanted, and along with the saline water, spent some time in storage
Nano's "infection" of a host usually happened through sexual congress between hosts, but sometimes it happened by ingestion or injection. Not just any host would do, however. Nano needed a host with a highly developed nervous system, so that it could easily find places to store, and easily retrieve information about the host and it's environment. It needed a host that engaged in sexual reproduction, so that Nano and others of it's kind could exchange information. Typically, Nano needed for it's host to be the dominant species in its ecological framework.
Nano was designed to detect when its environment became a new host organism. When it's container was retrieved, and began to drain through a long tube, and eventually through an extremely small pipe, into a warm, oxygen-rich environment, full of living cells, it found one.
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Author: Quantum Mechanic Title: The Gift That Keeps You Flipping Part: Universe: Contributed - Tigger Summary: Where the Youth Bug may have come from Keywords: scfi Revision: $Revision: 1.2 $ Archive: http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/CupaSoup/www/ Mailing List: FAQ: RCS: $Id: tiggerbug.x,v 1.2 2006/07/20 21:55:17 jcl Exp $