What Mary Said
The first self-replicating microscopic machine was named, appropriately, Mary.
However, her first replication was not called Jesus and if the scientists understood that naming her Mary insinuated that humans were God, they never mentioned it in interviews.
Mary’s babies were programmed to eat oil. She was supposed to help us stem the disasters of tanker spills. They would die after eating a few drops. Millions of them sprinkled like dust on a spill would eat and die. It worked on spill after spill. They would even eat the oil right off of birds, right off of the sea floor.
Her children died by the billions in every oil spill but Mary never died. She was the prime birther. An Eve with no Adam. A Queen bee churning out wave after wave of infertile children to help save the world.
Something so small should not have been able to change her own programming. To this day, we’re not sure what happened. Was it faulty programming or did she do it on purpose? Her changes were simple.
In the batch of nanotech babies she made for the spill of the Exxon Icarus, she changed two minor things that changed the whole world. One, she disabled their death switch. Two, she enabled their self-replication engines.
They cleaned up the oil wonderfully. Then they ate all the oil still in the tanker. Then they ate all of the oil in the rescue vehicles.
Replicating in great swathes in the ocean, they became the new krill. Dust storms of them blew across the land not so long after. Any and all oil not buried in the ground simply evaporated.
Most countries have hermetically-sealed reserves awaiting the day that the mites are killed. That day hasn’t come yet.
Mary’s children stopped replicating once they’d eaten all the oil they could find. Their population hovers at a stable level now, like benign insects. They starve to death but it takes them a long time.
We’re playing a waiting game with them. Hopefully we’ll be able to use oil in the next century or so.
Until then, Mary has changed the Earth again.
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However, her first replication was not called Jesus and if the scientists understood that naming her Mary insinuated that humans were God, they never mentioned it in interviews.
Mary’s babies were programmed to eat oil. She was supposed to help us stem the disasters of tanker spills. They would die after eating a few drops. Millions of them sprinkled like dust on a spill would eat and die. It worked on spill after spill. They would even eat the oil right off of birds, right off of the sea floor.
Her children died by the billions in every oil spill but Mary never died. She was the prime birther. An Eve with no Adam. A Queen bee churning out wave after wave of infertile children to help save the world.
Something so small should not have been able to change her own programming. To this day, we’re not sure what happened. Was it faulty programming or did she do it on purpose? Her changes were simple.
In the batch of nanotech babies she made for the spill of the Exxon Icarus, she changed two minor things that changed the whole world. One, she disabled their death switch. Two, she enabled their self-replication engines.
They cleaned up the oil wonderfully. Then they ate all the oil still in the tanker. Then they ate all of the oil in the rescue vehicles.
Replicating in great swathes in the ocean, they became the new krill. Dust storms of them blew across the land not so long after. Any and all oil not buried in the ground simply evaporated.
Most countries have hermetically-sealed reserves awaiting the day that the mites are killed. That day hasn’t come yet.
Mary’s children stopped replicating once they’d eaten all the oil they could find. Their population hovers at a stable level now, like benign insects. They starve to death but it takes them a long time.
We’re playing a waiting game with them. Hopefully we’ll be able to use oil in the next century or so.
Until then, Mary has changed the Earth again.
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