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Metamorphs 5
With the expedition to find intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy, there were only about a dozen Metamorphs left on earth. I decided to take advantage of the, uh, lessening of restrictions on allowable actions to indulge in an idea I'd had. Ordinarily, games on this scale would be against the Law. I built a crew of dummies - remote, semi-autonomous bodies - and flew out to the asteroid belt. After spending two days looking for suitable material, I tossed that idea in, flew to Jupiter, dropped a few dummies on each of the smaller moons, started building mass-drivers and factories. Using the Minau conceptual divider (a very handy tool that convinced atoms that they didn't exist), I sliced several moons - the equivalent mass of about half the Earth - up into large chunks, then forced the chunks into compacters. Within a few hours we were producing bowling-balls of pure neutronium and flinging them earthwards. Once I was sure the factories could run themselves until they'd either exhausted the material or produced enough neutronium, I flew back to Earth and supervised the final placement of the spheres; I used the half-field drive to divert them from their earthward course and throw them at the moon. They landed in a perfect hexagonal grid, a couple of hundred metres apart; they'd drift downward and then sink about a kilometre into the crust. Mascons, the NASA people would call them. I kept this up until I was sure that the moon had sufficient mass to retain an atmosphere; then, I ordered the dummies back at Jupiter to stop throwing spheres. The last few that trailed in I aimed at Venus. There weren't enough of them to seriously alter what passed for a biosphere there. The dummies then moved on to Jupiter, started bottling atmosphere and shipped it Earthwards. I had to sub-fuse it from crude methane into nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide; then, I released it over the moon, where it drifted down and started forming a narrow but almost Earth-like atmosphere. It was about ninety percent standard atmospheric pressure on the surface, which had been somewhat torn up by the passage of the spheres. I ordered dummies in to smooth the surface over (I got them to self-replicate until there were enough of them to handle this task), leaving four metres of sterile topsoil. Just then, I realised: the moon didn't have any rotation to speak of. Shit. I'd already transgressed the Law as it was, but I knew causing rotation in earth's satellite wouldn't be something I could gloss over when (or if) the others got back. Oh well. If it's worth doing, it's worth over-doing ... I planted tailored bacteria to kick some life into the soil and arranged some dandelion-clock-style seeds to form huge rafts in the sky. They'd provide some cover, but the convection currents were going to make an unholy mess of the whole thing; the sunwards-facing side would burn, and the dark side would freeze. The occasional eclipse of the earth wouldn't help. I sat cross-legged on the surface, glaring at the sun overhead as it burned out the bacteria I'd gone to so much trouble to build. I couldn't think of a subtle way out of this; I'd just have to go the whole hog. I ordered the dummies to multiply until there were enough to stand one each over the neutronium spheres, then ordered them to reassemble themselves into turbocharged versions of the 'David Bowie' mass rotation effector. They networked themselves, stretched out the effector field; under my command we began subtly altering the vectors of every atom on the moon, carefully applying rotation to the whole mass. I stood there, arms outstretched, eyes closed in concentration, twisting a small world out of its normal position in the universe. I thought I'd make it turn at right angles to the earth's axis of rotation. A change is as good as a holiday, as they say. I spent a few days making sure that, first, the rotation was sufficient to prevent the intended plants from dying, and second, that the overall balance of the earth-moon system was more or less unchanged. It seemed stable enough, although in a few thousand years, who could tell? Who would care, anyway? I didn't expect humanity to be around then, and if it was going to cause us any problems, we'd fix it then. I ordered a few more dummies to start spreading the seeds - a tailored form of grass, the idealised strain that you might find on lawn-bowls greens the world over, designed to grow to a length of five and one half centimetres and no more - and as soon as they'd taken root, I started putting up thousands of signs in English, Russian and Chinese: KEEP OFF THE GRASS |
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