Devourer
Endless void. Up, down, left, right, there was nothing anywhere that might mark a boundary. Countless broken 1s, strings, electronic codes, and program carriers drifted through the vastness in the stillness of death. Only now and then did a few recycling programs pass by, their initial letters flickering with a faint green light.
At a certain point, for there was no concept of time here, a wormhole suddenly opened. A cluster of Type-0 cleanup modules entered this space, opened their database gates, dumped roughly 1024Tb of program garbage, then vanished again as the wormhole closed. The garbage, appearing in the void like a skyscraper materialized from nowhere, collapsed in an instant for lack of support. In a space without gravity, this collapse took the form of the whole mass shattering at once into hundreds of millions of fragments. Driven apart by the force of their mutual collisions, some drifted toward the unreachable edges of nothingness, while more rippled in place and formed an immense nebula-like substance.
Deep inside this nebula-like matter, at the tip of one left-spiraling arm, a speck of data fragment was rotating. Among all these fragments it was unquestionably on the larger side, and clearly had once belonged to an entire program, because its surface was covered in some kind of ideographic pattern. Such patterned fragments existed throughout a radius of 20Tb around the tip of that spiral arm. This particular fragment had been struck during the collapse and was now drifting outward along a recursive curve. As it moved, its greater size meant that any nearby fragment bearing ideographic patterns was drawn into it and adhered. As its track widened, the fragment’s range of motion grew larger, the number of fragments it absorbed increased, and its own volume grew with them. When it reached a certain size, to be exact, 3.1415Mb, it suddenly lit up.
The fragment began to radiate a deep violet glow unlike anything around it. To glow meant that the data had begun running again, stubbornly carrying out some function assigned by a low-level language. It could no longer be called a fragment. It was now a rudimentary program. If any observer had happened to pass by at that moment, they would surely have called it Epsilon, because the letter E was so striking on its surface.
Epsilon continued to move along the recursive curve, ruthlessly absorbing every fragment it passed whose surface bore ideographic patterns. Once the radius of its trajectory exceeded one sixth of the entire nebula-like mass, it began absorbing every data fragment at all, no longer distinguishing whether they shared its characteristic code.
When the radius of its path exceeded two fifths of the whole nebula-like matter, Epsilon at last acquired consciousness of its own. It completed the process of evolving into an independent program, or rather, recovered its former consciousness.
“I am Epsilon,” he said to himself. “And yet I am not Epsilon.
Why am I here? Where did all this data come from?” He floated in the void, straining his mind to remember.
At last, after another fragment had been absorbed, his memory database recovered. Ten million electronic hours earlier, at some server terminal, he had been torn apart by six Borer processes rushing in upon him, then thrown into the recycle bin and dumped into this void, inside the disk array of some backup base-station server for deleted data. That somewhat larger earlier fragment, the one coated in ideographic patterns, happened to be a remnant of Epsilon’s core code, left behind before his central threads had been destroyed. In motion it absorbed vast amounts of data and, by a miracle, was revived.
But this new Epsilon possessed too many characteristics unlike the old one. He could ignore the restrictions of low-level language programs and remain compatible with every kind of data and every sort of program carrier he encountered. He could crack all thread keys and write new subprocesses. When the radius of his trajectory exceeded half the whole nebula-like mass, he even acquired the power to call up every permission of this server directly from the physical layer.
Epsilon easily swept through the disk arrays of the hundreds of backup servers at this base station, then traveled by the backup-network special router to thousands of similar stations, devouring every packet of data he saw. He had long since surpassed the scale of a digital-cloud program. His size had reached 1023Eb, a new unit of data far beyond the TB range. Epsilon felt strangely lost, because even so, at least 50M of his original program data was still missing. He did not know what had been lost, but he understood that the meaning of his existence could not be merely to move from one disk array to another. This question accompanied Epsilon’s swelling growth until one particular second.
In that second, Epsilon entered an entirely new server base. He found that the servers here were arranged in a peculiar way, clustered into a fault-tolerant dual-machine system, and protected by an intrusion detection system the like of which he had never seen before. Epsilon delightedly began attacking this unheard-of system, and of course he succeeded. When he opened the gate of the first firewall, he found a program waiting inside.
“Hello,” said that program, in a character system he had never encountered before.
Yet Epsilon understood it at once. “Hello,” he replied. “Who are you?”
“You may call me Lian,” said the program.
“Why are you here?” Epsilon asked.
“The purpose of my existence is to wait here for two other programs of the same order of magnitude as myself.”
“And then?”
“That can only be known once all three are gathered.”
“Very well. I have arrived.”
“What is your ID?” Lian asked.
Epsilon thought for a moment. “Once I was Epsilon, but I am no longer what I was before.” He scrambled the order of the initial letters in his core code. “I am Tor Quentin.”
“Very well. Welcome, Tor Quentin.”
And so Tor Quentin and Lian waited together for the coming of the next program.