"01 - Code of the Lifemaker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

the strange metabolism that was coming into being. Regardless of what the
Schedulers in the various factories would have liked to see made, the only
things that could be assembled readily were the ones for which parts were
available, and that depended to a large degree on the ability of the
scavengers to locate them, or alternatively to locate assemblies suitable
for breaking down—"digesting"—and rebuilding into something useful. Factory
Twenty-four was an extreme case. Unable to "metabolize" parts directly from
any source of raw materials because of the complete failure of its
materials-procurement workforce, it relied totally on its scavengers.
Factory Thirty-two, on the other hand, could acquire raw materials but
couldn't use them since it had been built without a processing facility at
all. Its robots delivered instead to Forty-seven, which happened to produce
parts for some of the scavengers being manufactured by Thirty-two, and the
two factory-robot organisms managed to coexist happily in their bizarre
form of symbiosis.

The piles of assorted junk, which shouldn't have accumulated from the
earlier phases of the process but had, were eaten up; the machines that
broke down were eaten up; and the carcasses of defunct factories were eaten
up. When those sources of materials had been exhausted, some of the
machines began to eat each other.

The scavengers had been designed, as they had to be, to discriminate
between properly functioning machines and desirable products on the one
hand and rejects in need of recycling on the other. However, as with
everything else in the whole, messed-up project, this function worked well
in some cases, not so well in others, and often not at all. Some of the
models turned out to be as likely to attempt the dismantling of a live,
walking-around Fred as of a dead, flat-on-its-back one. Many of the victims
were indifferent to this kind of treatment and soon died out, but others
succeeded in developing effective fight-or-flee responses to preserve
themselves, thus marking the beginnings of specialized prey and predators
in the form of "lithovores" and "artifactovores."

This development was not always an advantage, especially when the loss of
discrimination was total. Factory Fifty was consumed by its own offspring,
who began dismantling it at its output end as soon as they came off the
assembly line, and then proceeded proudly to deliver the pieces back to its
input end. Its internal repair robots were unable to undo the undoings fast
enough, and it ground to a halt to become plunder for marauders from
Thirty-six and Fifty-three. The most successful factory-robot organisms
protected themselves by evolving aggressive armies of "antibody" defenders,
which would recognize their own factory and its "kind" and leave them
alone, but attack and attempt to destroy any "foreign" models that ventured
too close. This gradually became the dominant form of organism, usually
associated with a distinct territory which its members cooperated in
protecting collectively.

By this time only a few holes in the ground remained at opposite ends of
the rocky shelf to mark where Factories One and Two had once stood. They