Author's Note: Another little vignette about these god-computers. I intended this to be the first chapter of a story, but I don't know. It's about the establishment of a colony using Von Neuman machines.

At twenty-one, he opened his eyes for the first time. He saw a sunrise through a glass wall, warm golden light washing over a featureless plain of wheat and glaring slightly in front of him as it reflected off the glass. He was seated in an off-white plastic chair with a high back and armrests. His bare feet touched the cool tiles of the floor, which were also off-white. He looked left and saw about ten feet away from him where the glass met a yellowish wall a potted evergreen tree surrounded by smaller potted bushes. To his right, also around ten feet away and also in a corner, was a round table with a lamp and several picture frames displayed on it.

He was about to look behind him when movement from outside caught his eye. A machine floated several feet above the tops of the grain, trailing a pink fog. The machine was long, about twenty feet, and seemed about six feet tall. Metalic coils glowed beneath it, and atop its barge-like chassis were several rectangular boxes. The last five feet of the machine appeared to be a furnace, and, as he watched, the line of boxes slid down the length of the machine, forcing the last one into the furnace. From the back of the furnace, the pink fog was emitted. It glowed before the rising sun.

“Good morning, Paul,” said a monotone voice.

Instinctively, he looked up at the ceiling but saw nothing more than a blank surface the same warm yellow as the walls.

“Do you find the sunrise pleasant, Paul?” the voice asked.

He looked over his left shoulder only to see that the room ended just a few feet behind his chair. There was a tall, rectangular outline in the wall that he took for a door. Over his right shoulder he saw a bed, the white sheets pulled back and slightly wrinkled.

“Paul?”

“Yes?” said Paul.

“Do you find the sunrise pleasant, Paul?”

Paul looked at the sunrise, distorted through the pink mist. “Yes.”

“I thought so, Paul,” said the voice. “I have found it to be the best first impression for my children. The most relaxing.”

“Who are you?” asked Paul, twisting in his chair to find a speaker. The voice seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

“I entreat you to think of me as your father, Paul,” said the voice. “Or your mother.”

“What are you, and where?”

“I am all around you, and a bit of me is inside you as well, Paul,” said the voice. “If that is too cryptic, I will offer you a direct answer.”

Paul waited, but the voice did not continue. “Uh, please,” he said.

“Very well, Paul,” said the voice. “Specifically, I am a N-o-h Four-dash-zero-zero-two Processor, Serial Number Zero-zero-three. Generally, I am the ship that you inhabit, though, as with most generalities, this is somewhat inaccurate.”

“You’re a computer?” asked Paul. He squinted through the glass wall as the fog machine, or another one, made another pass above the grain. The sunlight strained his eyes. He felt the beginning of a headache. “This is a ship?”

“You are quite correct, Paul, and please, call me Noh.”

“I—I don’t know—”

“This is undoubtedly a lot of information to comprehend at one time, Paul,” said Noh. “You have been asleep all your life, my son, in a quite literal way. I will endeavor to make your awakening as smooth as possible.” There was a low tone. “Please proceed through the door behind you to your left, Paul.”

Paul stood and saw that the door had opened. A thin frame of green light glowed around the door, embedded in the wall. He stepped through it, his bare feet lightly padding on the tiles. As he walked into the next room, a young man also entered from the other side. The two men stood at opposite ends of the long, narrow room, about ten feet separating them. The door slid shut horizontally behind both of them at the same time.

For a minute, Paul only stared at the man and saw the stranger doing the same. He wore a light brown t-shirt that revealed an athletic build, with a pair of loose, darker brown cotton pants that had variously sized pockets running down the outside of each leg. The man’s hair was dark blonde and short, covering a head that seemed slightly too large for his shoulders. His jaw was almost squared and was clean shaven, with no freckles or marks of any kind on his skin.

As Paul shifted his weight to his left, the man did the same. Paul cocked his head and watched as the man mimicked his motion exactly. “What’s going on?” he and the man asked at the same time.

“What do you mean, Paul?” said Noh.

“Who—” he began, but stopped when he pointed at the man and the man mirrored his gesture.

“That is your reflection, Paul,” said Noh. “That is you. Look at yourself. You. Paul. You.”

Paul moved further into the room and the man appeared to be walking toward him but never moved across the floor. As Paul approached the opposite side of the room, he moved left a pace and stood up against the wall. The man moved out of sight. Paul stepped back into the center of the room, and the man rejoined him. He raised his hand and tried to touch the man’s also outstretched fingers. They met at a cold, invisible boundary, unable to actually connect.

“That’s me?” said Paul. The young man in front of him moved so strangely, the jaw shifting and neck rippling as he voiced the same question as Paul.

There was no answer.

“That’s me,” said Paul. He touched his face and saw his reflection do the same. A sharp pain suddenly shot up the top of his neck and into the base of his skull at either side. Paul cringed and rubbed at the soreness.

The mirror slid to the side, revealing a mostly shadowed room. “Please continue, Paul.”

“I…have a headache,” said Paul, trying to massage the pain out of his neck.

“I know, Paul,” said Noh. “We must hurry. You must do as I say.”

Paul took a tentative step into the next room. He noticed that the floor was warmer and there was a gentle humming beneath it, though he felt no vibration. The room was large and square, each wall perhaps thirty feet or more in length. At the center of each wall was a doorway, and none was open except for his. Along each stretch of wall was a work bench, some with sophisticated monitors and scientific equipment and others with shelves of cases that appeared to house miniature compact discs. Paul recognized some machinery as being microscopes, some as computers, and some as centrifuges. One corner of the square was dedicated solely to what appeared to be kitchen appliances. The ceiling was about eight feet high except for a domed space in the center that appeared to be made of glass windows. For the moment, the only light in the room came from these skylights, still dim in the early hour of the morning. Beneath the dome was an empty round dais a few feet in diameter.

“Across the room to the right, you will find a jet injector charging on the counter, Paul,” said Noh. “Go to it.”

“Why?” asked Paul, already moving to where Noh directed him.

“Because I told you to, Paul,” said Noh.

Paul reached the counter and saw a gun-like device, with a nozzle at the opposite end of the barrel. “This?” he asked, pointing to it.

“Yes, Paul,” said Noh. “Choose one of the green cartridges from the cabinet directly above the jet injector and screw it into the rear of the injector.”

He opened the cabinet and saw dozens of green narrow cylinders standing on the first shelf. He raised his hand toward them but stopped, looking up at the ceiling and then turning around. “Why do I have to do this? Where am I? What’s going on?”

“You do not have to do anything, Paul,” said Noh, its voice still resonating from nowhere in particular. “You are onboard the Seres Colony Vessel Zero-zero-three, though it was named the Wellspring-dash-three. You are experiencing an acute strain of bacterial meningitis due to some defect in your generation’s cultivation process, the though exact cause is unidentifiable.”

Many questions plagued Paul’s mind in tandem with his headache, and each question he asked seemed not to produce answers but even more questions.

“I can explain each point with greater detail, Paul, but I will start with the most pertinent,” said Noh. “The bacterial meningitis seems to have arisen in your body due to an infinitesimally small miscalculation in the engineering of the Seres Colony Vessel cultivation nexus. In simpler terms, it is the equivalent of an incorrect decimal placement beginning a snowball effect. The result is that as you were growing within the nexus, this strain of bacterial meningitis was growing within your body. However, it was not activated until your body emerged from homeostasis, approximately twelve minutes ago—”

“Wait, I was grown?”

“—which means you have approximately three minutes to inject yourself with that cartridge of nanocells, or you will die, Paul,” said Noh. “The nanocells will counteract the inflammation caused by the bacteria and eventually destroy it while feeding off your body’s supply of adenosine triphosphate. The side effect is extreme exhaustion, due to the necessity of adeonsine triphosphate to carry out most of your basic bodily functions, but full health will return in a matter of hours.”

“I’ll die?”

“Yes, Paul,” said Noh. “In approximately two minutes. Please inject yourself with one of the green cartridges now.”

Paul jabbed his hand into the mass of cylinders neatly arrayed on the shelf, causing most of them to knock over, some spilling out of the cabinet and scattering across the counter. When he finally singled one out, he yanked the jet injector out of its wall charger and hastily screwed the cylinder into the rear of the gun. He gripped the handle tightly and rested his finger on the trigger, then paused. “Where?”

“Inject the cartridge into the back of your neck, Paul,” said Noh. “This will begin the transfer—”

Paul jammed the injector against the back of his neck and pulled the trigger. He felt a quick sting followed by an immediate rush up his neck and into his head, as if he stood up rapidly after sitting for too long. His vision blurred and his mind tingled. There was a chair pushed under the counter. He pulled it out and slumped down into it, weakly forcing the jet injector back up onto the counter. He felt suddenly exhausted.

“You will notice the pain and pressure in your head decreasing, Paul,” said Noh.

“Yeah,” sighed Paul. He had a strong desire to sleep.

“You will be unable to be physically active for some time now, Paul,” said Noh. “Now is an ideal time to voice any other questions you might have.”

Paul’s head rolled on his shoulders as he fought to keep it upright. Though his neck could hardly hold his head, his head itself felt light and airy in the sudden absence of pressure.

“Paul,” said Noh. “You must try to maintain consciousness. The alternative is minor to significant brain damage.”

His eyelids fluttered open then gradually sagged back together. “Wha…what is…a Seres Colony…”

“The Seres Colony Vessel is an interstellar starship designed to spread human life away from Earth, providing human beings with history, culture, and methods of communication so that their society may be maintained while also offering the benefits of greater physical space. ‘Seres’ is an acronym for ‘Self-Replicating Spaceship.’ It is also a homophone of ‘Ceres,’ the implications of which I am programmed not to speculate.”

“Wh…”

“A self-replicating spaceship is a vessel equipped with a vast array of automated machines, each specializing in a different process, linked to a central artificial intelligence system that has governance over each and every process, specializing in nothing. It was found that this cut down on production costs of the Seres vessels, less expensive than equipping each machine with an artificial intelligence system. These processes include construction, maintenance, agriculture, human cultivation, exploration, defense, and development.

“For example, the machine you saw outside your window is part of the agricultural branch. When the Wellspring-dash-three arrived on this planet, it was determined that while the pioneer units adequately altered living conditions in the atmosphere to support human life, the soil was particularly deficient in nitrogen. Rather than prolonging the human cultivation process further by waiting for the pioneer units to correct this original miscalculation, fertilization machines were constructed to provide plants with the necessary nitrogen until the natural growth and decay cycle balanced the soil itself.

“What do you wish to learn of now, Paul?” said Noh.

The room had begun to rotate back and forth in front of Paul. When he closed his eyes, he felt that he was spinning instead. “I can’t…I can’t…”

“Paul?” said Noh. “You really must focus, Paul. You have done exceptionally well, compared to your predecessors. You are almost through the birthing process.”

“I don’t understand,” gasped Paul. “I don’t…understand! I can’t…” Pain began to seep back into his head.

“Paul, the quantity of nanocells in your bloodstream is decreasing far too rapidly to match their destruction of the meningitis,” said Noh in a quicker tempo. “Focus on my voice, Paul. Imagine the sunrise, Paul. Remember the sunrise and its color. Focus on my—”