In the beginning, there was the Blueprint.

It had been written, formatted, debugged, and committed to Githulk by a team of people who, if asked, would call themselves _visionaries_, and if asked again under a truth serum, would confess to being underpaid, failing graduate students with nothing going for them other than a shared fridge and too much optimism.

The Blueprint was elegant. It was modular. It could fix itself. It was, in essence, a self-replicating nanobot design. A Von Neumann machine that could harvest raw materials, smelt them, shape them, and produce tiny, perfect copies of itself. It was designed to terraform planets, colonise or mine asteroids, and tidy up after humanity like a very small, tireless nanny made entirely of grey goo and dust.

Unfortunately, the budget was cut halfway through Phase Two of testing, which is to say: _before anyone had actually tested anything at all_.

Enter Axwood-Beltham Industries: a defence contractor so advanced it could charge twelve billion pounds for a submarine that didn’t have a conning tower. Axwood-Beltham saw the untested Blueprint, noted that it had “potential strategic utility,” and promptly filed it under **Tactical Applications: Espionage & Denial**.

However, filing things away, especially at Atwood-Beltham, does not always mean what you might think it means, and so, to everyone’s abiding dismay, began the Great Replication.

~~~

The first Von Neumann package was deployed not in a red Martian crater or some other far, but not too far away, ball of rock, but instead in a perfectly ordinary compost heap behind a government building in North Devon.

It was an older government building. Very old. No one quite remembered which department it had belonged to. It was one of those buildings that was once a truly magnificent edifice, would still be magnificent if anyone cared to think about it, but was utterly unloved. A hangover from more aspirational times tottering forward in an age when people much preferred very poor construction materials, thin aerated concrete and uncomfortable chairs - and all from the lowest bidder. There was a sign that may once have read ‘Inland Revenue (Devon) Offices’, but most of the property had long ago become a home for moss, pigeons, several unidentifiable rodents and at least one suspiciously intelligent badger, who, it’s fair to say was previously of no fixed abode.

The compost heap had once been an eco-initiative. Now, it was an experimental deployment zone.

The nanobot, was released at 8:00am sharp, with absolutely no fanfare or preamble, by a man in a hazmat suit. Which was, he felt, a nice change from being a Facilities Manager. It was about the size of a grain of sand. It was shaped like a grain of sand. If you got it under your fingernail you would probably mistake it for a grain of sand.

Fortunately, the man wore gloves and anyway had very short fingernails. The nanobot liked carbon. It liked iron. It liked sulphates, nitrates, trace metals, isotropic compounds of heavy metals, cold and vacuum. Strangely, it also sought out rubber bands, ceramic flowerpots. It was not averse to a pair of good, old-fashioned army boots.

Once into the compost heap it began to eat.

And then it began to build.

~~~

Three days later, the compost heap got up and walked off.