The Ring of Charon

The Life Cycle of the Charonians

The Charonians are a spacefaring life-form, a multi-species comprising ten or twenty widely different species, devices, and robotic constructs. The biological components of the system may at one time have been “intelligent,” as the term is usually understood by humans, but no longer are. Charonians are capable of problem solving, task ordering, directed research, synthesis, but are very weak in what humans would regard as creative or independent thought. They can think of how to do things—how to work around problems, for example. They are not as good at thinking of what to do, or why. They work in large part by rote. In the old-fashioned phrase, they are hard-wired, relying on a communal heritage memory of the experiences of previous generations.

It is likely the present-day Charonians started out as seedships for a colonization venture, bearing the original biological Charonians to new homes in the sky, but either by ill chance or deliberate decision on the part of the robotic guardians of the germ plasm, things changed.

The machine-intelligent components of the system redesigned the system, repeatedly modifying both themselves and the genes of the living components. The result: the Charonians have become a form of von Neumann machine, capable of endlessly replicating themselves.

Humans have spent lifetimes studying the idea of von Neumann machines, but the concept, however appealing, has always been out of reach because the cost and engineering challenges were too great. No one ever considered a simple, elegant solution to the problem: that life is a von Neumann machine. We humans can endlessly duplicate ourselves. If our DNA were modified so that we instinctively built a certain type of spacecraft, and that spacecraft automatically carried our germ plasm to another world, then that would be a von Neumann. It is, after all, not the machine itself that must be duplicated and spread across the galaxy for the idea to work, but the plans for the machine.

Several types of life-form and robot compose the Charonian multispecies. The living and robotic components rely on each other in the processes of reproduction and replication. Neither the biotic nor the mechanical Charonians could survive without the other.

The Charonians have proved that faster-than-light travel is possible, but only between points linked by black hole transit pairs and the “wormhole” connecting the transit pair. Natural black holes do not work in wormhole systems—a spacefarer must build his own. Therefore, before faster-than-light travel between two stars is possible, sub-lightspeed vehicles must move between the two stars, building black holes on arrival at the star to be visited. Unfortunately, a device the size of the Ring of Charon is required to form a black hole.