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Herb looked at the viewing field and felt his stomach tighten in horror. He had been expecting to see a neat cityscape: line after line of silver needles linked by lacy bridges, cool silver skyscrapers shot through with pink-tinted crystal windows; artfully designed to resemble the spread of colors on a petal. Instead he saw…bleak nothingness. Cold, featureless, gently undulating wasteland spreading in all directions.

Something had gone badly wrong. Suddenly the cozy white leather and polished yellow wood lounge of his spaceship was not the safe cocoon he had grown used to over the past few months. Now they would be coming to prize him from this warm, cushioned shell to cast him shivering into the real world, all because he had made one tiny mistake.

Somehow he had made a mess of the code that should have told the Von Neumann Machines to stop reproducing and start building.

Herb’s machines had eaten up an entire planet.

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