Basic Trope: A swarm of Nanomachines that "eat" everything and turns it into more of itself; usually to catastrophic effect.
- Straight: Alice invents a Nanoswarm that breaks out of containment and quickly strips her to the bone, before eating her lab in about 5 seconds, and intends to move to the surrounding area.
- Exaggerated: The Nanoswarm manages to consume everything in about 10 seconds and is quickly moving.
- Downplayed: The Nanoswarm is slowly moving to invent more of itself. It's slow enough for Alice to keep track of it, though.
- Justified:
- Alice was hired to create a deadly weapon, creating the Nanoswarm, only for it to quickly go horribly and start destroying everything.
- Alice is a Mad Scientist who merely wanted to create a miniaturized Von Neumann machine note out of curiosity without thinking of the consequences.
- Alice made self-replicating Nanomachines in a test of machine abilities, with intent to keep them heavily contained to prevent damage to the environment, only for one of the machines to attach itself to her without noticing and spreading when left at her home.
- Alice invented the Nanoswarm with intent to clean up the streets of liter and turn it into more of itself, so it'd become more efficient, but a programming error makes it believe literally everything is trash.
- Inverted:
- Alice creates a giant machine that creates more of itself.
- Alice creates a Nanoswarm intended to destroy other Nanomachines.
- The Nanoswarm destroys itself to create more substantial items like buildings.
- Subverted: Alice's Nanoswarm eats some material to reproduce itself, but this was a sample intended for it, and it can't actually do similar to non-sample items.
- Double Subverted: The Nanoswarm have a programming error that makes it believe that everything is a sample and starts to chow down on anything in its wake.
- Parodied:
- Alice creates an intelligent ant species that does similar.
- The Nanoswarm only eats certain things like clothing or crappy literature.
- Zig-Zagged: The Nanoswarm is really picky about what it'll eat or when, and if it'll devour everything or not.
- Averted:
- The Nanoswarm can't survive for long outside a specially made environment and dies before it can do much of anything.
- The Nanoswarm is made to be Three Laws-Compliant and won't do this unless specifically requested by Alice.
- There are no Nanoswarms.
- Lampshaded: "You know, I'm not sure why I let a tiny, hard to control machine have the ability to reproduce without putting in some kind of failsafe if it were to break free..."
- Invoked: Alice is angry at the world and decides to create a Nanoswarm as an indiscriminate act of anger.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied:
- "It's not going to destroy the world, there's plenty of backup systems in check in case it was to ever break out."
- "No, I'm not going to create a Nanoswarm, that could risk destroying the world."
- The nanoswarm has a hard-coded limit on its size (either by accident or design) so that it can't get big enough to destroy the world.
- Discussed: "I should probably put some systems in place to prevent a total global destruction in case it gets out."
- Conversed: "You know, I've never really understood how a Grey Goo scenario would be possible; you'd think they'd program it to die if it leaves an area or something."
- Implied: Not Applicable. (There's no real point in having Grey Goo if we don't get to see it.)
- Deconstructed:
- The Nanoswarm can only live for so long outside a control environment and quickly dies out before it can really do much of anything besides wrecking Alice's lab.
- The Nanoswarm has trouble finding things it actually needs to construct more of itself, as it's made of very rare materials that aren't easy to find in either modern buildings or natural environments like Unobtanium or difficult to maintain alloys.
- Reconstructed:
- Too bad Alice decided it needed protection from this with various safeguards and solar power.
- Alice lives in a futuristic society where those materials and/or alloys are very common.
- Played For Laughs:
- The Nanoswarm is stopped by humanity making itself as unappetizing as possible, such as covering themselves in mud and making the streets hideous.
- The Nanoswarm is treated with all the horror usually associated with this trope, only for the machines to short out when a light drizzle hits them. People then start wondering what they were even worried about.
- Played For Drama: The Nanoswarm is contained, and is treated similarly to a nuclear bomb, with intent that it'll only be released in a heavily dire war situation.
- Played For Horror: Humanity has taken to the stars and finds an alien planet overrun by Grey Goo. They wonder how many alien species have ended themselves this way.