“I still do.” I reached for a Kleenex and blew my nose. A lot of black stuff came out, mixed with blood and dust from the desert. I had to blow my nose four or five times to clear it. I crumpled the Kleenex and started to throw it away. Mae held out her hand. “I’ll take that.”
“No, it’s okay-”
“Give it to me, Jack.”
She took the Kleenex and slipped it into a little plastic bag and sealed it. That was when I realized how stupidly my mind was working. Of course that Kleenex would contain exactly the particles I wanted to study. I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and waited for the throbbing in my head to ease up a little. When I opened my eyes again the glare in the room was less bright. It almost looked normal.
“By the way,” Mae said, “Julia just called. She said you can’t call her back, something about some tests. But she wanted to talk to you.”
“Uh-huh.”
I watched Mae take the Kleenex bag and put it inside a sealed jar. She screwed down the lid tightly. “Mae,” I said, “if there’s E. coli in the swarm, we can find out by looking at that right now. Shouldn’t we do that?”
“I can’t right now. I will as soon as I can. I’m having a little trouble with one of the fermentation units, and I need the microscopes for that.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“I’m not sure yet. But yields are falling in one tank.” She shook her head. “It’s probably nothing serious. These things happen all the time. This whole manufacturing process is incredibly delicate, Jack. Keeping it going is like juggling a hundred balls at once. I have my hands full.” I nodded. But I was starting to think that the real reason she wasn’t looking at the Kleenex was that she already knew the swarm contained bacteria. She just didn’t think it was her place to tell me that. And if that’s what was going on, then she never would tell me. “Mae,” I said. “Somebody has to tell me what’s going on here. Not Ricky. I want somebody to really tell me.”
“Good,” she said. “I think that’s a very good idea.”
…
That was how I found myself sitting in front of a computer workstation in one of those small rooms. The project engineer, David Brooks, sat beside me. As he talked, David continuously straightened his clothes-he smoothed his tie, shot his cuffs, snugged his collar, pulled up the creases in his trousers from his thighs. Then he’d cross one ankle over his knee, pull up his sock, cross the other ankle. Run his hands over his shoulders, brushing away imaginary dust. And then start over again. It was all unconscious, of course, and with my headache I might have found it irritating. But I didn’t focus on it. Because with every piece of new information David gave me, my headache got worse and worse.
Unlike Ricky, David had a very organized mind, and he told me everything, starting from the beginning. Xymos had contracted to make a micro-robotic swarm that would function as an aerial camera. The particles were successfully manufactured, and worked indoors. But when they were tested outside, they lacked mobility in wind. The test swarm was blown away in a strong breeze. That was six weeks ago.
“You tested more swarms after that?” I said.
“Yes, many. Over the next four weeks, or so.”
“None worked?”
“Right. None worked.”
“So those original swarms are all gone-blown away by the wind?”
“Yes.”
“Which means the runaway swarms that we see now have nothing to do with your original test swarms.”
“Correct…”
“They are a result of contamination…”
David blinked rapidly. “What do you mean, contamination?”
“The twenty-five kilos of material that was blown by the exhaust fan into the environment because of a missing filter…”
“Who said it was twenty-five kilos?”
“Ricky did.”
“Oh, no, Jack,” David said. “We vented stuff for days. We must have vented five or six hundred kilos of contaminants-bacteria, molecules, assemblers.” So Ricky had been understating the situation again. But I didn’t understand why he bothered to lie about this. After all, it was just a mistake. And as Ricky had said, it was the contractor’s mistake. “Okay,” I said. “And you saw the first of these desert swarms when?”
“Two weeks ago,” David said, nodding and smoothing his tie.
He explained that at first, the swarm was so disorganized that when it first appeared, they thought it was a cloud of desert insects, gnats or something. “It showed up for a while, going here and there around the laboratory building, and then it was gone. It seemed like a random event.”
A swarm appeared again a couple of days later, he said, and by then it was much better organized. “It displayed distinctive swarming behavior, that sort of swirling in the cloud that you’ve seen. So it was clear that it was our stuff.”
“And what happened then?”
“The swarm swirled around the desert near the installation, like before. It came and went. For the next few days, we tried to gain control of it by radio, but we never could. And eventually-about a week after that-we found that none of the cars would start.” He paused. “I went out there to have a look, and I found that all the onboard computers were dead. These days all automobiles have microprocessors built into them. They control everything from fuel injection to radios and door locks.”
“But now the computers were not functioning?”
“Yeah. Actually, the processor chips themselves were fine. But the memory chips had eroded. They’d literally turned to dust.”
I thought, Oh shit. I said, “Could you figure out why?”
“Sure. It wasn’t any big mystery, Jack. The erosion had the characteristic signature of gamma assemblers. You know about that? No? Well, we have nine different assemblers involved in manufacturing. Each assembler has a different function. The gamma assemblers break down carbon material in silicate layers. They actually cut at the nano level-slicing out chunks of carbon substrate.”
“So these assemblers cut the memory chips in the cars.”
“Right, right, but…” David hesitated. He was acting as if I were missing the point. He tugged at his cuffs, fingered his collar. “The thing you have to keep in mind, Jack, is that these assemblers can work at room temperature. If anything, the desert heat’s even better for them. Hotter is more efficient.”
For a moment I didn’t understand what he was talking about. What difference did it make about room temperature or desert heat? What did that have to do with memory chips in cars? And then suddenly, finally, the penny dropped.
“Holy shit,” I said.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
David was saying that a mixture of components had been vented into the desert, and that these components-which were designed to self-assemble in the fabrication structure-would also self-assemble in the outside world. Assembly could be carried out autonomously in the desert. And obviously, that’s exactly what was happening.
I ticked the points off to make sure I had it right. “Basic assembly begins with the bacteria. They’ve been engineered to eat anything, even garbage, so they can find something in the desert to live off of.”
“Right.”
“Which means the bacteria multiply, and begin churning out molecules that self-combine, forming larger molecules. Pretty soon you have assemblers, and the assemblers begin to do the final work and turn out new microagents.”
“Right, right.”
“Which means that the swarms are reproducing.”
“Yes. They are.”
“And the individual agents have memory.”
“Yes. A small amount.”
“And they don’t need much, that’s the whole point of distributed intelligence. It’s collective. So they have intelligence, and since they have memory, they can learn from experience.”
“Yes.”
“And the PREDPREY program means they can solve problems. And the program generates enough random elements to let them innovate.”
“Right. Yes.”
My head throbbed. I was seeing all the implications, now, and they weren’t good. “So,” I said, “what you’re telling me is this swarm reproduces, is self-sustaining, learns from experience, has collective intelligence, and can innovate to solve problems.”
“Yes.”
“Which means for all practical purposes, it’s alive.”
“Yes.” David nodded. “At least, it behaves as if it is alive. Functionally it’s alive, Jack.”
I said, “This is very fucking bad news.”
Brooks said, “Tell me.”
“I’d like to know,” I said, “why this thing wasn’t destroyed a long time ago.”
David said nothing. He just smoothed his tie, and looked uncomfortable. “Because you realize,” I said, “that you’re talking about a mechanical plague. That’s what you’ve got here. It’s just like a bacterial plague, or a viral plague. Except it’s mechanical organisms. You’ve got a fucking man-made plague.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“That’s evolving.”
“Yes.”
“And it’s not limited by biological rates of evolution. It’s probably evolving much faster.”
He nodded. “It is evolving faster.”
“How much faster, David?”
Brooks sighed. “Pretty damn fast. It’ll be different this afternoon, when it comes back.”
“Will it come back?”
“It always does.”
“And why does it come back?” I said.
“It’s trying to get inside.”
“And why is that?”
David shifted uncomfortably. “We have only theories, Jack.”
“Try me.”
“One possibility is that it’s a territorial thing. As you know, the original PREDPREY code includes a concept of a range, of a territory in which the predators will roam. And within that core range, it defines a sort of home base, which the swarm may consider to be the inside of this facility.”
I said, “You believe that?”
“Not really, no.” He hesitated. “Actually,” he said, “most of us think that it comes back looking for your wife, Jack. It’s looking for Julia.”
DAY 6
11:42 A.M.
That was how, with a splitting headache, I found myself on the phone to the hospital in San Jose. “Julia Forman, please.” I spelled the name for the operator. “She’s in the ICU,” the operator said.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I’m sorry but direct calls are not allowed.”
“Then the nursing station.”
“Thank you, please hold.”
I waited. No one was answering the phone. I called back, went through the operator again, and finally got through to the ICU nursing station. The nurse told me Julia was in X-ray and didn’t know when she would be back. I said Julia was supposed to be back by now. The nurse said rather testily that she was looking at Julia’s bed right now, and she could assure me Julia wasn’t in it.
I said I’d call back.
I shut the phone and turned to David. “What was Julia doing in all this?”
“Helping us, Jack.”
“I’m sure. But how, exactly?”
“In the beginning, she was trying to coax it back,” he said. “We needed the swarm close to the building to take control again by radio. So Julia helped us keep it close.”
“How?”
“Well, she entertained it.”
“She what?”