The black swarm moved away from our sedan over to the Toyota. We watched as it slid from one window to another, trying to get in. Charley grinned at me through the glass. “It’s not like the shed. These cars are airtight. So… fuck ’em.”
“What about the air vents?” I said.
“I shut mine.”
“But they aren’t airtight, are they?”
“No,” he said. “But you’d have to go under the hood to begin to get in. Or maybe through the trunk. And I’m betting this overbred buzzball can’t figure that out.” Inside our car, Mae was snapping closed the dashboard air ducts one after another. She opened the glove compartment, glanced inside, shut it again. I said, “You find any keys?”
She shook her head, no.
Over the headset, Ricky said, “Guys? You got more company.”
I turned to see two additional swarms coming around the shed. They immediately swirled over our car, front and back. I felt like we were in a dust storm. I looked at Mae. She was sitting very still, stony-faced, just watching.
The two new clouds finished circling the car, then came to the front. One was positioned just outside Mae’s passenger door window. It pulsed, glinting silver. The other was on the hood of the car, moving back and forth from Mae to me. From time to time, it would rush the windshield, and disperse itself over the glass. Then it would coalesce again, back away down the hood, and rush again.
Charley cackled gleefully. “Trying to get in. I told you: they can’t do it.” I wasn’t so sure. I noticed that with each charge, the swarm would move farther back down the hood, taking a longer run. Soon it would back itself up to the front grill. And if it started inspecting the grill, it could find the opening to the air vents. And then it would be over. Mae was rummaging in the utility compartment between the seats. She came up with a roll of tape and a box of plastic sandwich baggies. She said, “Maybe we can tape the vents…” I shook my head. “There’s no point,” I said. “They’re nanoparticles. They’re small enough to pass right through a membrane.”
“You mean they’d come through the plastic?”
“Or around, through small cracks. You can’t seal it well enough to keep them out.”
“Then we just sit here?”
“Basically, yes.”
“And hope they don’t figure it out.”
I nodded. “That’s right.”
Over the headset, Bobby Lembeck said, “Wind’s starting to pick up again. Six knots.” It sounded like he was trying to be encouraging, but six knots wasn’t anywhere near enough force. The swarms outside the windshield moved effortlessly around the car. Charley said, “Jack? I just lost my buzzball. Where is it?”
I looked over at Charley’s car, and saw that the third swarm had slid down to the front tire well, where it was swirling in circles and moving in and out through the holes in the hubcap. “Checking your hubcaps, Charley,” I said.
“Umm.” He sounded unhappy, and with good reason. If the swarm started exploring the car thoroughly, it might stumble on a way in. He said, “I guess the question is, how big is their SO component, really?”
“That’s right,” I said.
Mae said, “In English?”
I explained. The swarms had no leader, and no central intelligence. Their intelligence was the sum of the individual particles. Those particles self-organized into a swarm, and their self-organizing tendency had unpredictable results. You really didn’t know what they would do. The swarms might continue to be ineffective, as they were now. They might come upon the solution by chance. Or they might start searching in an organized way. But they hadn’t done that so far.
My clothes were heavy, soaked in sweat. Sweat was dripping from my nose and chin. I wiped my forehead with the back of my arm. I looked at Mae. She was sweating, too. Ricky said, “Hey, Jack?”
“What.”
“Julia called a while ago. She’s checked out of the hospital and-”
“Not now, Ricky.”
“She’s coming out here tonight.”
“We’ll talk later, Ricky.”
“I just thought you’d want to know.”
“Jesus,” Charley said, exploding. “Someone tell this asshole to shut up. We’re busy!”
Bobby Lembeck said, “Eight knots of wind now. No, sorry… seven.”
Charley said, “Jesus, the suspense is killing me. Where’s my swarm now, Jack?”
“Under the car. I can’t see what it’s doing… No, wait… It’s coming up behind you, Charley. Looks like it’s checking out your taillights.”
“Some kind of car freak,” he said. “Well, it can check away.”
I was looking over my shoulder at Charley’s swarm when Mae said, “Jack. Look.” The swarm outside her window on the passenger side had changed. It was almost entirely silver now, shimmering but pretty stable, and on this silver surface I saw Mae’s head and shoulders reflected back. The reflection wasn’t perfect, because her eyes and mouth were slightly blurred, but basically it was accurate.
I frowned. “It’s a mirror…”
“No,” she said. “It’s not.” She turned away from the window to look at me. Her image on the silver surface did not change. The face continued to stare into the car. Then, after a moment or two, the image shivered, dissolved and re-formed to show the back of her head. “What does that mean?” Mae said.
“I’ve got a pretty good idea, but-”
The swarm on the front hood was doing the same thing, except that its silver surface showed the two of us sitting side by side in the car, looking very frightened. Again, the image was somewhat blurred. And now it was clear to me that the swarm was not a literal mirror. The swarm itself was generating the image by the precise positioning of individual particles, which meant-
“Bad news,” Charley said.
“I know,” I said. “They’re innovating.”
“What do you figure, is it one of the presets?”
“Basically, yes. I assume it’s imitation.”
Mae shook her head, not understanding.
“The program presets certain strategies to help attain goals. The strategies model what real predators do. So one preset strategy is to freeze where you are and wait, to ambush. Another is to random-walk until you stumble on your prey, and then pursue. A third is to camouflage yourself by taking on some element of the environment, so you blend in. And a fourth is to mimic the prey’s behavior-to imitate it.”
She said, “You think this is imitation?”
“I think this is a form of imitation, yes.”
“It’s trying to make itself appear like us?”
“Yes.”
“This is emergent behavior? It’s evolved on its own?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Bad news,” Charley said mournfully. “Bad, bad news.”
Sitting in the car, I started to get angry. Because what the mirror imaging meant to me was that I didn’t know the real structure of the nanoparticles. I’d been told there was a piezo wafer that would reflect light. So it wasn’t surprising that the swarm occasionally flashed silver in the sun. That didn’t call for sophisticated orientation of the particles. In fact, you would expect that sort of silvery ripple as a random effect, just the way heavily trafficked highways will clog up and then flow freely again. The congestion was caused by random speed changes from one or two motorists, but the effect rippled down the entire highway. The same would be true of the swarms. A chance effect would pass like a wave down the swarm. And that’s what we had seen.
But this mirroring behavior was something entirely different. The swarms were now producing images in color, and holding them fairly stable. Such complexity wasn’t possible from the simple nanoparticle I’d been shown. I doubted you could generate a full spectrum from a silver layer. It was theoretically possible that the silver could be precisely tilted to produce prismatic colors, but that implied enormous sophistication of movement.
It was more logical to imagine that the particles had another method to create colors. And that meant I hadn’t been told the truth about the particles, either. Ricky had lied to me yet again. So I was angry.
I had already concluded something was wrong with Ricky, and in retrospect, the problem lay with me, not him. Even after the debacle in the storage shed, I still failed to grasp that the swarms were evolving faster than our ability to keep pace with them. I should have realized what I was up against when the swarms demonstrated a new strategy-making the floor slippery to disable their prey, and to move them. Among ants, that would be called collective transport; the phenomenon was well known. But for these swarms, it was unprecedented, newly evolved behavior. Yet at the time I was too horrified to recognize its true significance. Now, sitting in the hot car, it wasn’t useful to blame Ricky, but I was scared, and tired, and I wasn’t thinking clearly.
“Jack.” Mae nudged my shoulder, and pointed to Charley’s car.
Her face was grim.
The swarm by the taillight of Charley’s car was now a black stream that curved high in the air, and then disappeared in the seam where the red plastic joined the metal. Over the headset I said, “Hey, Charley… I think it’s found a way.”
“Yeah, I see it. Fuck a duck.”
Charley was scrambling into the backseat. Already particles were beginning to fill the inside of the car, making a gray fog that rapidly darkened. Charley coughed. I couldn’t see what he was doing, he was down below the window. He coughed again.
“Charley?”
He didn’t answer. But I heard him swearing.
“Charley, you better get out.”
“Fuck these guys.”
And then there was an odd sound, which at first I couldn’t place. I turned to Mae, who was pressing her headset to her ear. It was a strange, rhythmic rasping. She looked at me questioningly.
“Charley?”
“I’m-spray these little bastards. Let’s see how they do when they’re wet.”
Mae said, “You’re spraying the isotope?”
He didn’t answer. But a moment later he appeared in the window again, spraying in all directions with the Windex bottle. Liquid streaked across the glass, and dripped down. The interior of the car was growing darker as more and more particles entered. Soon we couldn’t see him at all. His hand emerged from the black, pressed against the glass, then disappeared again. He was coughing continuously. A dry cough.
“Charley,” I said, “run for it.”
“Ah fuck. What’s the point?”
Bobby Lembeck said, “Wind’s ten knots. Go for it.”
Ten knots wasn’t enough but it was better than nothing.
“Charley? You hear?”
We heard his voice from the black interior. “Yeah, okay… I’m looking-can’t find-fucking door handle, can’t feel… Where’s the goddamn door handle on this-” He broke into a spasm of coughing.
Over the headset, I heard voices inside the lab, all speaking rapidly. Ricky said, “He’s in the Toyota. Where’s the handle in the Toyota?”
Bobby Lembeck: “I don’t know, it’s not my car.”
“Whose car is it? Vince?”
Vince: “No, no. It’s that guy with the bad eyes.”
“Who?”
“The engineer. The guy who blinks all the time.”
“David Brooks?”
“Yeah. Him.”
Ricky said, “Guys? We think it’s David’s car.”
I said, “That’s not going to do us any-”
And then I broke off, because Mae was pointing behind her to the backseat of our car. From the seam where the seat cushion met the back, particles were hissing into the car like black smoke.
I looked closer, and saw a blanket on the floor of the backseat. Mae saw it, too, and threw herself bodily into the back, diving between the seats. She kicked me in the head as she went, but she had the blanket and began stuffing it into the crack. My headset came off, and caught on the steering wheel as I tried to climb back to help her. It was cramped in the car. I heard a tinny voice from the earpieces.
“Come on,” Mae said. “Come on.”