Wireless (12 page)

“They? Hang on, did you take workers, or . . . ?”

“No, just the queen. None of these bugs is more than a month old.”

The termites have stopped banging on the glass. They form two rows on either side of the stick, pointing their heads up at the huge, monadic mammals beyond the alien barrier. Looking at them closely Maddy notices other signs of morphological change: the increasing complexity of their digits, the bulges at the backs of their heads.
Is the queen changing, too?
she asks herself, briefly troubled by visions of a malignant intelligence rapidly swelling beneath the surface of the vivarium, plotting its escape by moonlight.

John stands behind Maddy and folds his arms around her. She shivers. “I feel as if they’re
watching
us.”

“But to them it’s not about us, is it?” he whispers in her ear. “Come on. All that’s happening is you’ve trained them to ring a bell so the experimenters give them a snack. They think the universe was made for their convenience. Dumb insects, just a bundle of reflexes really. Let’s feed them and go back to bed.”

The two humans leave and climb the stairs together, arm in arm, leaving the angry aboriginal hive to plot its escape unnoticed.

Gregor sits on a bench on the Esplanade, looking out across the river toward the Statue of Liberty. He’s got a bag of stale bread crumbs, and he’s ministering to the flock of pigeons that scuttle and peck around his feet. The time is six minutes to three on the afternoon of October the First, and the year is irrelevant. In fact, it’s too late. This is how it always ends, although the onshore breeze and the sunlight are unexpected bonus payments.

The pigeons jostle and chase one another as he drops another piece of crust on the pavement. For once he hasn’t bothered to soak them overnight in 5 percent warfarin solution. There is such a thing as a free lunch, if you’re a pigeon in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’s going to be dead soon, and, if any of the pigeons survive, they’re welcome to the wreckage.

There aren’t many people about, so when the puffing middle-aged guy in the suit comes into view, jogging along as if he’s chasing his stolen wallet, Gregor spots him instantly. It’s Brundle, looking slightly pathetic when removed from his man-hive. Gregor waves hesitantly, and Brundle alters course.

“Running late,” he pants, kicking at the pigeons until they flap away to make space for him at the other end of the bench.

“Really?”

Brundle nods. “They should be coming over the horizon in another five minutes.”

“How did you engineer it?” Gregor isn’t particularly interested, but technical chitchat serves to pass the remaining seconds.

“Man-in-the-middle, ramified by all their intelligence assessments.” Brundle looks self-satisfied. “Understanding their caste specialization makes it easier. Two weeks ago we told the GRU that MacNamara was using the NP-101 program as cover for a preemptive D-SLAM strike. At the same time we got the NOAA to increase their mapping-launch frequency, and pointed the increased level of Soviet activity out to our sources in SAC. It doesn’t take much to get the human hives buzzing with positive feedback.”

Of course, Brundle and Gregor aren’t using words for this incriminating exchange. Their phenotypically human bodies conceal some useful modifications, knobby encapsulated tumors of neuroecto derm that shield the delicate tissues of their designers, neural circuits that have capabilities human geneticists haven’t even imagined. A visitor from a more advanced human society might start chattering excitedly about wet-phase nanomachines and neural-directed broadband packet radio, but nobody in New York on a sunny day in 1979 plus one million is thinking in those terms. They still think the universe belongs to their own kind, skull-locked social—but not eusocial—primates. Brundle and Gregor know better. They’re workers of a higher order, carefully tailored to the task in hand, and although they look human, there’s less to their humanity than meets the eye. Even Gagarin can probably guess better, an individualist trapped in the machinery of a utopian political hive. The termites of New Iowa and a host of other Galapagos continents on the disk are not the future, but they’re a superior approximation to anything humans have achieved, even those planetary instantiations that have doctored their own genome in order to successfully implement true eusocial societies. Group minds aren’t prone to anthropic errors.

“So it’s over, is it?” Gregor asks aloud, in the stilted serial speech to which humans are constrained.

“Yep. Any minute now—”

The air-raid sirens begin to wail. Pigeons spook, exploding outward in a cloud of white panic.

“Oh, look.”

The entity behind Gregor’s eyes stares out across the river, marking time while his cancers call home. He’s always vague about these last hours before the end of a mission—a destructive time, in which information is lost—but at least he remembers the rest. As do the hyphae of the huge rhizome network spreading deep beneath the park, thinking slow vegetable thoughts and relaying his sparky monadic flashes back to his mother by way of the engineered fungal strands that thread the deep ocean floors. The next version of him will be created knowing almost everything: the struggle to contain the annoying, hard-to-domesticate primates with their insistent paranoid individualism, the dismay of having to carefully sterilize the few enlightened ones like Sagan . . .

Humans are not useful. The future belongs to ensemble intelligences, hive minds. Even the mock-termite aboriginals have more to contribute. And Gregor, with his teratomas and his shortage of limbs, has more to contribute than most. The culture that sent him, and a million other anthropomorphic infiltrators, understands this well: he will be rewarded and propagated, his genome and memeome preserved by the collective even as it systematically eliminates yet another outbreak of humanity. The collective is well on its way toward occupying a tenth of the disk, or at least of sweeping it clean of competing life-forms. Eventually it will open negotiations with its neighbors on the other disks, joining the process of forming a distributed consciousness that is a primitive echo of the vast ramified intelligence wheeling across the sky so far away. And this time round, knowing
why
it is being birthed, the new God will have a level of self-understanding denied to its parent.

Gregor anticipates being one of the overmind’s memories: it is a fate none of these humans will know save at secondhand, filtered through his eusocial sensibilities. To the extent that he bothers to consider the subject, he thinks it is a disappointment. He may be here to help exterminate them, but it’s not a personal grudge: it’s more like pouring gasoline on a troublesome ant heap that’s settled in the wrong backyard. The necessity irritates him, and he grumbles aloud in Brundle’s direction: “If they realized how thoroughly they’d been infiltrated, or how badly their own individuality lets them down—”

Flashes far out over the ocean, ruby glare reflected from the thin tatters of stratospheric cloud.

“—They might learn to cooperate someday. Like us.”

More flashes, moving closer now as the nuclear battlefront evolves.

Brundle nods. “But then, they wouldn’t be human anymore. And in any case, they’re much too late. A million years too late.”

A flicker too bright to see, propagating faster than the signaling speed of nerves, punctuates their conversation. Seconds later, the mach wave flushes their cinders from the bleached concrete of the bench. Far out across the disk, the game of ape and ant continues; but in this place and for the present time, the question has been answered. And there are no human winners.

Rogue Farm

It was a bright, cool March morning: mare’s tails trailed across the southeastern sky toward the rising sun. Joe shivered slightly in the driver’s seat as he twisted the starter handle on the old front-loader he used to muck out the barn. Like its owner, the ancient Massey Ferguson had seen better days; but it had survived worse abuse than Joe routinely handed out. The diesel clattered, spat out a gobbet of thick blue smoke, and chattered to itself dyspeptically. His mind as blank as the sky above, Joe slid the tractor into gear, raised the front scoop, and began turning it toward the open doors of the barn—just in time to see an itinerant farm coming down the road.

“Bugger,” swore Joe. The tractor engine made a hideous grinding noise and died. He took a second glance, eyes wide, then climbed down from the tractor and trotted over to the kitchen door at the side of the farmhouse. “Maddie!” he called, forgetting the two-way radio clipped to his sweater hem. “Maddie! There’s a farm coming!”

“Joe? Is that you? Where are you?” Her voice wafted vaguely from the bowels of the house.

“Where are
you
?” he yelled back.

“I’m in the bathroom.”

“Bugger,” he said again. “If it’s the one we had round the end last month . . .”

The sound of a toilet sluiced through his worry. It was followed by a drumming of feet on the staircase, then Maddie erupted into the kitchen. “Where is it?” she demanded.

“Out front, about a quarter mile up the lane.”

“Right.” Hair wild and eyes angry about having her morning ablutions cut short, Maddie yanked a heavy green coat on over her shirt. “Opened the cupboard yet?”

“I was thinking you’d want to talk to it first.”

“Too right I want to talk to it. If it’s that one that’s been lurking in the copse near Edgar’s pond, I got some
issues
to discuss with it.” Joe shook his head at her anger and went to unlock the cupboard in the back room. “You take the shotgun and keep it off our property,” she called after him. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

Joe nodded to himself, then carefully picked out the twelve-gauge and a preloaded magazine. The gun’s power-on self-test lights flickered erratically, but it seemed to have a full charge. Slinging it, he locked the cupboard carefully and went back out into the farmyard to warn off their unwelcome visitor.

The farm squatted, buzzing and clicking to itself, in the road outside Armitage End. Joe eyed it warily from behind the wooden gate, shotgun under his arm. It was a medium-sized one, probably with half a dozen human components subsumed into it—a formidable collective. Already it was deep into farm-fugue, no longer relating very clearly to people outside its own communion of mind. Beneath its leathery black skin he could see hints of internal structure, cyto cellular macroassemblies flexing and glooping in disturbing motions. Even though it was only a young adolescent, it was already the size of an antique heavy tank, and blocked the road just as efficiently as an Apatosaurus would have. It smelled of yeast and gasoline.

Joe had an uneasy feeling that it was watching him. “Buggerit, I don’t have time for this,” he muttered. The stable waiting for the small herd of cloned spidercows cluttering up the north paddock was still knee-deep in manure, and the tractor seat wasn’t getting any warmer while he shivered out here waiting for Maddie to come and sort this thing out. It wasn’t a big herd, but it was as big as his land and his labor could manage—the big biofabricator in the shed could assemble mammalian livestock faster than he could feed them up and sell them with an honest HAND-RAISED NOT VAT-GROWN label. “What do you want with us?” he yelled up at the gently buzzing farm.

“Brains, fresh brains for baby Jesus,” crooned the farm in a warm contralto, startling Joe half out of his skin. “Buy my brains!” Half a dozen disturbing cauliflower shapes poked suggestively out of the farm’s back, then retracted, coyly.

“Don’t want no brains around here,” Joe said stubbornly, his fingers whitening on the stock of the shotgun. “Don’t want your kind round here, neither. Go away.”

“I’m a nine-legged semiautomatic groove machine!” crooned the farm. “I’m on my way to Jupiter on a mission for love! Won’t you buy my brains?” Three curious eyes on stalks extruded from its upper glacis.