"Oh Jesus," Charley said. "That's all we need."
"Shut up, Charley."
Rosie went to the refrigerator and came back with a bottle of water. She gave it to David, who drank as he cried. She helped him to his feet, nodded to me that she'd take it from here. I went back to the center of the room, where the others were standing by the workstation screen. On the screen, the lines of code had been replaced by a monitor view of the north face of the main building. Four swarms were there, glinting silver as they moved up and down the length of the building.
"What're they doing?" I said.
"Trying to get in."
I said, "Why do they do that?"
"We're not sure," Mae said.
We watched for a moment in silence. Once again I was struck by the purposefulness of their behavior. They reminded me of bears trying to break into a trailer to get food. They paused at every doorway and closed window, hovering there, moving up and down along the seals, until finally moving on to the next opening.
I said, "And do they always try the doors like that?"
"Yes. Why?"
"Because it looks like they don't remember that the doors are sealed."
"No," Charley said. "They don't remember."
"Because they don't have enough memory?"
"Either that," he said, "or this is another generation."
"You mean these are new swarms since noon?"
"Yes."
I looked at my watch. "There's a new generation every three hours?"
Charley shrugged. "I couldn't say. We never found where they reproduce. I'm just guessing." The possibility that new generations were coming that fast meant that whatever evolutionary mechanism was built into the code was progressing fast, too. Ordinarily, genetic algorithms-which modeled reproduction to arrive at solutions-ordinarily, they ran between 500 and 5,000 generations to arrive at an optimization. If these swarms were reproducing every three hours, it meant they had turned over something like 100 generations in the last two weeks. And with 100 generations, the behavior would be much sharper.
Mae watched them on the monitor and said, "At least they're staying by the main building. It seems like they don't know we're here."
"How would they know?" I said.
"They wouldn't," Charley said. "Their main sensory modality is vision. They may have picked up a little auditory over the generations, but it's still primarily vision. If they don't see it, it doesn't exist for them."
Rosie came over with David. He said, "I'm really sorry, guys."
"No problem."
"It's okay, David."
"I don't know what happened. I just couldn't stand it."
Charley said, "Don't worry, David. We understand. You're a psycho and you cracked. We get the picture. No problem."
Rosie put her arm around David, who blew his nose loudly. She stared at the monitor. "What's happening with them now?" Rosie said.
"They don't seem to know we're here."
"Okay…"
"We're hoping it stays that way."
"Uh-huh. And if it doesn't?" Rosie said.
I had been thinking about that. "If it doesn't, we rely on the holes in the PREDPREY assumptions. We exploit the weaknesses in the programming."
"Which means?"
"We flock," I said.
Charley gave a horse laugh. "Yeah, right, we flock-and pray like hell!"
"I'm serious," I said.
Over the last thirty years, scientists had studied predator-prey interactions in everything from the lion to the hyena to the warrior ant. There was now a much better understanding of how prey defended themselves. Animals like zebras and caribou didn't live in herds because they were sociable; herding was a defense against predation. Large numbers of animals provided increased vigilance. And attacking predators were often confused when the herd fled in all directions. Sometimes they literally stopped cold. Show a predator too many moving targets and it often chased none.
The same thing was true of flocking birds and schooling fish-those coordinated group movements made it harder for predators to pick out a single individual. Predators were drawn to attack an animal that was distinctive in some way. That was one reason why they attacked infants so often-not only because they were easier prey, but because they looked different. In the same way, predators killed more males than females because nondominant males tended to hang on the outskirts of the herd, where they were more noticeable. In fact, thirty years ago when Hans Kruuk studied hyenas in the Serengeti, he found that putting paint on an animal guaranteed it would be killed in the next attack. That was the power of difference.
So the message was simple. Stay together. Stay the same.
That was our best chance.
But I hoped it wouldn't come to that.
The swarms disappeared for a while. They had gone around to the other side of the laboratory building. We waited tensely. Eventually they reappeared. They once again moved along the side of the building, trying openings one after another.
We all watched the monitor. David Brooks was sweating profusely. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. "How long are they going to keep doing that?"
"As long as they fucking want," Charley said.
Mae said, "At least until the wind kicks up again. And it doesn't look like that's going to happen soon."
"Jesus," David said. "I don't know how you guys can stand it." He was pale; sweat had dripped from his eyebrows onto his glasses. He looked like he was going to pass out. I said, "David. Do you want to sit down?"
"Maybe I better."
"Okay."
"Come on, David," Rosie said. She took him across the room to the sink, and sat him on the floor. He hugged his knees, put his head down. She put cold water on a paper towel and placed it on the back of his neck. Her gestures were tender.
"That fucking guy," Charley said, shaking his head. "That's all we need right now."
"Charley," Mae said, "you're not helping…"
"So what? We're trapped in this fucking shed, it's not fucking airtight, there's nothing we can do, no place we can go, and he's fucking cracking up, makes everything worse."
"Yes," she said quietly, "that's all true. And you're not helping it."
Charley gave her a look, and began to hum the theme from The Twilight Zone. "Charley," I said. "Pay attention." I was watching the swarms. Their behavior had subtly changed. They no longer stayed close to the building. Instead, they now moved in a zigzag pattern away from the wall into the desert, and then back again. They were all doing it, in a kind of fluid dance.
Mae saw it, too. "New behavior…"
"Yes," I said. "Their strategy isn't working, so they're trying something else."
"Not going to do shit for them," Charley said. "They can zigzag all they want, it won't open any doors."
Even so, I was fascinated to see this emergent behavior. The zigzags were becoming more exaggerated; the swarms were moving farther and farther away from the buildings. Their strategy was shifting progressively. It was evolving as we watched. "It's really amazing," I said. "Little fuckers," Charley said.
One of the swarms was now quite close to the rabbit carcass. It approached within a few yards, and swirled away again, heading back to the main building. A thought occurred to me. "How well do the swarms see?"
The headset clicked. It was Ricky. "They see fabulously," he said. "It's what they were made to do, after all. Eyesight's twenty-oh-five," he said. "Fantastic resolution. Better than any human." I said, "And how do they do the imaging?" Because they were just a series of individual particles. Like the rods and cones in the eye, central processing was required to form a picture from all the inputs. How was that processing accomplished?
Ricky coughed. "Uh… not sure."