Within a few minutes, half-a-dozen other bundles had risen to the surface. Their light was bright enough that Liz could make out Tobias sitting next to her.
“I wonder why these bundles are so much larger than those we saw earlier,” she said. “They’re even larger than the ones I saw in the pools beside the fissure.”
“Those worms washed down from under the ice,” he said. “You may not have seen a representative sample. I wish I had my equipment. I’d like to see if there’s some correlation between the introns in the separate bundles.”
“Maybe all the worms in the same bundle have the same introns,” Liz suggested. “Maybe that’s what draws them together.”
“Maybe. Or maybe they all have different introns—if they have to cross-pollinate in some way.”
“But you have no idea why their introns are so different from ours?”
He shook his head. “They probably contain some kind of information, but what it is, I have no idea.”
“Information…?” she said.
“That’s really all our genes are,” he said. “A storage system for information that can be read each time our cells divide.”
“I guess I never thought of it like that. When I was gathering the worms, I just grabbed the ones I could reach. Like you said, maybe they weren’t representative. Maybe that’s why the bundles rejected them.”
“Say that again,” he said.
“Say what?”
“How you just gathered the ones you could reach.”
“I just gathered the ones I could reach,” she repeated. “Maybe they weren’t representative.”
“Again,” he said.
She repeated the phrase several more times, but rather than listening to her, Tobias’ attention was focused on the bundles of worms in front of them.
“That bundle right there,” he said, pointing at the nearest bundle. “Keep repeating the same phrase and watch how the waves of light move across its surface.”
She repeated the phrase again, watching the colors flow from one worm to the next. As the wave moved, it shifted from green to yellow to blue, reversing direction in time with her words.
“That’s what I saw down in the fissure,” she said. The colors appeared to deepen with the rising excitement in her voice. “They’re responding to what I’m saying, aren’t they? They’re mimicking the cadence of my voice.”
“I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it,” Tobias said. “But you’re right. That’s exactly what they’re doing.”
Over the next two days, Liz repeatedly tried to raise the ship to no avail.
“Anybody, we’re still alive,” she kept repeating into her mission assistant. “If you can hear me, please answer. We’re under the ice. Anybody, please…”
“It’ll be all right,” Tobias reassured her. “We’ll get through.”
“But the mining ships should be here by now,” she said. “What if they…?”
She couldn’t bring herself to say, “What if they start cutting away the core while we’re still here?” But she could see from the worried expression in Tobias’s eyes that he knew exactly what she was thinking.
In between her attempts to contact the ship, Liz tried to focus her attention on the worms.
“They have to be intelligent,” she said. “I mean look at the way they’re responding to our voices.”
Tobias’ features were lined in shadow as he peered into the pale blue glow emanating from the water. “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “What we’re seeing could be nothing more than an artifact of the way we’re interacting with them.”
“But they’re responding to our voices,” she said.
“True,” he said. “But computers respond to external stimuli. We can program them to tell us when the air quality is failing, when the temperature is rising… all sorts of things. They can even do it with a voice that sounds human. That makes it easy to think of them as intelligent. But what appears as intelligence is really just an artifact of how we’ve programmed them.”
Liz climbed to her feet, peering down into the water beside Tobias. Despite his reservations, she couldn’t help feeling that the bundles—or colonies, as she’d come to think of them—were self-aware. She’d even assigned some of them names. She called the largest bundle Glimmer, because it seemed to glimmer with intelligence when it responded to her voice. The one she called Neon, on the other hand, seemed to become increasingly excited the longer she spoke to it, flashing more and more erratically, while Limelight seemed simply to enjoy flashing long displays that appeared to be more in response to its own feelings than anything she was saying.
She also noticed that the bundles seemed to talk to each other, as though the patterns of light were a language that they used to communicate among themselves.
“I’ll admit their behavior looks intelligent,” Tobias conceded. “But the worms I dissected back in the igloo simply didn’t have the large nerve bundles you’d expect with higher intelligence.”
“Maybe it isn’t the worms themselves that are intelligent,” she said. “Maybe it’s the colonies. Maybe the individual worms are more like the neurons in our brains. They don’t retain much knowledge themselves, but as groups they form the patterns we associate with intelligence and self-awareness.”
“It’s a possibility,” he said. “But if we assume the colonies are like human brains, we have to ask how they maintain their intelligence over time.”
“Over time?”
Tobias knelt, studying a group of worms clustered in front of him. “Unlike the neurons in our brains, the worms in any given bundle come and go. They aren’t always the same worms. With the way the bundles shrink and grow, they may actually be composed of entirely different worms from one day to the next—even though they seem to maintain the personalities you’ve identified.”
Liz frowned. Not only was Tobias right, she’d also noticed that when the colonies shrank past a certain point, they lost their personalities completely. That, she now realized, had been the problem with the worms she’d brought back to the igloo. They hadn’t formed colonies large enough to respond to anything in their environment, much less her voice.
“So,” Tobias continued, “if the unique personalities disappear entirely when the worms scatter, what’s the thing we’re really interacting with? Especially, what is it if it comes back into existence with an entirely different mix of worms supporting it?”
Liz’s brow tightened. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
“Personality,” he explained. “Identity. It shouldn’t exist independently of the physical entity that supports it. My identity is an emergent property of the impulses moving along my neurons. It doesn’t exist in some mind-space off on its own. But with the worms, it looks like it does. So the question is, what is the thing we’re talking to? Where does it go if an entirely different group of worms can call it back again?”
Liz started to speak, then looked off across the water. She didn’t have an answer to Tobias’s question. In fact, she wasn’t sure she even understood it.
In between her conversations with Tobias about the worms, Liz continued trying to raise the Arrow.
“Anyone, if you can hear me, please answer. We’re alive down here. We need a shuttle.” As she repeated the same message over and over, she could hear the growing desperation in her voice, but she could do nothing to control it. “Please…” she pleaded. “Please, don’t leave us here…”
She had all but given up hope, convinced that the mining ships were going to begin cutting away the core at any moment, when a voice finally broke through the static.
“This is the Arrow… Can you hear us?”
“We hear you!” she shouted back. “We’re under the ice. Don’t leave us here! Please, don’t leave us!”