Swarm Read online

  “I’m impressed,” said Sandra, smiling at me.

  She was a babe. I had to admit it. She was also way too young for me, but that was mattering less and less as I spent more time with her. I was wary, naturally, having watched other professors go down that road with research assistants and the like. There was a legendary formula that an old, philandering professor had supposedly worked out. It described a critical ratio for the duration of such relationships. It involved the measured youth and attractiveness of the student against the length of the inevitably short-lived marriage. It was an inverse relationship. The prettier the girl, the story went, the shorter the marriage. To me, Sandra looked like a two year experience, at best. I had to admit though, it would be an excellent two years.

  I turned back to the screen I’d figured out, which now encompassed three walls. The golden beads that represented friendly ships had drifted apart and were heading back toward the dark crescent of the Earth. More golden motes had appeared there, sliding over the surface of the planet. They must be ships that had managed to locate suitable ‘command personnel’. I almost shuddered at the thought. How many people were being dragged from their beds down there and slaughtered? One every minute, perhaps? The flocks of ships were relentless in their searches for someone who could pass their tests. They were machines, I knew now, built of something like liquid metal. There was no mercy in their hearts, because they had no hearts.

  “My kids must have been revived by now,” I said to Sandra. “I bet they are freaking out in medical if they were awake and enduring this battle while tied down.”

  “That does sound rough,” Sandra said. “I hope they aren’t blinded and screaming in there. I was for awhile before you came and got me out of that creepy room.”

  I took a deep breath. I was feeling good, slightly relaxed after a long hard night, one that was easily the worst of my life. It was hard not to feel good after having saved myself, a bunch of other people, and possibly the world itself. My elation was to be short-lived, however.

  “Alamo, how are my kids doing?”

  The answer was prompt and devastating. “The biotics could not be revived,” said the ship.

  I froze. My mind froze.

  “Oh no,” Sandra said, reaching for me. A black, snake-like arm whipped out, circled her wrist and yanked it back. “Kyle?”

  A block of ice formed in my guts. It made it hard to speak, or think, or do anything. Shock, I suppose they would call it. The hope-monkey had gotten me, I realized with some rational corner of my mind. Just how badly I’d been bitten I would never have admitted before that very moment. My kids had been alive—in my mind. It had all seemed so reasonable. Alessandra had been revived, and she was no worse for the wear. I had assumed the ship could work the same miracle upon Kristine and Jake. Like a primitive tribesman who sees a foreign doctor cure a fatal disease with an injection, I thought the magic was unlimited. But logically, they had been far more dead than Sandra had ever been. She had been in a cold ocean for a fraction of the time they’d lain broken in my farmyard. Cells deteriorated far more slowly in icy water than they did in the open air on a warm spring night. Sandra hadn’t been gutted, either. Sewing fingers back on was not the same thing as rebuilding an intestinal tract. The ship had patched Sandra together, but hadn’t managed to do the same for my kids.

  I shook with anger. This ship had killed my kids, teased me with their revival, and then killed them all over again, even if they’d only been alive again in my mind. Suddenly all the grief I’d felt earlier, which had been on hold, came crashing down on me again. It was a flood of emotion that had all been kept at bay by the hope-monkey.

  “I want to see my kids,” I choked out. “Bring them to me, dammit!”

  “The biotics are not aboard.”

  “Where are they?”

  “When the revival efforts failed, they were released.”

  “You mean you dumped them out of this ship? Why did you do that?”

  “All waste is to be released.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Unknown.”

  “What do you mean unknown?” I roared at the walls. These infuriating, cold walls. “Where did you drop them?”

  “Shortly after the battle started, they were released.”

  “In space then. You dumped them into space. Are they orbiting somewhere? The bodies?”

  “Predictive assessment warning. The following is only an estimate: the waste was released in a decaying orbit. The probability is high it has reentered the planetary atmosphere.”

  “The waste? So they burned up on reentry into the atmosphere?”

  “The probability exceeds ninety-nine percent.”

  “I don’t even have anything left to bury,” I said dully.

  Sandra was saying something, but I didn’t care and I didn’t hear a word of it. I didn’t even look at her. I ripped open a beer can that I found rolling around on the ship’s deck and drank it. It was warm and tasted like shit, but I drank it all fast. Then I fell to my knees and sicked it all up again.

  “There’s some more human waste for you,” I said.

  I flopped back onto my soggy couch. “Alamo. Take me back to my farm.”

  -10-

  Sandra tried. She coddled me with her voice. I hadn’t thought she had it in her, really, to be so caring. She had seemed like such a tough, independent-minded—even mean girl when she’d had a pistol aimed at my crotch just a few hours ago. But now, she was a friend, and she tried to make things better for me. I couldn’t hear her words. But I got the feeling, the intent—that much sank through my black mood, but none of the rest of it.

  The hope-monkey had gotten me. The monkey had, in fact, kicked my ass. That part—the knowing I had let it get to me—was as galling as anything else. It was ridiculous. My kids had died last night, not just now. I had watched them die. I’d looked into their dead eyes, just as I had looked into my wife Donna’s dead eyes a decade earlier. I was no stranger to grief. I knew the process. But I’d let hope revive the kids in my mind, if not in reality. That had gotten me through a few tough hours without feeling the pain of their loss. Now, here I was reliving the pain all over again. Like a wound torn open. Like a broken bone that had to be yanked straight and reset.

  I screamed suddenly. It was more of a roar of rage than anything else. Sandra, who had been talking gently to me, winced and shut up.

  I spoke a long stream of foul words. My eyes burned, and I could barely open them. Breathing hard, I sucked in gulps of air as if I had swum six laps underwater.

  “Alamo, you murderous machine, I hate you.”

  The ship did not respond.

  “Alamo, what if I ordered you to crash us into a mountain right now? At full speed.”

  Sandra looked alarmed, but didn’t speak. I think she rightly judged my mood. I was best left alone right now.

  “That order would be invalid under current circumstances,” said the ship. It sounded almost cheery to me, and the voice grated on my nerves. I would have liked it better if it sounded upset, or at least worried about what its crazy commander might do next. That’s the problem with computers. When you are insanely furious with them, they had no comprehension of the situation and they didn’t care one whit.

  “I need some air,” I said aloud. “Are we over my farm?”

  “Yes.”

  “Open a window or something. Open three of them. I want to at least smell my own fields if I can’t get down there.”

  Some round holes opened in the walls. I wasn’t surprised to see daylight pour into the ship. It made Sandra and I blink and squint. It looked and smelled like a fine day.

  “Can I go down and walk around my house, Alamo?” I asked. I had the sudden urge to visit the kids’ rooms and look at their things.

  “Command personnel can’t be exposed to hostile biotics.”

  So that was it. I was still a prisoner, not really a commander at all. “Why not?”

  “You are command personnel
. You cannot be exposed to harm unless you have undergone precautionary treatment or are in the process of being replaced.”

  “Precautionary treatment? Those injections, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What exactly is in those injections?”

  “We are.”

  I stopped speaking. Sandra and I looked around at the walls. We are? What the hell did that mean? The ship had all along been speaking about itself in the imperial ‘we’ form, as if it was some kind of nineteenth century emperor. I had thought perhaps, since it was in communication with the other ships, it considered itself a plurality of consciousness. But mostly, I hadn’t really given the affectation much thought in all the confusion and excitement. Now however, I could see it was clearly thinking of itself as a multiple form of some kind. And it was talking about injecting this we into my body.

  “I saw Sandra’s eyes,” I said to the ship, thinking aloud. “They were golden, reflective. You filled her with some kind of metal didn’t you?”

  “The metallic content of the injections given to the Sandra-biotic was approximately seventy-two percent. The exact proportions vary depending on nature of the injections and their purpose.”

  “I’m full of metal?” asked Sandra in alarm. “I don’t like that. Aren’t most metals poisonous?”

  I shrugged. “You seem okay. They must have flushed them out of you somehow. Remember how you had to go after you woke up? I built a bathroom for you.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. I could see the look of disgust on her face, however. No one wants to hear they had just peed out a mysterious puddle of liquid metal.

  “Alamo, let me get this straight. If I let you give me—protective injections, you will allow Sandra to move about more freely?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kyle, don’t do it. There’s no need right now. Crow said the injections were nasty, remember?”

  “You came out okay.”

  “You shouldn’t make any big decisions right now. You are grieving. You aren’t yourself yet.”

  I looked at her, knowing she was right. Then, like a bolt out of the blue, I knew what was going on. The fact I hadn’t realized it right away demonstrated Sandra was right. I was a computer scientist. I should have known instantly what the ship was hinting about with these injections.

  “Alamo, you said the injection contained us. As in, a portion of your collective self. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “This ship isn’t really a ship at all, is it? It’s a swarm of nano-particles. That’s what you are, isn’t it, Alamo?”

  “Your description is imprecise, but partially correct.”

  “Partially? You are more than just a mass of nano-particles?”

  “Many of the ship’s systems are built of massed compounds.”

  I thought about that. “Like the engines maybe?”

  “Yes.”

  I nodded to myself. It made sense to me. How would you build something like the firing chamber of an engine out of billion tiny robots? These things had to be very small, to make up the ship’s hull. Perhaps they didn’t compose the ship’s hull itself, perhaps what they did was build the walls and hull up or removed it, quickly. That was the liquid shimmer I saw when ‘doors’ opened or closed between chambers.

  “Kyle?” asked Sandra.

  “Yeah?”

  “What the hell is a nano?”

  “It’s short for nanorobot, or nanite. The concept is so new, and so experimental, that we computer types haven’t even all agreed on what to call them yet. We can’t build anything like this ship, of course. Not yet, anyway. But the idea is essentially that you build not one big robot, but billions of tiny ones, so small you can’t see them with the naked eye. Working together, these microscopic robots can build things human hands could never construct.”

  “You are saying that they injected me with a zillion tiny robots and they rebuilt my fingers and restarted my heart?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  I shook my head. I reached out to take her hand. No less than three thin black arms snaked out of the walls, and pinned her wrist. Then I was able to gently pat her. It was horrible, however, as I could see the pain on her face. The arms were hurting her, making my entire gesture of comfort into a joke. She tried to smile back to protect my feelings.

  Was this my future? I thought. In order to touch someone they had to be tied up? In order to walk the Earth again, I had to be part machine? In order to escape this fate entirely, the only option was death?

  I closed my eyes. I decided then to try to get past the death of my children. I would put them away in my mind, at least for now. Too many world-changing events were happening. Thousands of people were dying on the Earth, just as my own kids had, due to these ships. I had to keep working and thinking in order to save other people the pain I was feeling now. At the very least, having a higher purpose might channel my grief into something constructive and make it more bearable. It was a coping technique counselors had suggested when my wife Donna had died.

  “Alamo, let’s talk about the enemy ship we just defeated. Who was aboard that ship?”

  “They are the enemy.”

  “Yes,” I said patiently, my eyes still closed. “Was that ship like this one? Was it made up of nanites?”

  “No.”

  “Was it manned then by—by biotics you call them, organic life forms something like Sandra and I?”

  “No.”

  “Great,” I said. “Where do I go from there?”

  “They aren’t alive?” asked Sandra, alarmed. “They aren’t even robots? What else is there? Are they ghosts or something?”

  I thought for a moment. “Alamo, are the enemy alive at all?”

  Hesitation. “Unknown.”

  Sandra made an unhappy sound. I knew how she felt. You could not help but think of space-zombies.

  “Are they possibly large robots?” I asked on a hunch.

  Hesitation. “Yes.”

  I nodded, but I did not smile. I suspected it would be a while before I smiled again. But this sort of thing, this problem-solving, was helping me. It kept my mind from spiraling into black depression, or rage. I had something to work on, something to prevent emotional pain from overwhelming me. My grief was like a fire, and it had been contained for now. “Do you have a name for these enemies, Alamo?”

  “No.”

  “What shall we call them, Sandra?” I asked.

  “Hmmm. We’ve got the Nanos... how about the Macros?”

  I nodded. “Sounds good. Alamo, name these enemies the Macros, and refer to them that way from now on.”

  “Reference renamed.”

  “What do the Macros want here on Earth?”

  “Raw materials.”

  That didn’t sound good. Sandra and I exchanged worried glances.

  “Are they coming back soon?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How soon?”

  “Unknown.”

  “Alamo, what do your kind want?” asked Sandra. “What do the Nanos want here?”

  There was no response.

  “Alamo,” I said sternly, “I want you to listen to Sandra.”

  “The Sandra-biotic is not command personnel.”

  “I know that. You don’t have to take commands from her. Just answer her questions.”

  Hesitation. “Permissions set.”

  “Okay, now answer her last question.”

  “Current primary objective: Locate command personnel.”

  “Current objective?” asked Sandra, thinking aloud. “What was your previous objective?”

  “Previous objective: Scientific examination.”

  Sandra nodded and smiled, clearly proud of herself. “See? These little bastards are the butt-probing aliens we’ve all been scared of for years.”

  I snorted. But I had to admit, she might be right.

  “Listen Kyle,” she told me seriously. “We need to talk. I
can tell you are devastated, but you are still thinking reasonably clearly. That’s exactly why the ship made you into a commander. That’s why you are leading this pack of survivors.”

  “No need for a pep-talk.”

  “Yes, yes there is a need for one,” she insisted. “We need you. Earth needs you. Sure, you’ve suffered. Lots of people have. I died, for God’s sake. But this is bigger than us. We have to do our best, because we are everything now. We are all that our world has up here to protect her. Everyone might die if we don’t do it right.”

  I sighed. “If you’re trying to make me feel better, you are doing a lousy job of it.”

  She laughed. I didn’t laugh with her, but I knew she was right.

  But still, in my own mind, I had a different set of goals. I wasn’t really in this to save Earth. I wanted to find out what was going on, who was pulling the strings. I wanted to tear them up. Maybe it would take years. Maybe I would die trying. But I was going to get some revenge if I could, even if it was on a machine that didn’t feel anything and didn’t care as I destroyed it. Screw them all, that was what I was thinking.

  I was no longer angry with the Alamo. It was a tool. I might as well be angry with the fence pole that speared my wife. I wanted to find the creatures who built this ship.

  If nothing else, my hunger for revenge would keep me going.

  -11-

  “Riggs? Commander Riggs, are you there?”

  “Yes Jack, go ahead.”

  “Give me a break and call me Commodore at least when other people are listening, okay Commander?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  “I’ve got some new people now. A whole new crop of them. Take a look at the screen you invented.”