DAY 6 11:42 A.M.
That was how, with a splitting headache, I found myself on the phone to the hospital in San Jose. “Julia Forman, please.” I spelled the name for the operator. “She’s in the ICU,” the operator said.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I’m sorry but direct calls are not allowed.”
“Then the nursing station.”
“Thank you, please hold.”
I waited. No one was answering the phone. I called back, went through the operator again, and finally got through to the ICU nursing station. The nurse told me Julia was in X-ray and didn’t know when she would be back. I said Julia was supposed to be back by now. The nurse said rather testily that she was looking at Julia’s bed right now, and she could assure me Julia wasn’t in it.
I said I’d call back.
I shut the phone and turned to David. “What was Julia doing in all this?”
“Helping us, Jack.”
“I’m sure. But how, exactly?”
“In the beginning, she was trying to coax it back,” he said. “We needed the swarm close to the building to take control again by radio. So Julia helped us keep it close.”
“How?”
“Well, she entertained it.”
“She what?”
“I guess you’d call it that. It was very quickly obvious that the swarm had rudimentary intelligence. It was Julia’s idea to treat it like a child. She went outside with bright blocks, toys. Things a kid would like. And the swarm seemed to be responding to her. She was very excited about it.”
“The swarm was safe to be around at that time?”
“Yes, completely safe. It was just a particle cloud.” David shrugged. “Anyway, after the first day or so, she decided to go a step further and formally test it. You know, test it like a child psychologist.”
“You mean, teach it,” I said.
“No. Her idea was to test it.”
“David,” I said. “That swarm’s a distributed intelligence. It’s a goddamn net. It’ll learn from whatever you do. Testing is teaching. What exactly was she doing with it?”
“Just, you know, sort of games. She’d lay out three colored blocks on the ground, two blue and one yellow, see if it would choose the yellow. Then with squares and triangles. Stuff like that.”
“But David,” I said. “You all knew this was a runaway, evolving outside the laboratory. Didn’t anybody think to just go out and destroy it?”
“Sure. We all wanted to. Julia wouldn’t allow it.”
“Why?”
“She wanted it kept alive.”
“And nobody argued with her?”
“She’s a vice president of the company, Jack. She kept saying the swarm was a lucky accident, that we had stumbled onto something really big, that it could eventually save the company and we mustn’t destroy it. She was, I don’t know, she was really taken with it. I mean, she was proud of it. Like it was her invention. All she wanted to do was ‘rein it in.’ Her words.”
“Yeah. Well. How long ago did she say that?”
“Yesterday, Jack.” David shrugged. “You know, she only left here yesterday afternoon.” It took me a moment to realize that he was right. Just a single day had passed since Julia had been here, and then had had her accident. And in that time, the swarms had already advanced enormously.
“How many swarms were there yesterday?”
“Three. But we only saw two. I guess one was hiding.” He shook his head. “You know, one of the swarms had become like a pet to her. It was smaller than the others. It’d wait for her to come outside, and it always stuck close to her. Sometimes when she came out it swirled around her, like it was excited to see her. She’d talk to it, too, like it was a dog or something.” I pressed my throbbing temples. “She talked to it,” I repeated. Jesus Christ. “Don’t tell me the swarms have auditory sensors, too.”
“No. They don’t.”
“So talking was a waste of time.”
“Uh, well ... we think the cloud was close enough that her breath deflected some of the particles. In a rhythmic pattern.”
“So the whole cloud was one giant eardrum?”
“In a way, yeah.”
“And it’s a net, so it learned ...”
“Yeah.”
I sighed. “Are you going to tell me it talked back?”
“No, but it started making weird sounds.”
I nodded. I’d heard those weird sounds. “How does it do that?”
“We’re not sure. Bobby thinks it’s the reverse of the auditory deflection that allows it to hear. The particles pulse in a coordinated front, and generate a sound wave. Sort of like an audio speaker.”
It would have to be something like that, I thought. Even though it seemed unlikely that it could do it. The swarm was basically a dust cloud of miniature particles. The particles didn’t have either the mass or the energy to generate a sound wave.
A thought occurred to me. “David,” I said, “was Julia out there yesterday, with the swarms?”
“Yes, in the morning. No problem. It was a few hours later, after she left, that they killed the snake.”
“And was anything killed before that?”
“Uh ... possibly a coyote a few days ago, I’m not sure.”
“So maybe the snake wasn’t the first?”
“Maybe ...”
“And today they killed a rabbit.”
“Yeah. So it’s progressing fast, now.”
“Thank you, Julia,” I said.
I was pretty sure the accelerated behavior of the swarms that we were seeing was a function of past learning. This was a characteristic of distributed systems—and for that matter a characteristic of evolution, which could be considered a kind of learning, if you wanted to think of it in those terms. In either case, it meant that systems experienced a long, slow starting period, followed by ever-increasing speed.
You could see that exact speedup in the evolution of life on earth. The first life shows up four billion years ago as single-cell creatures. Nothing changes for the next two billion years. Then nuclei appear in the cells. Things start to pick up. Only a few hundred million years later, multicellular organisms. A few hundred million years after that, explosive diversity of life. And more diversity. By a couple of hundred million years ago there a............