DAY 6 7:12 P.M.
“Oh shit,” Bobby said. He jumped up from the table and ran out of the room. Everyone else did, too. I followed the others.
Ricky was holding his radio as he went: “Vince, lock us down. Vince?”
“We’re locked down,” Vince said. “Pressure is five plus.”
“Why didn’t the alarm go off?”
“Can’t say. Maybe they’ve learned to get past that, too.”
I followed everybody into the utility room, where there were large wall-mounted liquid crystal displays showing the outside video cameras. Views of the desert from all angles. The sun was already below the horizon, but the sky was a bright orange, fading into purple and then dark blue. Silhouetted against this sky was a young man with short hair. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt and looked like a surfer. I couldn’t see his face clearly in the failing light, but even so, watching the way he moved, I thought there was something familiar about him.
“We got any floodlights out there?” Charley said. He was walking around, holding his bowl of pasta, still eating.
“Lights coming up,” Bobby said, and a moment later the young man stood in glaring light. Now I could see him clearly—
And then it hit me. It looked like the same kid who had been in Julia’s car last night after dinner, when she drove away, just before her accident. The same blond surfer kid who, now that I saw him again, looked like—
“Jesus, Ricky,” Bobby said. “He looks like you.”
“You’re right,” Mae said. “It’s Ricky. Even the T-shirt.”
Ricky was getting a soft drink out of the dispensing machine. He turned toward the display screen. “What’re you guys talking about?”
“He looks like you,” Mae said. “He even has your T-shirt with I Am Root on the front.” Ricky looked at his own T-shirt, then back at the screen. He was silent for a moment. “I’ll be damned.”
I said, “You’ve never been out of the building, Ricky. How come it’s you?”
“Fucking beats me,” Ricky said. He shrugged casually. Too casually?
Mae said, “I can’t make out the face very well. I mean the features.” Charley moved closer to the largest of the screens and squinted at the image. “The reason you can’t see features,” he said, “is because there aren’t any.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Charley, it’s a resolution artifact, that’s all.”
“It’s not,” Charley said. “There’re no fucking features. Zoom it in and see for yourself.” Bobby zoomed. The image of the blond head enlarged. The figure was moving back and forth, in and out of the frame, but it was immediately clear that Charley was right. There were no features. There was an oval patch of pale skin beneath the blond hairline; and there was the suggestion of a nose and brow ridges, and a sort of mound where the lips should be. But there were no actual features.
It was as if a sculptor had started to carve a face, and had stopped before he was finished. It was an unfinished face.
Except that the eyebrows moved, from time to time. A sort of wiggle, or flutter. Or perhaps that was an artifact.
“You know what we’re looking at here, don’t you?” Charley said. He sounded worried. “Pan down. Let’s see the rest of him.” Bobby panned down, and we saw white sneakers moving over the desert dirt. Except the sneakers didn’t seem to be touching the ground, but rather hovering just above it. And the sneakers themselves were sort of blurry. There was a hint of shoelaces, and a streak where a Nike logo would be. But it was like a sketch, rather than an actual sneaker.
“This is very weird,” Mae said.
“Not weird at all,” Charley said. “It’s a calculated approximation for density. The swarm doesn’t have enough agents to make high-resolution shoes. So it’s approximating.”
“Or else,” I said, “it’s the best it can do with the materials at hand. It must be generating all these colors by tilting its photovoltaic surface at slight angles, catching the light. It’s like those flash cards the crowd holds up in football stadiums to make a picture.”
“In which case,” Charley said, “its behavior is quite sophisticated.”
“More sophisticated than what we saw earlier,” I said.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Ricky said irritably. “You’re acting like this swarm is Einstein.”
“Obviously not,” Charley said, “ ’cause if it’s modeling you, it’s certainly no Einstein.”
“Give it a rest, Charley.”
“I would, Ricky, but you’re such an asshole I get provoked over ............