Spring 2007 (23 page)

“They do it about twice a day,” Maddy confesses. “I put
her in the number two aquarium with a load of soil and leaves and a mesh lid on
top. When they start making a racket I feed them.”

He looks surprised. “This I’ve got to see.”

The walls are coming back up again. Maddy stifles a
sigh: it’s not about her any more, it’s about the goddamn mock termites. Anyone
would think they were the center of the universe and she was just here to feed
them. “Let’s go look, then.” John is already standing up, trying to pick up his
discarded shirt with his prosthesis. “Don’t bother,” she tells him. “Who’s
going to notice, the insects?”

“I thought–” he glances at her, taken
aback–“sorry, forget it.”

She pads downstairs, pausing momentarily to make sure
he’s following her safely. The tapping continues, startlingly loud. She opens
the door to the utility room in the back and turns on the light. “Look,” she
says.

The big glass-walled aquarium sits on the worktop. It’s
lined with rough-tamped earth and on top, there are piles of denuded branches
and wood shavings. It’s near dusk, and by the light filtering through the
windows she can see mock-termites moving across the surface of the muddy dome
that bulges above the queen’s chamber. A group of them have gathered around a
curiously straight branch: as she watches, they throw it against the glass like
a battering ram against a castle wall. A pause, then they pick it up and pull
back, and throw it again. They’re huge for insects, almost two inches long:
much bigger than the ones thronging the mounds in the outback. “That’s odd.”
Maddy peers at them. “They’ve grown since yesterday.”

“They? Hang on, did you take workers, or…?”

“No, just the queen. None of these bugs are more than a
month old.”

The termites have stopped banging on the glass. They
form two rows on either side of the stick, pointing their heads up at the huge,
monadic mammals beyond the alien barrier. Looking at them closely Maddy notices
other signs of morphological change: the increasing complexity of their digits,
the bulges at the back of their heads. Is the queen’s changing, too? She asks
herself, briefly troubled by visions of a malignant intelligence rapidly
swelling beneath the surface of the vivarium, plotting its escape by moonlight.

John stands behind Maddy and folds his arms around her.
She shivers. “I feel as if they’re
watching
us.”

“But to them it’s not about us, is it?” He whispers in
her ear. “Come on. All that’s happening is you’ve trained them to ring a bell
so the experimenters give them a snack. They think the universe was made for
their convenience. Dumb insects, just a bundle of reflexes really. Let’s feed
them and go back to bed.”

The two humans leave and climb the stairs together, arm
in arm, leaving the angry aboriginal hive to plot its escape unnoticed.

Chapter Seventeen:
It’s
always October the First

Gregor sits on a bench on the Esplanade, looking out
across the river towards the Statue of Liberty. He’s got a bag of stale bread
crumbs and he’s ministering to the flock of pigeons that scuttle and peck
around his feet. The time is six minutes to three on the afternoon of October
the First, and the year is irrelevant. In fact, it’s too late. This is how it
always ends, although the onshore breeze and the sunlight are unexpected bonus
payments.

The pigeons jostle and chase one another as he drops
another piece of crust on the pavement. For once he hasn’t bothered to soak
them overnight in 5% warfarin solution. There is such a thing as a free lunch,
if you’re a pigeon in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’s going to be dead
soon, and if any of the pigeons survive they’re welcome to the wreckage.

There aren’t many people about, so when the puffing
middle aged guy in the suit comes into view, jogging along as if he’s chasing
his stolen wallet, Gregor spots him instantly. It’s Brundle, looking slightly
pathetic when removed from his man-hive. Gregor waves hesitantly, and Brundle
alters course.

“Running late,” he pants, kicking at the pigeons until
they flap away to make space for him at the other end of the bench.

“Really?”

Brundle nods. “They should be coming over the horizon in
another five minutes.”

“How did you engineer it?” Gregor isn’t particularly
interested but technical chit-chat serves to pass the remaining seconds.

“Man-in-the-middle, ramified by all their intelligence
assessments.” Brundle looks self-satisfied. “Understanding their caste
specialization makes it easier. Two weeks ago we told the GRU that MacNamara
was using the NP-101 program as cover for a pre-emptive D-SLAM strike. At the
same time we got the NOAA to increase their mapping launch frequency, and
pointed the increased level of Soviet activity out to our sources in SAC. It
doesn’t take much to get the human hives buzzing with positive feedback.”

Of course, Brundle and Gregor aren’t using words for
this incriminating exchange. Their phenotypically human bodies conceal some
useful modifications, knobby encapsulated tumors of neuroectoderm that shield
the delicate tissues of their designers, neural circuits that have capabilities
human geneticists haven’t even imagined. A visitor from a more advanced human
society might start excitedly chattering about wet-phase nanomachines and
neural-directed broadband packet radio, but nobody in New York on a sunny day
in 1979 plus one million is thinking in those terms. They still think the
universe belongs to their own kind, skull-locked social–but not
eusocial–primates. Brundle and Gregor know better. They’re workers of a
higher order, carefully tailored to the task in hand, and although they look
human there’s less to their humanity than meets the eye. Even Gagarin can
probably guess better, an individualist trapped in the machinery of a utopian
political hive. The termites of New Iowa and a host of other Galapagos
continents on the disk are not the future, but they’re a superior approximation
to anything humans have achieved, even those planetary instantiations that have
doctored their own genome in order to successfully implement true eusocial
societies. Group minds aren’t prone to anthropic errors.

“So it’s over, is it?” Gregor asks aloud, in the stilted
serial speech to which humans are constrained.

“Yep. Any minute now–”

The air raid sirens begin to wail. Pigeons spook,
exploding outward in a cloud of white panic.

“Oh, look.”

The entity behind Gregor’s eyes stares out across the
river, marking time while his cancers call home. He’s always vague about these
last hours before the end of a mission–a destructive time, in which
information is lost–but at least he remembers the rest. As do the hyphae
of the huge rhizome network spreading deep beneath the park, thinking slow
vegetable thoughts and relaying his sparky monadic flashes back to his mother
by way of the engineered fungal strands that thread the deep ocean floors. The
next version of him will be created knowing almost everything: the struggle to
contain the annoying, hard-to-domesticate primates with their insistent
paranoid individualism, the dismay of having to carefully sterilize the few
enlightened ones like Sagan…

Humans are not useful. The future belongs to ensemble
intelligences, hive minds. Even the mock-termite aboriginals have more to
contribute. And Gregor, with his teratomas and his shortage of limbs, has more
to contribute than most. The culture that sent him, and a million other
anthropomorphic infiltrators, understands this well: he will be rewarded and
propagated, his genome and memeome preserved by the collective even as it
systematically eliminates yet another outbreak of humanity. The collective is
well on its way towards occupying a tenth of the disk, or at least of sweeping
it clean of competing life forms. Eventually it will open negotiations with its
neighbors on the other disks, joining the process of forming a distributed
consciousness that is a primitive echo of the vast ramified intelligence
wheeling across the sky so far away. And this time round, knowing
why
it
is being birthed, the new God will have a level of self-understanding denied to
its parent.

Gregor anticipates being one of the overmind’s memories:
it is a fate none of these humans will know save at second-hand, filtered
through his eusocial sensibilities. To the extent that he bothers to consider
the subject, he thinks it is a disappointment. He may be here to help
exterminate them, but it’s not a personal grudge: it’s more like pouring
gasoline on a troublesome ant heap that’s settled in the wrong back yard. The
necessity irritates him, and he grumbles aloud in Brundle’s direction: “If they
realized how thoroughly they’d been infiltrated, or how badly their own
individuality lets them down–”

Flashes far out over the ocean, ruby glare reflected
from the thin tatters of stratospheric cloud.

“–They might learn to cooperate some day. Like
us.”

More flashes, moving closer now as the nuclear
battlefront evolves.

Brundle nods. “But then, they wouldn’t be human any
more. And in any case, they’re much too late. A million years too late.”

A flicker too bright to see, propagating faster than the
signaling speed of nerves, punctuates their conversation. Seconds later, the
mach wave flushes their cinders from the bleached concrete of the bench. Far
out across the disk, the game of ape and ant continues; but in this place and
for the present time, the question has been answered. And there are no human
winners.

***

Fiction:
Pluto Tells All by John Scalzi

Pluto Tells All

By Pluto, ex-planet, 4,500,000,000 years old

As told to John Scalzi

•
 
I don’t
want to sound like I was surprised, but yeah, I was surprised. Because just
before, they were talking about adding planets, right? Me and Eris and possibly
Ceres, and it looked like that proposal was getting good play. So it looked
good, and Charon and I thought it’d be okay to take a break and get a little
alone time. So there we are relaxing and then suddenly my agent Danny’s on the
phone, telling me about the demotion. And I say to him, I thought you had this
taken care of. That’s what you told me. And he said, well, they took another
vote. And then he started trying to spin the demotion like it was a positive.
Look at Phil Collins, he said. He was an ex-member of Genesis but then he had
this huge solo career. And I said, first, Phil Collins
sucks
, and
second, I’m not exactly the lead singer of the solar system, am I? This isn’t
the Phil Collins scenario, it’s the Pete Best scenario. I’m the Pete Best of
the goddamn solar system. So I fired Danny. Now I’m with CAA.

•
 
No,
really. Phil Collins does suck. I’m sorry, but there it is. Good drummer, but a
lot of his sound is from his producer, Hugh Padgham. You want to sound like
Phil Collins? Have your producer drop in a noise gate. Done. And his
singing.
Oy. Funny thing is, in the 80s, Phil was in talks to play me in a science
fiction comedy. He dropped out of it and made
Buster
instead. The movie
deal fell apart after that. I lost some money on that. I have some issues with
Phil Collins.

•
 
The
funny thing about the demotion is that I never actually wanted to be a planet,
you know? I was out here minding my own business and then suddenly Clyde
Tombaugh is staring at me. And the next thing I know, people start calling me
and telling me I’m the newest planet. And I remember saying, I don’t know if I
want that responsibility. And they said, well, you can’t not be a planet
now,
Walt Disney’s already named a character after you. That’s really what made me a
planet. Not the astronomers, but that cartoon dog. People loved that dog.

•
 
Ironically,
I’m a cat person.

•
 
I’m not
going to sue. Who am I going to sue? You think the International Astronomical
Union has any money to speak of? There’s a reason the most popular event at an
astronomer’s conference is the free buffet.

•
 
I try to
look at it philosophically. Seventy-six years a fine run. And now I’m sort of
the spokesperson for an entirely new class of objects: The dwarf planets. I
understand it’s meant to be something of a consolation prize, but you know
what, there are more of us dwarf planets out here than anything else. If we’re
talking “one dwarf planet, one vote,” you’re going to find we’re setting the
agenda on a lot of things.

•
 
I might
make a comeback. There are some groups rebelling against the new definition
right now. And there are a lot of people telling me they want to work with me.
It’s not
just
NASA anymore. Let’s just say CAA is earning its fee.

•
 
Yes, I’m
excited about the New Horizons mission. But I wish you guys could have found a
way to get one of the Voyagers my way. I wanted to listen that record.

•
 
I think
most people know I had no direct involvement in
The Adventures of Pluto
Nash.
That movie took place on
your
moon, folks.