River of Blue Fire

  “Are there other things that are strange in this simulation world?” asked !Xabbu.

  “Well, reports sometimes of objects that don’t belong in any real-world simulation at all, and some weird effects—ripples in the base media, funny lights, local distortions. But of course, entomologists are just as likely as anyone else to get tired and see things, especially in a place like this, which is already pretty overwhelming.”

  “Why did this Kunohara person make all this?” Renie wondered.

  “Your guess is as good as mine.” Lenore flipped her hand through her hair, and this very human gesture paradoxically reminded Renie that she was watching a simulation, that the real Lenore might look nothing like this creature before her, and was certainly physically somewhere else entirely. “I read somewhere that he was one of those kids that was obsessed by bugs when he was little—of course, that’s true for most of us here. But the difference was, he made money at it. Secured some crucial biomedical patents when he was in his early twenties—that Cimbexin stuff they’re trying to use as a cellular-growth on-off switch was one of his, and that self-fitting tile, Informica—and made millions. Billions, eventually.”

  “And so he built this with the money?” !Xabbu was examining a caddisfly larva with what seemed too many legs as it emerged from its chrysalis over and over in a looped display.

  “No, we built this, if you mean the Hive—well, a consortium of universities and agribusinesses did. But Kunohara built the world outside—the simulation we’re studying. And it’s really pretty amazing. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  The transition from the Hive museum to the cabin of the dragonfly-plane was instantaneous. Cullen was already in his pilot’s seat. He nodded in greeting, then returned to his instruments.

  “Sorry to jump you around like that,” said Lenore, “but we take advantage of our sovereignty in the Hive and don’t waste much time imitating normality. As soon as we go through the hangar doors, everything happens in real time and like real life, even if it is happening in Giant Bug World. Kunohara’s rules.”

  “He’d make us walk if he could,” Cullen said. “Every now and then one of our sims gets munched—a migration specialist named Traynor got cornered by a whip scorpion the other day. Turned him into bug-food faster than I can say it. I bet Kunohara thought that was pretty funny.”

  “What happened to him?” !Xabbu asked worriedly, clearly picturing what a scorpion would look like at this scale.

  “To Traynor? Just a rude shock, then he got bounced out of the system.” Cullen rolled his eyes. “That’s what always happens. But then we had to reapply to get him another licensed sim. That’s why Angela wasn’t exactly pleased to see you. The celebrated Mr. K. is pretty tight-sphinctered about what goes in and out of his simworld.”

  “Thanks for that vivid image, Cullen,” said Lenore.

  “Belt up,” he responded. “I’m talking to you two rookies in particular. I’ve got clearance, and we’re ready to fly. You don’t want to get tactor-bounced any more than necessary.”

  As Renie and !Xabbu scrambled to secure themselves, the hangar door slid open, revealing a wall of shadowy plant shapes and a light gray sky.

  “What time is it?” Renie asked.

  “Where you are? You’d know better than me.” Lenore shook her head. “This simworld’s on GMT. It’s a little after five AM here. The best time to see the Eciton is when they start moving around dawn.”

  “We’re cutting it fine, though.” Cullen frowned. “If you’d been here on time, Kwok, we’d be there by now.”

  “Shut up and fly this old crate, bug-boy.”

  !Xabbu sat quietly, staring out the window as the mountainous trees loomed and then slid past on either side. Renie could not help but be impressed herself: It was daunting, seeing things from this perspective. A lifetime of ecological catastrophes being pumped through her consciousness by the newsnets had left her with a feeling of the environment as a fragile thing, an ever-thinning web of greenery and clean water. In the real world that might be so, but to be brought down to this size was to see nature in its former terrifying and dictatorial splendor. She could at last truly imagine the Earth as Gaea, as a single living thing, and herself as a part of a complicated system rather than a something perched atop the ladder of Creation. So much of that sense of mastery was perspective, she realized—simply a product of being one of the larger animals. At her current size, every leaf was a marvel of complexity. Beneath every stone, on every lump of dirt, lived whole thriving villages of tiny creatures, and on those animals lived even more minute creatures. For the first time, she could imagine the chain of life down to molecules, and even smaller.

  And has someone built that here as well? she wondered. As !Xabbu said, are we becoming gods, that we can grow ourselves as big as a universe, or walk inside an atom?

  It was hard not to be impressed by Atasco and Kunohara and the rest—at least those who had not knowingly built their wonderlands with the suffering of others. What she had seen so far was truly stunning.

  “God damn.” Cullen slapped his hand against the steering wheel. “We’re late.”

  Renie leaned so that she could look past him, but all she could see through the windshield was more of the giant forest. “What is it?”

  “The troop’s already on the move,” said Lenore. “See those?” She pointed to several dark shapes fitting above them in the branches.

  “Those are antbirds and woodcreepers. They follow the Eciton swarm when it travels, and feed on the creatures driven ahead of it.”

  “I’m going to have to put on the autopilot,” Cullen said crossly. “It’s going to be bumpy, but don’t blame me—I was on time.”

  “Human pilots aren’t fast enough to avoid all the bird strikes,” Lenore explained. “Don’t take Cullen’s charming manners too personally. He’s always like this before breakfast, aren’t you, Cully?”

  “Get locked.”

  “It is too bad, though,” she went on. “One of the most interesting things about the Eciton is how they make their camp—their ‘bivouac’ as it’s called. They have tarsal claws, these hooks on their feet, and when the troop stops, they grab each other and link up into long hanging vertical chains. Other ants hook on, until eventually there’s a kind of net many layers deep, made entirely of ants, that covers the queen and her larvae.”

  Renie was fairly certain she’d heard of more disgusting things in her life but she couldn’t think of any offhand. “These are army ants?”

  “One type,” agreed Lenore. “If you’re from Africa, you may have seen driver ants . . .”

  Her disquisition on Renie’s domestic insects was cut short as the dragonfly plane abruptly dropped like a stone, then tumbled in midair before pulling out of its dive and into a long, flat skim above the grass forest. Cullen whooped. “Damn, we’re quick!”

  Renie was struggling not to throw up. Even !Xabbu, despite the mask of baboon features, looked more than a little unsettled.

  Lenore’s naturalist lecture was kept on hold over the next few minutes by a further succession of evasive procedures. Passing through an almost continuous serious of dives, banks, and loop-the-loops to avoid birds that Renie seldom even saw before the autopilot reacted, the dragonfly seemed to travel ten times as far vertically and horizontally as it did forward. In fact, Lenore explained, they really weren’t even trying to go forward; instead, they were waiting in place for the swarm to approach.

  Between being rattled against !Xabbu in the passenger alcove and bouts of severe queasiness, Renie managed to wonder at how realistic these sensations of weightlessness and g-force were. It seemed hard to believe that they could be generated solely by the V-tanks in which their bodies were currently floating.

  A vast feathered shadow suddenly loomed in the windshield. Another thought-swift jerk in direction, this one an unadverti
sed columnar rise that seemed to slam her guts down into her shoes, finally proved too much. Renie tasted vomit at the back of her mouth, then felt her stomach convulse. There were no visible results of sickness within the simulation; a moment later, except for the slowing contractions in her midsection, even Renie felt as though it had never happened.

  Must be the waste hoses in my mask pumping it away, she thought weakly. That mask that I can’t feel anymore. Aloud, she said, “I can’t take much more of this.”

  “Problem not.” Cullen, body language suggesting he wasn’t too thrilled with having passengers at all, reached out to the wheel and dropped the dragonfly into a sharp spiral. “It will only get worse when the swarm shows up, when we’re trying to take readings and avoid those damn birds.”

  “It’s too bad,” Lenore said. “You won’t have quite as close a view. But we’ll try to set you down somewhere you can still see.” She pointed at the viewscreen. “Look, there’s the prey wave-front! The Eciton are almost here.”

  Hurrying through the matted foliage, dawn light winking dully on wing and carapace, came a seething rout of insects—madly-stilting beetles, skimming flies, large creatures like spiders and scorpions treading the slower, smaller prey underfoot in their hurry to escape the great enemy: Renie thought it looked like some bizarre insectoid prison break. As moments passed, and as the dragonfly spiraled down, the wave of prey insects grew denser and more chaotic. The blankly inhuman heads and jointed limbs jerking in heedless flight upset her. They looked like an army of the damned, hopelessly fleeing the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

  “See those?” Lenore pointed out a group of slender-winged insects that flew above the panicked herd, but seemed far more purposeful than those below. “Those are ithomiines—ant butterflies, so-called. They follow the Eciton everywhere, just like the antbirds do—in fact, they feed on the birds’ droppings.”

  The dragonfly’s hatch hissed open. Overcome by a little too much of Nature at her most cloacal extremes, Renie struggled down the ladder and onto the top of a mossy stone, then bent double to coax the blood back into her head. !Xabbu clambered down and stood beside her.

  “Just stay fairly still,” Lenore called down through the hatchway. “The birds and others have plenty to feed on, but you don’t want to call attention to yourselves unnecessarily. We’ll be back to pick you up in about half an hour.”

  “What if something gets us?”

  “Then I guess you’ll be offline sooner than we thought,” was Lenore’s cheerful rejoinder. “Enjoy the show!”

  “Well, thank you so much,” Renie growled, but the dragonfly wings had beat into life again, pressing her down by the force of their wind, and she doubted the woman had heard. A moment later the dragonfly leaped upward with the force of a brief and localized hurricane, then zigzagged forward over the oncoming insect stampede and disappeared into the forest.

  Now that they were out in the open, Renie could hear the sounds properly, and realized that she had never thought of Nature as being noisy. In fact, she realized, most of the nature she’d seen had possessed a classical sound track and voice-over narration. Here, the twittering of the hunting birds alone was almost deafening, and with the clicking and rasping of prey in full flight, coupled with the swarms of flies that buzzed above the hurrying mass, she and !Xabbu might have been listening to some kind of bizarre factory floor working at a nightmarish level of production.

  She lowered herself to a tuft of moss; when she sank in and found herself surrounded by stiff tubular stems, she realized the moss was almost as deep as she was tall. She moved to a bare section of rock and sat down.

  “So what do you think?” she said to !Xabbu at last. “This must make you feel very excited about your own hopes. I mean, if they can build this, then surely you can build the place you want to.”

  He squatted beside her. “I must confess that I have not been thinking about my project in the last hours. I am amazed by all this. I am amazed. I could never have dreamed such things were possible.”

  “Neither could I.”

  He shook his head, his tiny monkey brow crinkling. “It is a level of realism that actually frightens me, Renie. I think I know now how my ancestors and tribesmen must have felt when they saw an airplane for the first time, or the lights of a big city.”

  Renie squinted into the distance. “The grass is moving. I mean really moving.”

  !Xabbu narrowed his own deep-sunken eyes. “It is the ants. Grandfather Mantis!” he gasped, then murmured something unintelligible in his own language. “Look at them!”

  Renie could have chosen to do nothing else. The leading edge of the ant swarm was pouring into the comparatively clear space before them in relentless, viscous waves like lava, smothering grass, leaves, and everything else. The ants were mostly dark brown, with reddish abdomens. Each slender insect was almost twice as long as Renie was tall, not counting the segmented antennae which seemed to move a dozen times for every other motion the ants made. But it was not as individuals that they exercised their profound, horrifying magic.

  As the main body of the swarm surged into view, Renie gaped, unable to speak. The front stretched away out of sight in a line that was miles across by her perspective, and it was not a thin front. The swarming, seething mass of ants streamed back into the vegetation in such thickly clotted thousands that it seemed the entire edge of the world had grown legs and was marching toward them.

  Despite the first appearance of inexorable progress, the Eciton did not simply march. The outriders scurried forward, then turned and hurried back to the nearest pseudopod of the writhing mass; in the meantime, others followed the path they had just blazed, and then explored farther before hurrying back themselves, until the entire living clot had moved into the area the outriders had just visited. Thus the army crawled forward like some huge amoeba, a vast seething lump that was nevertheless questingly alive down to its last particle, an army that to Renie’s vastly shrunken gaze might have covered all of Durban beneath its hurrying bodies.

  “Jesus Mercy,” Renie whispered. “I’ve never . . .” She fell back into silence.

  The dragonfly appeared from out of the trees farther back in the swarm, and moved over the front of the column, darting and then hovering while its human pilots made their observations. It swerved with reflexive suddenness to avoid a brown-and-white bird, which continued in its downward plummet and snatched up a struggling cockroach instead.

  Seeing the dragonfly plane made Renie feel a little less overwhelmed. It was a simulation, after all, and even if within this simulation she were no more than a tiny fleck in the path of an ant swarm, nevertheless humans had built it, and humans could bring her back out of it safely.

  The ant mass had surged to within what by her terms was only a quarter of a mile from the base of the rock on which she and !Xabbu sat, but their vantage point seemed to stand outside the main thrust of the swarm’s pulsing forward movement, so she was able to relax a little and even enjoy the sheer spectacle. Lenore had been right—it was an amazing show.

  “They are very fast, especially when we are so small,” said a voice behind her. “The leading edges of an Eciton burchelli raid move at about twenty meters per hour.”

  Renie jumped in shock. For half a moment, she thought that Cullen had landed the plane and that he and Lenore had snuck up on them, that she had been watching a real dragonfly instead of the Hive aircraft, but the white-robed sim standing a few paces away up the hill was clearly someone entirely new.

  “They are hypnotic to watch, are they not?” the stranger asked. He smiled within the shadow of his hood.

  “Who are you?”

  The stranger brushed the hood back just casually enough to avoid melodrama, revealing close-cropped black hair and a heavily lined, Asian face. “I am Kunohara. But you have probably guessed that, haven’t you? They do still mention my name at the
Hive, I presume.” His diction was careful, his English overprecise but otherwise flawless. Renie did not think he was using any translation gear.

  “They mentioned you, yes.”

  “This is your world, is it not?” !Xabbu asked the newcomer. Renie could see subtle signs of her friend’s nervousness, and she was not tremendously comfortable with the stranger herself. “It is very, very impressive.”

  “The Hive people have certainly brought you to see one of its most spectacular manifestations,” Kunohara said. “The swarm looks full of confusion, but it is not. Do you see the spider, there?” He pointed down to the nearest edge of the boiling mass. A long-legged green spider had failed to outrun one of the pseudopods, and now was clinched in doomed combat with a trio of large-headed ants. “She has encountered the true soldiers of the Eciton swarm. They ‘walk point,’ as the military people would put it. They only fight to defend the swarm—most prey is killed by the minor and media workers. But see what happens!”

  The spider had been turned onto its back; its struggles were slowing. Even as its legs kicked feebly, a group of smaller ants rushed over it. Two of them severed its head with jaws as sharp and competent as gardener’s shears; others began to bite through other parts and carry them away, back to the body of the swarm. Within moments, all that was left was the heavy, smooth abdomen and attached bits of the thorax.

  “They will bring up a submajor,” said Kunohara, with as much satisfaction as if he watched the last act of a favorite opera. “See, the soldiers have already gone back to their patrol. They do not carry things, but a submajor does.”

  A larger ant indeed appeared as if summoned, straddled the remaining piece of the spider, which was larger than the ant itself, and grasped the edge of the ragged thorax in its jaws. Several of the smaller ants came up to help, and together they trundled it back into the foraging mass.

  “You see?” Kunohara began to walk slowly down the hill, still watching the Eciton swarm. “It seems to be chaotic, but only to the uninformed eye. In reality, a finite but flexible series of behaviors, when multiplied by thousands or millions of individuals, creates extreme complexity and extreme efficiency. Ants have lived for ten million generations, where we have only thousands. They are perfect, and they care nothing about us—one writer, I remember, said they were ‘pitiless and elegant.’ Of course, one could possibly say the same of high-level simulations as well. But we have only begun to discover the complexity of our own artificial life.” He stopped and gave a curious smile, shy and yet not very winning. “I am lecturing again. My family always told me that I loved the sound of my own voice. Perhaps that is why I spend so much time alone now.”