“Maybe, but that doesn’t mean this is over. This isn’t just any network breach. Our work has defense applications. And that means it’s a matter of national security-which means other options are on the table.”
There were murmurs among the others.
Professor Lei looked doubtful. “I don’t think you know what you’re getting into, Josh.”
“We put too much into this just to walk away. If someone’s trying to steal our future, I say we fight back.” He looked to the rest of the team. “Are you guys with me, or are you just going to take this? Because I, for one, am not going quietly.”
They looked uncertainly to each other.
Prakash was the first to speak up, but not without first letting out an irritated sigh. “Count me in. You might be an idiot, but at least you’re willing to do something.”
Strickland cast a give-me-a-break look at him.
Prakash shrugged. “I’m ready to do whatever it takes to get back what’s rightfully mine.”
Strickland nodded. Prakash nodded grimly back.
“Well, if Vijay and I can agree on something for once, how about the rest of you?”
Strickland never got his answer.
Reality itself suddenly disintegrated around them all.
On the observation deck of Hoover Tower less than a quarter mile away, Odin lowered his Leupold binoculars to reveal blue eyes framed by a thick black beard and the brim of a Red Sox baseball cap. He surveyed the main quad beside the Memorial Church where flames, body parts, and a blackened section of cobblestones seemed to be all that remained of the men who’d stood there just moments before. The glass windows of the church had shattered in an explosion. A nearby palm tree was burning. There were shouts in the distance, car alarms wailing, but nothing stirred in the courtyard.
He looked up to scan the dawn sky still speckled with stars. In a few moments he saw a distant flash. Odin counted softly to himself as he stowed the binoculars. “One thousand eight, one thousand nine, one thousand ten…”
Still counting, he withdrew a cell phone from his jacket pocket and keyed a number from memory.
The boom of the distant aerial explosion echoed off the buildings like a hammer blow. He stopped counting, having reached “twelve,” and noted the direction of the explosion. Odin let the noise fade before he spoke into the handset. “Our client just received an air mail package.” He listened. “No one’s left in the office. I need to catch the next flight out.”
As he spoke, a large raven flapped down to perch on the tower railing next to him. It had a small transponder strapped to its leg and a nearly invisible wire filament headset hovering above its head. Odin extended his hand, and the black bird caw ed its harsh call as it climbed onto his arm. It fluffed the feathers at its throat and let out a keek-keek sound.
He lifted the raven and studied it as he spoke into the phone. “Schedule the next meeting as soon as possible. Our deadline was just accelerated.”
He proceeded toward the tower steps, still holding the raven. Behind him a column of black smoke rose against the dawn light as horrified screams intermingled with the sound of approaching sirens.
CHAPTER 5
It was war, then. She had modeled this behavior and detected the cues-but even so, the swiftness of the assault caught her off-guard. Perhaps the stigmergic propagation rate needed to be tweaked.
Professor Linda McKinney stared intently at a procession of salmon-colored, dark-eyed weaver ants, coursing like blood cells along branching pathways. They scurried against a craquelure background of mango bark on highways only they could see, surging into combat against black ants many times their size-swarming over their enemy. The video image revealed the carnage in ultrahigh resolution. The dead were piling up.
Weaver ants- Oecophylla longinoda. Along with mankind they were one of the few extirpator species on earth-meaning they deliberately sought out and destroyed rival organisms (including their own species) to maintain absolute control of their territory.
McKinney zoomed the camera in on a growing knot of weavers, watching as dozens of workers swarmed a much larger, black ant-a Dorylus major, the warrior caste of the driver army ant (which the locals called siafu). The monstrous black ant had one of the weavers in its mandibles, but following a timeless script, the much smaller and faster weavers grabbed hold of their enemy, first immobilizing the massive intruder-and then tearing its legs off. They dropped it among the dead and moved on to their next victim.
Defeating a siafu army ant colony in battle was no mean feat. Here in Africa, even humans steered clear of siafu, which occasionally swarmed in wave fronts twenty million strong into huts and farms. Anything that could not escape their grasp would die. There were authenticated accounts of siafu killing humans who’d passed out drunk, unattended infants, and goats or cows that were tied in place. First suffocated by thousands of ants crawling into their mouth and lungs, the strangled victims would have their flesh removed in hours, leaving only bones behind. There was no stopping the swarm. You just had to get out of the way. And yet, as fearsome as they were, even siafu army ants fled from the weavers.
Weavers were so aggressive that McKinney would hear them in their multitudes, drumming their legs against tree leaves in alarm, sounding like raindrops as she walked through the mango orchards. Gathering their troops. Collectively, they dominated the treetops of Africa-while their close cousins Oecophylla smaragdina dominated the trees of Asia and Australia. What made them even more fascinating to McKinney was that their reign had already lasted more than a hundred million years. Human civilization was barely a blip on their radar screen.
Weaver society was so durable, so adaptable, that these ants had survived ice ages, extinction-level events- like the asteroid impact that doomed the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, sixty-six million years ago. In fact, more than merely surviving, the weavers had thrived. In terms of biomass, they now rivaled that of humanity itself. In numbers they were counted in trillions. They were one of the most successful and enduring species on the face of the planet. That was one of the reasons she had spent her adult life studying them. There was an ancient knowledge of sustainability here on a scale humans could only aspire to. And they were fascinating in so many other ways.
McKinney had originally been drawn to myrmecology because of social insects’ unique evolutionary strategy; where most organisms had a single body, Hymenoptera-the order of social insects that included wasps, bees, and ants-were in effect a single organism consisting of millions of separate bodies. The physician Lewis Thomas once described ants as “a brain with a million legs.” It was like being able to send your hand to go get things while you were off doing something else. The great myrmecologist E. O. Wilson proposed that ants were a “superorganism”- an organism that transcended the limitations of a single body to enact a collective will. And that will had an intelligence superior to that of the individual ants themselves. Precisely how this occurred was still unknown, and it was a mystery that McKinney had dedicated her career to unraveling.
Studying the screen, she keyed observations into her laptop and spoke via speakerphone to a graduate student several miles away. “Mike, check the lens on camera nine. There’s an occlusion that’s confusing the tracking software.”
“Got it. Rich, can you move the lift closer?”
Another voice came in over the line. “There in a sec.”
“Thanks.”
McKinney zoomed the image out, displaying dozens of thumbnail video insets on the panoramic HD monitor that, when tiled together, outlined an entire mango tree as a three-dimensional model. She rotated the model as though it were a video game-the difference being that the tree was real and the images real-time. The tree stood on the verdant hillsides near the Marikitanda Research Station, where McKinney ran her field lab. The mango tree’s entire surface was being recorded in real time from dozens of separate digital video cameras placed on scaffolding around it. Software was stitching the imagery together into a single live 3-D image wrapped around the tree. Just
