(Revised version posted June 3, 2025)
Epigraph:
In the fifteen years since contact with Formicaran hives, the study of Tokic has challenged fundamental assumptions about linguistic structure, particularly in relation to how languages encode identity and collective cognition. Tokic is a spatial, signed language whose holonic grammar explicitly encodes the whole-part relationships of distributed entities. The existence of humans—corporeal, individuated beings—posed a fundamental problem for Tokic’s grammatical categories. The existence of cyborg humans posed an even graver problem, because the hives initially believed that the first-contact team had enslaved their cybernetic parts. This would have been a serious violation of the Theorem of Love; the misunderstanding nearly resulted in the death of the first-contact team. Fortunately, under the leadership of Jonah Loeb, the team survived and reached an understanding of the holonic grammar that permitted successful negotiation with Golf Course Colony. Since then, the field of linguistics has been challenged to consider how human languages might implicitly encode collective cognition, revealing structural patterns that had previously gone unrecognized.
Everett, Daphne (2032). “The Grammar of the Swarm: Tokic and the Linguistics of the Collective Mind.” The Journal of Alien Cognition and Communication, 42(3), 215–243.
1.
Jonah nervously shifted his knapsack on his shoulders. It was heavy with the stuff he would need in the Zone. It seemed wrong that on such a beautiful day, he would soon be psychotic.
Yet Rock Creek Park glowed at this time of year. The autumnal light seemed to melt off the trees. Just five miles south was official Washington, with its marbled ecosystems of money and power. But the park was so large, and so hilly and forested, that it might as well be deep country, timelessly beyond politics. More than that, it seemed to be in a different part of the universe, colored by the light of a different sun.
Some hundred yards away, a row of observers watched him and his advisor pitilessly through binoculars. Some of them were in camo gear; they looked like they could break Jonah’s neck with their bare hands. But they couldn’t go into the golf course. He could. And, unfortunately, today he would—alone. It would be his sixth trip in, and it got harder every time. It was not likely to kill him physically. It would kill his soul. Temporarily, but that was bad enough.
Jonah’s stomach felt icy with tension. The horizontally arrayed lenses of the binoculars reminded him of the eyes of a jumping spider. He said to Professor Sever, “What would you do if you saw a forty-hertz wave?”
What he was really saying was, If the ant colony in the Zone is conscious, what would we do about that? But scientists didn’t talk that way. The scary stuff was always repressed underneath layers of jargon.
Shera Sever looked grim. She had a severe, lined face, the sort that came from not wearing enough sunscreen in places tourists never went. “I’m sorry you have to do this, Jonah. Your problem is lucky for us. Not so much for you.”
Jonah knew that your problem meant his deafness. The Venn-diagram overlap of deaf person and entomology grad student, which he was, yielded exactly one human being on Earth: him. He was the single best person in the world for going into the Zone. He pressed, “The forty-hertz—”
Sever shook her head. “Jonah, please get off this. What’s in there has a neural network. Not a mind.” She walked to the fence’s one and only gate. Jonah followed her, smarting. The row of binocular lenses shifted a minute angle to track them. He was important, irreplaceable even, but he was always on thin ice with Sever. That was the default condition of a lot of graduate students, but it seemed to be even more default for him. He thought it might be conscious; she did not; and her opinion counted more.
He drew up beside her at the gate. The fence was topped with barbed wire. Underneath it, buried in the ground, were high-voltage suppressors. Two years ago this had been a modest municipal golf course. Now most people just called it the Zone. This close to the fence, he could hear a soft, high-pitched whine because the suppressors interfered slightly with his cochlear implant processors. It was irritating, and he repressed the desire to pull the processors’ headpieces off his skull. Now was not a good time to be deaf. He was, technically speaking, a cyborg, but he never used the word. It sounded too silly and self-important.
The fence was not there to keep people out. Not even the stupidest or drunkest people dared to go into the Zone to smoke or party or have sex. The fence, and the electrical suppressors underneath it, were there to keep the ant colony in. Sever had persuaded the government that trying to poison Golf Course Colony, as it was now called, might just make it mutate even more. And that trying to blow it up might just make it grow even faster. No one knew what to do, so Jonah’s job was classic scientist: gather data.
Sever waved to the observers and pointed to the gate: Open it. A moment later Jonah heard the whine vanish. He nodded to Sever, confirming that the suppressors were off. She pushed the gate open.
Jonah stepped through, then on impulse turned to her. “Professor, I want to run my experiment.”
Sever grimaced. “Oh, Jonah. This is costing a thousand dollars a minute. And even you can barely hold out in there. Please don’t make me send Bert and Ernie in after you.”
Jonah sighed. “Bert and Ernie” were a pair of soldiers standing by to rescue him. Should he run into trouble, they would inject themselves with antipsychotics and race into the Zone to haul him out. Jonah had his doubts; they were more likely to kill each other than save him. He said, “Look, I just want to show that the ant colony will synchronize with a forty-hertz pulse train.”
Sever said, “You’re not fooling me, Jonah. I know what you’re after. But Golf Course Colony can’t be sapient. You pissed off your entire prelim committee by pushing this. If you weren’t essential, I don’t think you’d even be in the program. I’ve spoken up for you, but you’re closer than you think to just being hired to do this.”
Jonah compressed his lips. He could be tossed out and then offered hazard pay, which he would accept because like most grad students, he had no money. Then he would be a technician, a mere pair of hands, not a potential scholar—let alone a scholar with potential. He said sullenly, “I’m the one on the line.”
“True that,” Sever said. “So don’t waste your time in there. Just get the data. A lot of lives may depend on it.”
Jonah turned and trudged uphill toward the golf clubhouse. But as he went, his footsteps sounded softer and softer. He made a soft tsk with his lips and discovered that he could not hear himself at all. He grimaced and walked back to the gate, holding his hand out: My disk.
Sever detached a small white disk from from the lapel of her denim jacket. She gave it to him with a thin smile. “Don’t forget your gear, soldier.”
Jonah took it, embarrassed. It was an FM transmitter that radioed her voice directly into his cochlear implants. Effectively, it put his ears on her body. In that one sense his hearing was better than normal, because he could hear anyone wearing it loud and clear up to a hundred feet away. It was handy for all kinds of situations. It wasn’t for the Zone, though; it was too short-range. But it would confuse him if he didn’t turn it off. He pushed the button on its side, and its green light dimmed. At the same time, the tenor of his soundscape changed subtly. His input was now coming from the microphones in his processors, instead of from the ones in the disk. The disk was a useful gadget, but it made his auditory life very weird because he heard his own voice, his own footsteps, only when they reached the disk and were radioed back to him. It literally put his ears off his body.
He walked back up. He heard the whine resuming, distantly, as the suppressors were powered up again. He could already sense his thoughts becoming distorted. At the moment it was just a vague sense that the world was empty, uninhabited, desolate. It had nothing to do with the suppressors; it was a property of the Zone itself. The birds circling above now seemed like nothing more than intaglio etchings in the sky, with no more will or delight than the ashes lofted by a fire.
He was not immune to the Zone effect. He was just pretty good at handling it. Everyone assumed it was because he couldn’t hear the stridulation of the billions of insects in the Zone, an intense and annoying high-pitched sound, like cicadas in overdrive, that no earmuffs could shut out because it vibrated right through the skull to the inner ear. This was true, so far as it went; his cochlear implant software cut off all sounds higher-pitched than 8,000 cycles per second. But Jonah knew that was only part of the story. The Zone effect was produced, somehow, by electromagnetic fields that affected the brain. He had no protection against those. Yet he seemed to be able to discount them. No one knew why, and in an intellectual carelessness he found remarkable, it was just chalked up to his deafness. Jonah was sure that if he ever figured it out, he would know a lot more about himself.
He heard a whir and looked up to see that a drone had joined him. He would soon pass out of view behind a line of trees. Now Sever and the observers would have eyes on him this way too.
Professor Shera Sever had rocketed to fame by discovering that a colony of Camponotus pennsylvanicus ants—the classic, ordinary black ants common in the Northeast USA—had mutated in a bizarre way. Some of its larvae never hatched. Instead, they thrust their legs and antennae through their egg casings. Where the tip of an antenna met the tip of another larva’s leg, they fused. That enabled electrochemical signals to flow from one larva to the next. Sever had named these larvae sessiles, from the Latin word for seated.
Golf Course Colony had somehow grown itself a neural network.
But what that network was doing, nobody knew. That was Jonah’s job: to collect the data that might get answers. And to do it before the government decided that enough was enough and brought its toys to bear.
He paused to survey the clubhouse. There were six golf carts parked in formation beside it. Their vinyl seats were encrusted with pollen and dirt, and their tires had gone flat. The golf course had been abandoned so fast that little had been saved.
His phone rang. He reached up to his ear and clicked a button on the processor to take the call. Sever’s voice surged into his head. “Try there, Jonah. Don’t go any further than you need to.”
“Okay,” Jonah agreed. He had to remind himself that her voice was real, not a recording. He knelt, shrugged off his pack, and found one of the colony’s entrance holes. A few ants emerged from it, waving their antennae. He gripped one of them and peered at it. It had long antennae with pheromone glands at their tips, the result of a colony-wide Hox mutation that had moved the species’ pheromonal organ to a completely different place. It was a weird-looking ant. He let it go and pulled his endoscope out of the pack. It was a fiber-optic cable of the kind used for colonoscopies. He turned on its tiny but bright light and threaded it into the hole. Then he peered into the endoscope’s display.
It was like traveling into another universe. He saw a gaping, arboreal, irregular cavity swarming with ants, their antennae waving and their mandibles clicking. They rushed at him and disappeared offscreen; others rushed in from the edge and disappeared into crevices and cavities beyond the light.
He pushed the endoscope into the ground slowly, centimeter by centimeter. The scene on the display rotated and somersaulted, like video from a tiny roller coaster. What he was looking for was anything white, because anything white would be an egg case—the shell of a sessile. But after a moment he shook his head in frustration. He waved his arm at the drone, then held his fist to his face, thumb and pinky splayed out: Call me.
Sever’s astringent voice came on the line. “No sessiles?”
“No sessiles,” he agreed. “So now…” He shook his head again.
Sever said, “I’m sorry, Jonah. Better go further up.”
Jonah looked unhappily up the hill. The clubhouse was not far, but psychologically it was in a different universe. It was near the center of the Zone, where the sessiles were closest to the surface and emitted the strongest electromagnetic fields. Their bodies were loaded with zinc, a metal that bound easily to chitin and was a very good conductor.
He reluctantly walked toward the clubhouse. The drone followed. A dull despair settled on him, growing with each step. Nothing meant anything. Delight was gone. Going into the heart of the Zone was like lifting a warm, redolent piece of pizza to one’s mouth and biting down to find that it was made of styrofoam. Every living thing he saw was merely a machine with no more inner life than a clock.
This was what Golf Course Colony had done to a municipal golf course. If it ever spread beyond the Zone, this was what it would do to humanity.
He drew up a dozen feet from the clubhouse. He gasped and shook his head, forcing himself to remember why he was there; it was like trying to recall a dream. Put the endoscope down a hole. Look for sessiles. Insert electrodes in 32 of them.
He found another entrance hole. This time, he soon found an untidy tangle of sessiles. He nodded in satisfaction, then threaded an electrode down the endoscope. Presently its needle-sharp tip appeared in the display, enormously magnified.
He held his breath to keep his hands still, then pushed the tip into one of the sessiles. The insect squirmed queasily, making its casing stretch and contract. Ordinarily Jonah would have shuddered; sticking things into living creatures was his least favorite aspect of science. But the weirdness of the Zone rendered him cold and conscienceless. He plugged the other end of the electrode into his multimeter.
The multimeter emitted a scattered beeping, which was a representation of the sessile’s neural pulses. They sounded, as usual, like windchimes banging against each other in a storm. He did a few more sessiles and the sound became even more discordant. Golf Course Colony had always been chaotic, mystifying, inexplicable.
But so was he, in a way. His cyborg body had parts that thought for themselves. His processors and internal circuitry constantly made decisions about what they thought was important for him to hear, and they sometimes got it wrong. He might be listening to someone, only for their voice to vanish when he turned his head and his processors decided that person was no longer important. He was a whole made of independent parts, a distant relative of the colony below his feet.
His phone rang and again Sever’s voice filled his head. "Jonah, give me an electrode count.”
He frowned. It sounded like a question for him, but it could not be, any more than a PA system addressed one personally. He pressed a button on one of his processors, hanging up the call.
The phone rang again at once. Sever’s voice said, more slowly this time, “Jonah. Listen to me. This is your advisor. I am talking to you. Give me an electrode count."
Jonah scowled, hung up again, and moved still closer to the clubhouse. Data—he had to get the data. Data would let him understand Golf Course Colony well enough to find a safe way to kill it. He would be a hero. To whom, he could no longer remember, but a hero all the same. He found another hole and moved methodically, mechanically, to insert electrodes into more sessiles.
His phone rang again and his processors picked up the call. A voice gabbled, saying absurd things about Bert and Ernie and rescue. Nothing could ever rescue him, because nothing could ever want to rescue him. He was the only conscious person in the world. Yet he wanted someone to talk to so badly it felt like having been hungry for a thousand years. A woman would never touch his arm and look him in the eyes. Never. This voice pretending to address him—it was a malfunction in the universe. This made him angry, and he hung up again.
The drone moved closer to him, whining furiously. He ignored it. He took out his phone and opened an app. It was a program that he had written himself. It had only one function: to emit a forty-hertz tone, to human ears a deep, almost subsonic bass. He put it on the grass, facing down. Forty-hertz waves were important because in the human brain they were associated with consciousness. Some irritating machine had told him not to bother. The hell with that.
The multimeter’s crackling sound changed abruptly, hardening into a sustained pure tone. Jonah stared at it, bewildered. The neural traffic had become synchronized—at forty hertz.
Something—Jonah had no idea what—flipped. He suddenly had the intense sensation, the perception, the knowledge, that Golf Course Colony knew he was there and was intending to do something about it. He was being looked at, slowly and carefully, by something intensely conscious. His spine went rigid and he gasped, too frightened to move.
2.
The Caretaker was feeling the emotion of bad carnival. It was a sensation of faraway mess, mistake, and chaos, for which parts of oneself were responsible. The closest equivalent, in a human, would be the mortification of knowing that one of his or her hands had detached itself, crawled away, and strangled someone.
The Caretaker’s job was to modify the genes of an ant colony on Earth, and then raise and mentor it. Over the years they had helped the ant colony grow a neural network while waiting for the primates to go extinct. No primate species had ever survived its own technology. Once freed, the ant colony would repopulate the planet with its descendants, who would build a proper civilization.
For now, the ant colony was thriving. It was learning how to examine the world around it, and mastering basic Tokic so that it could talk. The Caretaker continually tasted the soil around it, registering with pleasure its unique profile of formics, phosphoglycans, sidereophores, and humic supramolecules. They had also trained the ant colony to gently push the primates away with a field that disrupted the perception of intentionality. It was a civilized, ethical weapon, completely in accordance with the Theorem of Love.
But one primate had been pushing its way in anyway. The Caretaker had decided not to intervene; it seemed harmless. But the ant colony had become angrier and angrier about it. Now, all of a sudden, it was in a killing rage. It had whipped itself up into hyperconsciousness, and it was getting ready to attack the primate above them with a violent electromagnetic pulse.
That was bad carnival, really bad carnival. It would be a pointless attack, because primates were biological creatures that would not be harmed by electromagnetic pulses. But the pulse could blow out a big chunk of The Caretaker, and it might draw the unwelcome attention of more primates.
Why was the ant colony so angry?
The Caretaker told a subset of itself, a few billion of its nanobots, to take on the shape of a small clover plant. This was difficult, but fun. The Caretaker liked their body; it was nimble and agile, and adept on so many scales. Their nanobots could aggregate themselves into any shape, however complex. When The Caretaker was underground, which they almost always were, the tendrils were an amorphous network. When they were aboveground, which they almost never were, the tendrils shaped themselves into a central trunk that branched off into ever finer branches. The tendrils could move quickly, but as a whole, The Caretaker was slow.
The Caretaker’s subset got to work, morphing itself into a stem and designing the leaves branching off of it. The fake plant would gleam like oily metal, diffracting light into prismatic shards of color, but that was all right because it would be hidden among real plants.
The Caretaker moved this disguised subset upward bit by bit through the soil. Once it crowned the surface its “leaves” spread away from the stalk and turned to the sun, mimicking the act of tracking it.
The Caretaker disapproved; the subset was showing off. But they asked two of the subset’s pseudo-leaves to make a pinhole eye. One of the leaves made a tiny hole in its center. The other leaf positioned itself to receive a projected image from it. The image was upside down, but the leaf’s circuitry easily turned it right side up and passed it on.
From the safety of the grass, using its disguised eye, The Caretaker peered out at the golf course in Rock Creek Park.
They saw the primate at once. The Caretaker had seen many aliens, but primates were weird enough to make their nanobots chatter among themselves in complicated, boustrouphedonic signals, with ancillaries of confusion, disaggregation, and premature repolarization. Primates were bizarre. They had only two arms, and those arms were physically attached to them. That was gross. Weird. Unsettling. It took a few milliseconds for The Caretaker to calm its various parts down.
They studied the primate some more. It was kneeling on the ground. It held a long, black tube and a box with electronics in it. But apart from that, the primate was not unusual. It had been here before several times, in fact. What about it, exactly, was making the ant colony so angry?
The Caretaker dusted the primate with a light breeze of X-rays. What the X-rays revealed was so shocking that part of The Caretaker contracted into a hard, tight ball despite the resistance of the soil. The primate was a cyborg! It had two hundred and eighty thousand transistors embedded in the bony sphere that held its neural network. They led to thirty-two electrodes that went deep into the sphere’s interior.
The primates were going cyborg!
The ant colony had only now gotten smart enough to realize this. The Caretaker’s tendrils contracted even further in their collective chagrin. They had been careless; they had not paid enough attention to the primates to realize what was going on. The existence of a cyborg primate changed everything. It was totally unexpected, and it put the entire plan at risk. No wonder the ant colony was grue and wanhope—and furious.
Now The Caretaker realized that the electromagnetic pulse would in fact hurt the primate, possibly quite badly, because of its internal electronics. Bad carnival, bad carnival, things were spinning out of control. What were they going to do?
(Revised version posted June 3, 2025) Epigraph: In the fifteen years since contact with Formicaran hives, the study of Tokic has challenged fundamental assumptions about linguistic structure, particularly in relation to how languages encode identity and collective cognition. Tokic is a spatial, signed language whose holonic grammar explicitly encodes the whole-part relationships of distributed entities. The existence of humans—corporeal, individuated beings—posed a fundamental problem for Tokic’s grammatical categories. The existence of cyborg humans posed an even graver problem, because the hives initially believed that the first-contact team had enslaved their cybernetic parts. This would have been a serious violation of the Theorem of Love; the misunderstanding nearly resulted in the death of the first-contact team. Fortunately, under the leadership of Jonah Loeb, the team survived and reached an understanding of the holonic grammar that permitted successful negotiation with Golf Course Colony. Since then, the field of linguistics has been challenged to consider how human languages might implicitly encode collective cognition, revealing structural patterns that had previously gone unrecognized. Everett, Daphne (2032). “The Grammar of the Swarm: Tokic and the Linguistics of the Collective Mind.” The Journal of Alien Cognition and Communication, 42(3), 215–243. 1. Jonah nervously shifted his knapsack on his shoulders. It was heavy with the stuff he would need in the Zone. It seemed wrong that on such a beautiful day, he would soon be psychotic. Yet Rock Creek Park glowed at this time of year. The autumnal light seemed to melt off the trees. Just five miles south was official Washington, with its marbled ecosystems of money and power. But the park was so large, and so hilly and forested, that it might as well be deep country, timelessly beyond politics. More than that, it seemed to be in a different part of the universe, colored by the light of a different sun. Some hundred yards away, a row of observers watched him and his advisor pitilessly through binoculars. Some of them were in camo gear; they looked like they could break Jonah’s neck with their bare hands. But they couldn’t go into the golf course. He could. And, unfortunately, today he would—alone. It would be his sixth trip in, and it got harder every time. It was not likely to kill him physically. It would kill his soul. Temporarily, but that was bad enough. Jonah’s stomach felt icy with tension. The horizontally arrayed lenses of the binoculars reminded him of the eyes of a jumping spider. He said to Professor Sever, “What would you do if you saw a forty-hertz wave?” What he was really saying was, If the ant colony in the Zone is conscious, what would we do about that? But scientists didn’t talk that way. The scary stuff was always repressed underneath layers of jargon. Shera Sever looked grim. She had a severe, lined face, the sort that came from not wearing enough sunscreen in places tourists never went. “I’m sorry you have to do this, Jonah. Your problem is lucky for us. Not so much for you.” Jonah knew that your problem meant his deafness. The Venn-diagram overlap of deaf person and entomology grad student, which he was, yielded exactly one human being on Earth: him. He was the single best person in the world for going into the Zone. He pressed, “The forty-hertz—” Sever shook her head. “Jonah, please get off this. What’s in there has a neural network. Not a mind.” She walked to the fence’s one and only gate. Jonah followed her, smarting. The row of binocular lenses shifted a minute angle to track them. He was important, irreplaceable even, but he was always on thin ice with Sever. That was the default condition of a lot of graduate students, but it seemed to be even more default for him. He thought it might be conscious; she did not; and her opinion counted more. He drew up beside her at the gate. The fence was topped with barbed wire. Underneath it, buried in the ground, were high-voltage suppressors. Two years ago this had been a modest municipal golf course. Now most people just called it the Zone. This close to the fence, he could hear a soft, high-pitched whine because the suppressors interfered slightly with his cochlear implant processors. It was irritating, and he repressed the desire to pull the processors’ headpieces off his skull. Now was not a good time to be deaf. He was, technically speaking, a cyborg, but he never used the word. It sounded too silly and self-important. The fence was not there to keep people out. Not even the stupidest or drunkest people dared to go into the Zone to smoke or party or have sex. The fence, and the electrical suppressors underneath it, were there to keep the ant colony in. Sever had persuaded the government that trying to poison Golf Course Colony, as it was now called, might just make it mutate even more. And that trying to blow it up might just make it grow even faster. No one knew what to do, so Jonah’s job was classic scientist: gather data. Sever waved to the observers and pointed to the gate: Open it. A moment later Jonah heard the whine vanish. He nodded to Sever, confirming that the suppressors were off. She pushed the gate open. Jonah stepped through, then on impulse turned to her. “Professor, I want to run my experiment.” Sever grimaced. “Oh, Jonah. This is costing a thousand dollars a minute. And even you can barely hold out in there. Please don’t make me send Bert and Ernie in after you.” Jonah sighed. “Bert and Ernie” were a pair of soldiers standing by to rescue him. Should he run into trouble, they would inject themselves with antipsychotics and race into the Zone to haul him out. Jonah had his doubts; they were more likely to kill each other than save him. He said, “Look, I just want to show that the ant colony will synchronize with a forty-hertz pulse train.” Sever said, “You’re not fooling me, Jonah. I know what you’re after. But Golf Course Colony can’t be sapient. You pissed off your entire prelim committee by pushing this. If you weren’t essential, I don’t think you’d even be in the program. I’ve spoken up for you, but you’re closer than you think to just being hired to do this.” Jonah compressed his lips. He could be tossed out and then offered hazard pay, which he would accept because like most grad students, he had no money. Then he would be a technician, a mere pair of hands, not a potential scholar—let alone a scholar with potential. He said sullenly, “I’m the one on the line.” “True that,” Sever said. “So don’t waste your time in there. Just get the data. A lot of lives may depend on it.” Jonah turned and trudged uphill toward the golf clubhouse. But as he went, his footsteps sounded softer and softer. He made a soft tsk with his lips and discovered that he could not hear himself at all. He grimaced and walked back to the gate, holding his hand out: My disk. Sever detached a small white disk from from the lapel of her denim jacket. She gave it to him with a thin smile. “Don’t forget your gear, soldier.” Jonah took it, embarrassed. It was an FM transmitter that radioed her voice directly into his cochlear implants. Effectively, it put his ears on her body. In that one sense his hearing was better than normal, because he could hear anyone wearing it loud and clear up to a hundred feet away. It was handy for all kinds of situations. It wasn’t for the Zone, though; it was too short-range. But it would confuse him if he didn’t turn it off. He pushed the button on its side, and its green light dimmed. At the same time, the tenor of his soundscape changed subtly. His input was now coming from the microphones in his processors, instead of from the ones in the disk. The disk was a useful gadget, but it made his auditory life very weird because he heard his own voice, his own footsteps, only when they reached the disk and were radioed back to him. It literally put his ears off his body. He walked back up. He heard the whine resuming, distantly, as the suppressors were powered up again. He could already sense his thoughts becoming distorted. At the moment it was just a vague sense that the world was empty, uninhabited, desolate. It had nothing to do with the suppressors; it was a property of the Zone itself. The birds circling above now seemed like nothing more than intaglio etchings in the sky, with no more will or delight than the ashes lofted by a fire. He was not immune to the Zone effect. He was just pretty good at handling it. Everyone assumed it was because he couldn’t hear the stridulation of the billions of insects in the Zone, an intense and annoying high-pitched sound, like cicadas in overdrive, that no earmuffs could shut out because it vibrated right through the skull to the inner ear. This was true, so far as it went; his cochlear implant software cut off all sounds higher-pitched than 8,000 cycles per second. But Jonah knew that was only part of the story. The Zone effect was produced, somehow, by electromagnetic fields that affected the brain. He had no protection against those. Yet he seemed to be able to discount them. No one knew why, and in an intellectual carelessness he found remarkable, it was just chalked up to his deafness. Jonah was sure that if he ever figured it out, he would know a lot more about himself. He heard a whir and looked up to see that a drone had joined him. He would soon pass out of view behind a line of trees. Now Sever and the observers would have eyes on him this way too. Professor Shera Sever had rocketed to fame by discovering that a colony of Camponotus pennsylvanicus ants—the classic, ordinary black ants common in the Northeast USA—had mutated in a bizarre way. Some of its larvae never hatched. Instead, they thrust their legs and antennae through their egg casings. Where the tip of an antenna met the tip of another larva’s leg, they fused. That enabled electrochemical signals to flow from one larva to the next. Sever had named these larvae sessiles, from the Latin word for seated. Golf Course Colony had somehow grown itself a neural network. But what that network was doing, nobody knew. That was Jonah’s job: to collect the data that might get answers. And to do it before the government decided that enough was enough and brought its toys to bear. He paused to survey the clubhouse. There were six golf carts parked in formation beside it. Their vinyl seats were encrusted with pollen and dirt, and their tires had gone flat. The golf course had been abandoned so fast that little had been saved. His phone rang. He reached up to his ear and clicked a button on the processor to take the call. Sever’s voice surged into his head. “Try there, Jonah. Don’t go any further than you need to.” “Okay,” Jonah agreed. He had to remind himself that her voice was real, not a recording. He knelt, shrugged off his pack, and found one of the colony’s entrance holes. A few ants emerged from it, waving their antennae. He gripped one of them and peered at it. It had long antennae with pheromone glands at their tips, the result of a colony-wide Hox mutation that had moved the species’ pheromonal organ to a completely different place. It was a weird-looking ant. He let it go and pulled his endoscope out of the pack. It was a fiber-optic cable of the kind used for colonoscopies. He turned on its tiny but bright light and threaded it into the hole. Then he peered into the endoscope’s display. It was like traveling into another universe. He saw a gaping, arboreal, irregular cavity swarming with ants, their antennae waving and their mandibles clicking. They rushed at him and disappeared offscreen; others rushed in from the edge and disappeared into crevices and cavities beyond the light. He pushed the endoscope into the ground slowly, centimeter by centimeter. The scene on the display rotated and somersaulted, like video from a tiny roller coaster. What he was looking for was anything white, because anything white would be an egg case—the shell of a sessile. But after a moment he shook his head in frustration. He waved his arm at the drone, then held his fist to his face, thumb and pinky splayed out: Call me. Sever’s astringent voice came on the line. “No sessiles?” “No sessiles,” he agreed. “So now…” He shook his head again. Sever said, “I’m sorry, Jonah. Better go further up.” Jonah looked unhappily up the hill. The clubhouse was not far, but psychologically it was in a different universe. It was near the center of the Zone, where the sessiles were closest to the surface and emitted the strongest electromagnetic fields. Their bodies were loaded with zinc, a metal that bound easily to chitin and was a very good conductor. He reluctantly walked toward the clubhouse. The drone followed. A dull despair settled on him, growing with each step. Nothing meant anything. Delight was gone. Going into the heart of the Zone was like lifting a warm, redolent piece of pizza to one’s mouth and biting down to find that it was made of styrofoam. Every living thing he saw was merely a machine with no more inner life than a clock. This was what Golf Course Colony had done to a municipal golf course. If it ever spread beyond the Zone, this was what it would do to humanity. He drew up a dozen feet from the clubhouse. He gasped and shook his head, forcing himself to remember why he was there; it was like trying to recall a dream. Put the endoscope down a hole. Look for sessiles. Insert electrodes in 32 of them. He found another entrance hole. This time, he soon found an untidy tangle of sessiles. He nodded in satisfaction, then threaded an electrode down the endoscope. Presently its needle-sharp tip appeared in the display, enormously magnified. He held his breath to keep his hands still, then pushed the tip into one of the sessiles. The insect squirmed queasily, making its casing stretch and contract. Ordinarily Jonah would have shuddered; sticking things into living creatures was his least favorite aspect of science. But the weirdness of the Zone rendered him cold and conscienceless. He plugged the other end of the electrode into his multimeter. The multimeter emitted a scattered beeping, which was a representation of the sessile’s neural pulses. They sounded, as usual, like windchimes banging against each other in a storm. He did a few more sessiles and the sound became even more discordant. Golf Course Colony had always been chaotic, mystifying, inexplicable. But so was he, in a way. His cyborg body had parts that thought for themselves. His processors and internal circuitry constantly made decisions about what they thought was important for him to hear, and they sometimes got it wrong. He might be listening to someone, only for their voice to vanish when he turned his head and his processors decided that person was no longer important. He was a whole made of independent parts, a distant relative of the colony below his feet. His phone rang and again Sever’s voice filled his head. "Jonah, give me an electrode count.” He frowned. It sounded like a question for him, but it could not be, any more than a PA system addressed one personally. He pressed a button on one of his processors, hanging up the call. The phone rang again at once. Sever’s voice said, more slowly this time, “Jonah. Listen to me. This is your advisor. I am talking to you. Give me an electrode count." Jonah scowled, hung up again, and moved still closer to the clubhouse. Data—he had to get the data. Data would let him understand Golf Course Colony well enough to find a safe way to kill it. He would be a hero. To whom, he could no longer remember, but a hero all the same. He found another hole and moved methodically, mechanically, to insert electrodes into more sessiles. His phone rang again and his processors picked up the call. A voice gabbled, saying absurd things about Bert and Ernie and rescue. Nothing could ever rescue him, because nothing could ever want to rescue him. He was the only conscious person in the world. Yet he wanted someone to talk to so badly it felt like having been hungry for a thousand years. A woman would never touch his arm and look him in the eyes. Never. This voice pretending to address him—it was a malfunction in the universe. This made him angry, and he hung up again. The drone moved closer to him, whining furiously. He ignored it. He took out his phone and opened an app. It was a program that he had written himself. It had only one function: to emit a forty-hertz tone, to human ears a deep, almost subsonic bass. He put it on the grass, facing down. Forty-hertz waves were important because in the human brain they were associated with consciousness. Some irritating machine had told him not to bother. The hell with that. The multimeter’s crackling sound changed abruptly, hardening into a sustained pure tone. Jonah stared at it, bewildered. The neural traffic had become synchronized—at forty hertz. Something—Jonah had no idea what—flipped. He suddenly had the intense sensation, the perception, the knowledge, that Golf Course Colony knew he was there and was intending to do something about it. He was being looked at, slowly and carefully, by something intensely conscious. His spine went rigid and he gasped, too frightened to move. 2. The Caretaker was feeling the emotion of bad carnival. It was a sensation of faraway mess, mistake, and chaos, for which parts of oneself were responsible. The closest equivalent, in a human, would be the mortification of knowing that one of his or her hands had detached itself, crawled away, and strangled someone. The Caretaker’s job was to modify the genes of an ant colony on Earth, and then raise and mentor it. Over the years they had helped the ant colony grow a neural network while waiting for the primates to go extinct. No primate species had ever survived its own technology. Once freed, the ant colony would repopulate the planet with its descendants, who would build a proper civilization. For now, the ant colony was thriving. It was learning how to examine the world around it, and mastering basic Tokic so that it could talk. The Caretaker continually tasted the soil around it, registering with pleasure its unique profile of formics, phosphoglycans, sidereophores, and humic supramolecules. They had also trained the ant colony to gently push the primates away with a field that disrupted the perception of intentionality. It was a civilized, ethical weapon, completely in accordance with the Theorem of Love. But one primate had been pushing its way in anyway. The Caretaker had decided not to intervene; it seemed harmless. But the ant colony had become angrier and angrier about it. Now, all of a sudden, it was in a killing rage. It had whipped itself up into hyperconsciousness, and it was getting ready to attack the primate above them with a violent electromagnetic pulse. That was bad carnival, really bad carnival. It would be a pointless attack, because primates were biological creatures that would not be harmed by electromagnetic pulses. But the pulse could blow out a big chunk of The Caretaker, and it might draw the unwelcome attention of more primates. Why was the ant colony so angry? The Caretaker told a subset of itself, a few billion of its nanobots, to take on the shape of a small clover plant. This was difficult, but fun. The Caretaker liked their body; it was nimble and agile, and adept on so many scales. Their nanobots could aggregate themselves into any shape, however complex. When The Caretaker was underground, which they almost always were, the tendrils were an amorphous network. When they were aboveground, which they almost never were, the tendrils shaped themselves into a central trunk that branched off into ever finer branches. The tendrils could move quickly, but as a whole, The Caretaker was slow. The Caretaker’s subset got to work, morphing itself into a stem and designing the leaves branching off of it. The fake plant would gleam like oily metal, diffracting light into prismatic shards of color, but that was all right because it would be hidden among real plants. The Caretaker moved this disguised subset upward bit by bit through the soil. Once it crowned the surface its “leaves” spread away from the stalk and turned to the sun, mimicking the act of tracking it. The Caretaker disapproved; the subset was showing off. But they asked two of the subset’s pseudo-leaves to make a pinhole eye. One of the leaves made a tiny hole in its center. The other leaf positioned itself to receive a projected image from it. The image was upside down, but the leaf’s circuitry easily turned it right side up and passed it on. From the safety of the grass, using its disguised eye, The Caretaker peered out at the golf course in Rock Creek Park. They saw the primate at once. The Caretaker had seen many aliens, but primates were weird enough to make their nanobots chatter among themselves in complicated, boustrouphedonic signals, with ancillaries of confusion, disaggregation, and premature repolarization. Primates were bizarre. They had only two arms, and those arms were physically attached to them. That was gross. Weird. Unsettling. It took a few milliseconds for The Caretaker to calm its various parts down. They studied the primate some more. It was kneeling on the ground. It held a long, black tube and a box with electronics in it. But apart from that, the primate was not unusual. It had been here before several times, in fact. What about it, exactly, was making the ant colony so angry? The Caretaker dusted the primate with a light breeze of X-rays. What the X-rays revealed was so shocking that part of The Caretaker contracted into a hard, tight ball despite the resistance of the soil. The primate was a cyborg! It had two hundred and eighty thousand transistors embedded in the bony sphere that held its neural network. They led to thirty-two electrodes that went deep into the sphere’s interior. The primates were going cyborg! The ant colony had only now gotten smart enough to realize this. The Caretaker’s tendrils contracted even further in their collective chagrin. They had been careless; they had not paid enough attention to the primates to realize what was going on. The existence of a cyborg primate changed everything. It was totally unexpected, and it put the entire plan at risk. No wonder the ant colony was grue and wanhope—and furious. Now The Caretaker realized that the electromagnetic pulse would in fact hurt the primate, possibly quite badly, because of its internal electronics. Bad carnival, bad carnival, things were spinning out of control. What were they going to do?