“I’m not sure I understand the question.”

“Remember, the colony has become a superorganism. Again, every last individual member, although physically separate, is somehow connected to form a single mind. A hive-mind. Do you see why the Seventeen never imagined this as a real possibility for a space-faring race?”

Erin’s eyes widened. “Of course,” she said. “Because it’s impossible. Even over a single planet. If all the neurons in a human brain were spread out over the entire earth, you couldn’t get the brain to work. Even at the speed of light, the communication between neurons wouldn’t be fast enough. One of the reasons the brain is so compact is so signals can reach every last neuron as quickly as needed.”

“That’s right,” said Fermi. “That’s what I was getting at. The only way an abomination like this could exist is if the life form evolved the ability to send their equivalent of a neuronal firing faster than light. Instantaneously. If evolution provided the species with a way to take advantage of quantum entanglement.”

Erin blinked rapidly. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what that is,” she said.

Fermi described how every particle in the universe was in some way connected with every other, and how the Seventeen had eventually learned how to make use of this entanglement to communicate instantaneously, whether the communication was next door or at the edge of the universe.

“So this is a species with an army ant nature and an intuitive sense of quantum mechanics,” said the alien. “Which explains the superiority of its technology based on this science.”

“You said its technology,” said Erin. “Not their technology.”

“The members of the hive make up a single individual,” said Fermi. “A single superorganism. You’re made up of trillions of individual cells, but when I speak of these trillion cells in the collective sense, I’m speaking about you in the singular.”

“But then how can it be a species?”

Fermi smiled. “Excellent question. The semantics are a little tricky. A species is defined as a group of organisms, so you are technically correct. The Hive began as separate individuals, with separate minds, limited though they must have been, but have become something else. But since this one superorganism has conquered thousands of light years of space, we consider it both an individual and an entire species.”

Erin decided to move on. She would have to ponder semantics at another time. “But since it’s intelligent,” she said, deciding to use the singular, “won’t it modify its behavior? I understand its possible unwillingness to stop killing nonintelligent life. Even very compassionate humans still eat meat, or chicken, or fish. And plant life is life as well. So for a human to give up taking any life would be suicide. But an intelligent colony of army ants could at least bring itself to draw the line at fellow intelligences.”

“One would think,” said Fermi. “But that’s not how it goes. Intelligent, nonintelligent, it’s all the same to the Hive.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it’s been able to infiltrate some of our societies,” said Fermi simply.

45

THERE WAS A knock at the conference room door and a man brought in a tray of bottled water and cold soft drinks. There was a coffeemaker in the room, and Steve Fuller took the interruption as an excuse to pour himself a cup. Coffee was a drink for which Erin Palmer had never developed a taste, so she opened a bottle of the chilled water instead and poured it into a glass.

Fermi took a bottle of water as well, and Erin wondered if all members of the Seventeen had arisen from this liquid. She didn’t know much about this subject, but for some reason she had a feeling that they would all enjoy a cold glass of water.

When everyone had settled in once again, Erin turned her eyes back to Fermi and said, “What do you mean, infiltrate? I thought they wouldn’t get here for thirty-two thousand years. I mean it wouldn’t get here.”

“The infiltration wasn’t physical,” explained Fermi. “The physical members of the Hive can do short hops across space-time. But for longer ones the Hive needs to establish gates, which its physical members are building at an incredible pace. But fourteen hundred years ago, we discovered the Hive had another ability: it can enter a sentient mind from any distance, and suppress the mind of its host. Not easily. And, thankfully, not often.

“We soon discovered that twelve of the seventeen species had been infiltrated. The other five, for reasons which were not entirely clear, were resistant. When the few individuals who were being used as hosts were discovered, they were almost always killed by the portion of the hive mind that had controlled them. But a handful did survive. And this handful gained insight into the thought processes of the hive-mind.”

Erin looked on expectantly.

“So fourteen hundred years ago,” continued Fermi, “we discovered that the Hive was utterly selfish, utterly ruthless, and utterly without mercy, remorse, or compassion. It was a mentality that could not be understood. And although the hive-mind is one entity, it’s a highly splintered one. It has its mental tendrils in thousands or millions of places, so only a fraction of its attention is devoted in our direction. But it was sending out feelers. Scouting parties. It was using the principles of quantum entanglement, through a method we still don’t understand, to seize the minds of sentients to help prepare the way for its conquests, tens of thousands of years in the future.”

Erin thought of the scouts in an ant colony, the advance team, branching off from the main body. The army ant analogy was proving quite useful.

“Ultimately, we found foolproof means of identifying those few individuals controlled by the hive-mind in this way. And the twelve susceptible species found genetic countermeasures that they embedded in the DNA of their entire populations, making them resistant to this form of infiltration. When these genetic modifications had been completed, the Hive scouts were pushed out, never to return.”

“Okay,” said Erin. “So their last infiltration happened more than thirteen hundred years ago.”

“Actually,” said Fermi. “It took several hundred years to perfect and implement the countermeasures. So the Hive was fully blocked from entering any of the Seventeen’s minds only about eleven hundred years ago.” The alien frowned. “Not that it really mattered. We obviously couldn’t let it control individuals and gather intelligence. But even without the use of its scouts we knew we were ripe for the taking. Maybe ants would need good intel going against something that could mount a challenge to them. But we were like a few soft grub worms in the path of an entire colony of seething army ants, millions strong. No intel needed in our case.”

Fuller stared at Erin and raised his eyebrows. “I’m sure it didn’t fail to register with you,” he said, “that the description of the Hive’s behavior sounds extremely … psychopathic.”

“No. I got that,” she replied.

It all made a horrible sense to her. This superorganism would inevitably be without mercy or remorse. When the self, the seat of intellect, was so massive—spread out over trillions of individuals and thousands of light years—its selfishness would be equally immense.

Erin knew many scientists believed insect colonies on Earth were the ultimate embodiment of cooperation. But she realized now it was just the opposite. Sure, if you looked at army ants as individuals, they were cooperative—with each other. They made bridges with their bodies so their brethren could cross. They were willing to readily die for the cause. But if you looked at them as a superorganism, as cells of a single being that just happened to be able to move independently, the actions of individuals weren’t cooperative anymore. They were selfish. The cells in her own body displayed perfect cooperation, but they had a single purpose: preserving her as an individual.