"Fucking does."

"I already put in pepper."

"Needs more."

I said, "Guys? Are we missing anybody?"

"I don't think so, why?"

I pointed to the monitor. "Who's that standing out in the desert?"

DAY 6

7:12 P.M.

"Oh shit," Bobby said. He jumped up from the table and ran out of the room. Everyone else did, too. I followed the others.

Ricky was holding his radio as he went: "Vince, lock us down. Vince?"

"We're locked down," Vince said. "Pressure is five plus."

"Why didn't the alarm go off?"

"Can't say. Maybe they've learned to get past that, too."

I followed everybody into the utility room, where there were large wall-mounted liquid crystal displays showing the outside video cameras. Views of the desert from all angles. The sun was already below the horizon, but the sky was a bright orange, fading into purple and then dark blue. Silhouetted against this sky was a young man with short hair. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt and looked like a surfer. I couldn't see his face clearly in the failing light, but even so, watching the way he moved, I thought there was something familiar about him.

"We got any floodlights out there?" Charley said. He was walking around, holding his bowl of pasta, still eating.

"Lights coming up," Bobby said, and a moment later the young man stood in glaring light. Now I could see him clearlyAnd then it hit me. It looked like the same kid who had been in Julia's car last night after dinner, when she drove away, just before her accident. The same blond surfer kid who, now that I saw him again, looked like"Jesus, Ricky," Bobby said. "He looks like you."

"You're right," Mae said. "It's Ricky. Even the T-shirt."

Ricky was getting a soft drink out of the dispensing machine. He turned toward the display screen. "What're you guys talking about?"

"He looks like you," Mae said. "He even has your T-shirt with I Am Root on the front." Ricky looked at his own T-shirt, then back at the screen. He was silent for a moment. "I'll be damned."

I said, "You've never been out of the building, Ricky. How come it's you?"

"Fucking beats me," Ricky said. He shrugged casually. Too casually?

Mae said, "I can't make out the face very well. I mean the features." Charley moved closer to the largest of the screens and squinted at the image. "The reason you can't see features," he said, "is because there aren't any."

"Oh, come on."

"Charley, it's a resolution artifact, that's all."

"It's not," Charley said. "There're no fucking features. Zoom it in and see for yourself." Bobby zoomed. The image of the blond head enlarged. The figure was moving back and forth, in and out of the frame, but it was immediately clear that Charley was right. There were no features. There was an oval patch of pale skin beneath the blond hairline; and there was the suggestion of a nose and brow ridges, and a sort of mound where the lips should be. But there were no actual features.

It was as if a sculptor had started to carve a face, and had stopped before he was finished. It was an unfinished face.

Except that the eyebrows moved, from time to time. A sort of wiggle, or flutter. Or perhaps that was an artifact.

"You know what we're looking at here, don't you?" Charley said. He sounded worried. "Pan down. Let's see the rest of him." Bobby panned down, and we saw white sneakers moving over the desert dirt. Except the sneakers didn't seem to be touching the ground, but rather hovering just above it. And the sneakers themselves were sort of blurry. There was a hint of shoelaces, and a streak where a Nike logo would be. But it was like a sketch, rather than an actual sneaker.

"This is very weird," Mae said.

"Not weird at all," Charley said. "It's a calculated approximation for density. The swarm doesn't have enough agents to make high-resolution shoes. So it's approximating."

"Or else," I said, "it's the best it can do with the materials at hand. It must be generating all these colors by tilting its photovoltaic surface at slight angles, catching the light. It's like those flash cards the crowd holds up in football stadiums to make a picture."

"In which case," Charley said, "its behavior is quite sophisticated."

"More sophisticated than what we saw earlier," I said.

"Oh, for Christ's sake," Ricky said irritably. "You're acting like this swarm is Einstein."

"Obviously not," Charley said, " 'cause if it's modeling you, it's certainly no Einstein."

"Give it a rest, Charley."

"I would, Ricky, but you're such an asshole I get provoked over and over."

Bobby said, "Why don't you both give it a rest?"

Mae turned to me and said, "Why is the swarm doing this? Imitating the prey?"

"Basically, yes," I said.

"I hate to think of us as prey," Ricky said.

Mae said, "You mean it's been coded to, literally, physically imitate the prey?"

"No," I said. "The program instruction is more generalized than that. It simply directs the agents to attain the goal. So we are seeing one possible emergent solution. Which is more advanced than the previous version. Before, it had trouble making a stable 2-D image. Now it's modeling in three dimensions."

I glanced at the programmers. They had stricken looks on their faces. They knew exactly how big an advance they were witnessing. The transition to three dimensions meant that not only was the swarm now imitating our external appearance, it was also imitating our behavior. Our walks, our gestures. Which implied a far more complicated internal model. Mae said, "And the swarm decided this on its own?"

"Yes," I said. "Although I'm not sure 'decided' is the right term. The emergent behavior is the sum of individual agent behaviors. There isn't anybody there to 'decide' anything. There's no brain, no higher control in that swarm."

"Group mind?" Mae said. "Hive mind?"

"In a way," I said. "The point is, there is no central control."

"But it looks so controlled," she said. "It looks like a defined, purposeful organism."

"Yeah, well, so do we," Charley said, with a harsh laugh.

Nobody else laughed with him.

If you want to think of it that way, a human being is actually a giant swarm. Or more precisely, it's a swarm of swarms, because each organ-blood, liver, kidneys-is a separate swarm. What we refer to as a "body" is really the combination of all these organ swarms. We think our bodies are solid, but that's only because we can't see what is going on at the cellular level. If you could enlarge the human body, blow it up to a vast size, you would see that it was literally nothing but a swirling mass of cells and atoms, clustered together into smaller swirls of cells and atoms.

Who cares? Well, it turns out a lot of processing occurs at the level of the organs. Human behavior is determined in many places. The control of our behavior is not located in our brains. It's all over our bodies.

So you could argue that "swarm intelligence" rules human beings, too. Balance is controlled by the cerebellar swarm, and rarely comes to consciousness. Other processing occurs in the spinal cord, the stomach, the intestine. A lot of vision takes place in the eyeballs, long before the brain is involved.

And for that matter, a lot of sophisticated brain processing occurs beneath awareness, too. An easy proof is object avoidance. A mobile robot has to devote a tremendous amount of processing time simply to avoid obstacles in the environment. Human beings do, too, but they're never aware of it-until the lights go out. Then they learn painfully just how much processing is really required.

So there's an argument that the whole structure of consciousness, and the human sense of self-control and purposefulness, is a user illusion. We don't have conscious control over ourselves at all. We just think we do.