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. Silhouetted1 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 clearly—
And 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 dispensing2 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 shrugged3 casually4. 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 squinted5 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. Zoom6 it in and see for yourself.” Bobby zoomed7. The image of the blond head enlarged. The figure was moving back and forth8, 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 ridges9, and a sort of mound10 where the lips should be. But there were no actual features.
It was as if a sculptor11 had started to carve a face, and had stopped before he was finished. It was an unfinished face.
Except that the eyebrows12 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 touching13 the ground, but rather hovering14 just above it. And the sneakers themselves were sort of blurry15. There was a hint of shoelaces, and a streak16 where a Nike logo would be. But it was like a sketch17, rather than an actual sneaker.
“This is very weird18,” Mae said.
“Not weird at all,” Charley said. “It’s a calculated approximation for density19. The swarm20 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 tilting22 its photovoltaic surface at slight angles, catching23 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 irritably24. “You’re acting25 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 prey26?”
“Basically, yes,” I said.
“I hate to think of us as prey,” Ricky said.
Mae said, “You mean it’s been coded to, literally27, physically28 imitate the prey?”
“No,” I said. “The program instruction is more generalized than that. It simply directs the agents to attain29 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 decided30 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 precisely31, it’s a swarm of swarms32, 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 cellular33 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 swirling34 mass of cells and atoms, clustered together into smaller swirls35 of cells and atoms.
Who cares? Well, it turns out a lot of processing occurs at the level of the organs. Human behavior is determined36 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 spinal37 cord, the stomach, the intestine38. 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 awareness39, 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.
Just because human beings went around thinking of themselves as “I” didn’t mean that it was true. And for all we knew, this damned swarm had some sort of rudimentary sense of itself as an entity40. Or, if it didn’t, it might very soon start to.
Watching the faceless man on the monitor, we saw that the image was now becoming unstable41. The swarm had trouble keeping the appearance solid. Instead it fluctuated: at moments, the face and shoulders seemed to dissolve into dust, then reemerge as solid again. It was strange to watch it.
“Losing its grip?” Bobby said.
“No, I think it’s getting tired,” Charley said.
“You mean it’s running out of power.”
“Yeah, probably. It’d take a lot of extra juice to tilt21 all those particles into exact orientations42.”
Indeed, the swarm was reverting43 back to a cloud appearance again.
“So this is a low-power mode?” I said.
“Yeah. I’m sure they were optimized44 for power management.”
“Or they are now,” I said.
It was getting darker quickly, now. The orange was gone from the sky. The monitor was starting to lose definition.
The swarm turned, and swirled45 away.
“I’ll be goddamned,” Charley said.
I watched the swarm disappear into the horizon.
“Three hours,” I said, “and they’re history.”
收听单词发音 |
1
silhouetted
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| 显出轮廓的，显示影像的 | |
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dispensing
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| v.分配( dispense的现在分词 )；施与；配（药） | |
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shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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casually
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| adv.漠不关心地，无动于衷地，不负责任地 | |
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squinted
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| 斜视( squint的过去式和过去分词 )； 眯着眼睛； 瞟； 从小孔或缝隙里看 | |
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zoom
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| n.急速上升；v.突然扩大，急速上升 | |
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zoomed
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| v.（飞机、汽车等）急速移动( zoom的过去式 )；（价格、费用等）急升，猛涨 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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ridges
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| n.脊( ridge的名词复数 )；山脊；脊状突起；大气层的)高压脊 | |
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mound
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| n.土墩，堤，小山；v.筑堤，用土堆防卫 | |
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sculptor
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| n.雕刻家，雕刻家 | |
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eyebrows
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| 眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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hovering
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| 鸟( hover的现在分词 )； 靠近（某事物）； （人）徘徊； 犹豫 | |
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blurry
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| adj.模糊的；污脏的，污斑的 | |
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streak
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| n.条理，斑纹，倾向，少许，痕迹；v.加条纹，变成条纹，奔驰，快速移动 | |
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sketch
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| n.草图；梗概；素描；v.素描；概述 | |
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weird
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| adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的 | |
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density
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| n.密集，密度，浓度 | |
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swarm
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| n.(昆虫)等一大群；vi.成群飞舞；蜂拥而入 | |
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tilt
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| v.(使)倾侧；(使)倾斜；n.倾侧；倾斜 | |
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tilting
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| 倾斜，倾卸 | |
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catching
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| adj.易传染的，有魅力的，迷人的，接住 | |
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irritably
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| ad.易生气地 | |
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acting
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| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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physically
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| adj.物质上，体格上，身体上，按自然规律 | |
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attain
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| vt.达到，获得，完成 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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swarms
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| 蜂群，一大群( swarm的名词复数 ) | |
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cellular
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| adj.移动的；细胞的，由细胞组成的 | |
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swirling
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| v.旋转，打旋( swirl的现在分词 ) | |
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swirls
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| n.旋转( swirl的名词复数 )；卷状物；漩涡；尘旋v.旋转，打旋( swirl的第三人称单数 ) | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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spinal
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| adj.针的，尖刺的，尖刺状突起的；adj.脊骨的，脊髓的 | |
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intestine
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| adj.内部的；国内的；n.肠 | |
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awareness
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| n.意识，觉悟，懂事，明智 | |
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entity
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| n.实体，独立存在体，实际存在物 | |
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unstable
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| adj.不稳定的，易变的 | |
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42
orientations
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| n.方向( orientation的名词复数 )；定位；（任职等前的）培训；环境判定 | |
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43
reverting
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| 恢复( revert的现在分词 )； 重提； 回到…上； 归还 | |
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44
optimized
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| adj.最佳化的，（使）最优化的v.使最优化，使尽可能有效( optimize的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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45
swirled
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| v.旋转，打旋( swirl的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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