Prey

In another room, Jack sees Bobby Lembeck, a thirty-five-year-old coding supervisor, Mae Chang, a former field biologist who now works in programming, and Charley Davenport, a thirty-year-old expert in genetic algorithms who irritates everyone. Again, all were members of Jack’s team at MediaTronics. Jack is surprised by how edgy everyone seems. He asks Ricky why they’re so irritable. Ricky tells him they’ve been working on a military project for two years, explaining that because America’s involvement in Bosnia made the military administration consider the uses of robot aircraft, flying cameras are the future for military operations. They want something smaller than what is available, something that can’t be shot down by defense systems. Xymos has hypothesized that a “cloud of nanocomponents” (124) could swarm to make a camera that bullets would pass right through. Jack understands the concept, but he also knows that each particle would have to be made intelligent for the idea to work. Flocking behaviors in birds and fish show that there are no leaders. Flocking has low-level rules and is an “emergent behavior” (125) that operates according to a sort of collective intelligence. Ricky says this is their problem in their nano-swarm: unpredictable flocking behavior.

Emergent behaviors can’t be predicted by programmers, which is both exciting and frustrating for people in the industry. Jack recalls his work on the PREDPREY program five years prior. PREDPREY was a way of keeping goals fixed so that the agents comprising distributed-intelligence programs couldn’t get distracted and forget what they were working on. Jack modeled some of his programming on the fact that “hungry predators [a]ren’t distracted” (127). During his programming, he became an expert in predatory relationships, including in hyenas, lions, ants, and more.

Ricky says they used Jack’s protocol to program their individual units and that Jack will soon understand how they made the particles in their systems. Jack is skeptical. He knows that making a molecule takes a massive amount of time. A molecule has an unimaginably large number of parts: 10 to the 25th power. Even if they could create one million parts of a molecule per second, it would still take three trillion years. This is what Ricky refers to as the “build-time” (128) problem. However, he says his goal has been to make several pounds of molecules each hour.

Jack sees a machine like a glowing octopus housed within an intricate structure of glass cubes. It appears to hang in midair. It is a bright, branching tree structure. Jack realizes that he is looking at a parallel assembly line. Ricky confirms that fragments of molecules are added to pipes, and atoms are then added to them. He explains that this progresses in scale with bigger pipes and more atoms. When the atoms go into the central pipe, the manufacturing is done. The octopus’s various arms make different molecules. Next, they enter a room containing a massive magnet. Ricky hurries them onward. Jack remembers the history of the difficulties of molecular fabrication. Moving atoms took forever. Scientists needed molecular “assemblers” (132) to make molecular products, but assemblers were even more complex. Ricky says they achieved it, but Jack can’t believe him.

Jack realizes that the tanks in the room are like a microbrewery—but Ricky is making microbes instead of beer. They are using bacteria to make molecules, which is “genetic engineering, not nanotechnology” (135). In his field, there has always been an idea that genetic engineering, computer programming, and nanotechnology would converge. Jack uses the analogy of a set of Lego blocks as a series of atoms snapped together to form a molecule. However, atoms can’t be set into any arrangement. Cells are the only thing capable of producing large numbers of reliable molecules. Ricky says they’re growing a strain of E. coli called Theta-d 5972.

Jack is worried because those cells can live in humans; Ricky explains that they chose it because it is cheap to grow and already well studied. The bacteria makes the twenty-seven primary molecules for them, which then combine to form the assemblers that make the desired molecules. Jack doesn’t understand how they combine themselves reliably and automatically. Ricky says the octopus allows them to make nine assemblers at once, which then “reapply” (137) the assemblers. The assemblers then adhere to the bacteria.

Ricky shows Jack an image of a “molecular helicopter” (138), the military version of Julia’s bloodstream demo. It doesn’t need a propeller because some of its parts can climb “the viscosity of the air” (138). One problem they haven’t been able to fix is that wind blows the particles around. Therefore, the camera’s mobility remained limited, and Xymos’s contract with the Department of Defense was canceled. Now they have six weeks to save the contract. They think the program code might hold the key to the wind problem, which is one of the reasons they want Jack.

They take an elevator three stories up onto a series of mesh walkways. Ricky says the contractors made the initial mistake here: they didn’t install filters in one of the four major vents. Contaminants were present for three weeks of manufacturing, tainting the air with fifty kilos of pollutants. An alarm goes off, signaling a perimeter breach. On a bank of cameras, Ricky shows Jack a dark, moving cloud made of particles. He says they can’t control it and can’t interact with it. It’s a “runaway swarm” (142) and has been autonomous for ten days. Jack is also there to help them get it back.

Jack is confused. The particles can’t generate their own power, so if the lab simply turned off the electrical field, it should cut them off and render them useless prior to decay. However, Ricky says they are solar powered. This gives them enough power for three hours, and then the swarm collapses after dark. The team goes out looking for the collapsed swarm—which should show up under UV light—every night, but so far they have been unable to find it. Jack asks why the wind doesn’t scatter the swarm after it powers off at night. Ricky thinks it hides somewhere protected, like a hole or an overhang. He also says there are at least three other runaway swarms, meaning that the original cloud is reproducing.

Jack compares the situation to his use of swarms in programming. In computer language, swarms refer to components that act in concert to solve a problem. The rhythms of the swarm they are watching don’t make sense to Jack. As he watches, it comes closer and turns silver. He realizes that it has learned how to stay solid in the wind. It sinks lower during big gusts, which makes sense when Ricky reveals that they built small amounts of memory into the particles. Jack notices that the swarm is also making low vibrating sounds. The swarm suddenly divides into three when it gets closer: The other two swarms were hiding in it. As Jack realizes that the swarms are trying to get inside, they descend on a rabbit and kill it. It looks like they’re eating it. Soon, the three swarms leave together. Jack says they can’t retrieve the swarms or revoke their autonomy but that he can kill them. He thinks he’ll be done by tomorrow.