“Wait a minute,” I said as a horrifying thought occurred to me. “If the Federation can influence minds, the Swarm can too, right?”
“Even if they can,” said Brad, “they’re still over a thousand light years away.”
I shook my head. “Distance may not matter. Not entirely. Not when we’re talking about quantum phenomena. And if my guess is right, that’s the area where their superiority over the Federation is the greatest.”
“We both know you aren’t just guessing,” said Nari simply.
“What does that mean?” said Brad.
“It means I know a lot about the Swarm,” I said. “Because Nari and his people were whispering in my ear as I slept, helping to shape the species in my novel. So even though the book was a relative failure, they did succeed in schooling me on what we’re dealing with.”
“That’s exactly right,” said Nari.
Tessa nodded in my direction. “So maybe you should provide the backgrounder on the Swarm you were just asking Nari for,” she said. “I haven’t read this particular book of yours, so I still need to know more about what we’re dealing with.”
“Good idea,” said Nari. “I’m sure Jason can do an excellent job.”
I shook my head in disbelief. The wild turns never stopped coming. Still, as horrified as I was by certain aspects of the past few days, I had never been so fascinated or intellectually engaged.
If not for sinister factions, an enigmatic organization named the Sentinels, worries that my mind had been tampered with, and suspicions that Tessa had betrayed me, I’d have been in geek heaven by now, Swarm or no Swarm.
31
As if the past seventy-two hours hadn’t been unbelievable enough, I was about to borrow from one of my own books to describe a real-life menace that threatened the entire galaxy. At the risk of being immodest, I did think I had a better-than-average imagination, but even I couldn’t have conjured up a story as mind-blowing and surreal as what I was actually experiencing.
But here we all were.
I turned to Nari. “Some of what was in my novel may not apply to the actual Swarm. Let me know if I say anything you know to be untrue.”
“I will,” he said.
I cleared my throat and began. “The best way to understand the Swarm is to imagine a planet on which army ants developed a collective intelligence,” I said. “A hive-mind. A concept that has long been a staple of science fiction.”
“Right,” said Tessa. “I’m familiar. Usually, they have an intelligent queen who controls unintelligent drones.”
“Not in this case. Each member is intelligent individually, and the hive is even more intelligent collectively. Each member can switch back and forth from being an independent operator to being controlled by the hive-mind.”
I paused. “So you can use the singular or plural when referring to the Swarm, since both apply. They’re a single superorganism. But they’re also a species numbering in the billions or trillions comprised mostly of identical clones.
“But to continue, it’s highly likely that their home planet was dominated by separate and warring colonies of army-ant-equivalents for millions of years. Non-sentient colonies. So ruthless and dominant that the only threat any of them faced were competing colonies of their own species.”
“And then one of these colonies developed intelligence,” said Tessa.
“Exactly. An evolutionary miracle that gave them a decisive advantage, allowing this colony to quickly wipe out all others and dominate the planet.”
“Just to be clear,” said Nari, “they may or may not resemble actual ants. We have no idea. Their behavior clearly evolved from a progenitor matching the behavior of these insects almost perfectly, but their appearance is still a mystery.”
The alien waved a tentacle in my direction. “Go on,” he said.
“Given this evolutionary history,” I continued, “you end up with a ruthlessly aggressive species. But one that isn’t tribal like ours and other wolf species. Individuals will never war with each other, because they’re part of the same superorganism. The Swarm was never in danger of self-destructing, only of failing to curb its violent expansion across its planet, its instinctive compulsion to devour everything in sight.”
“Which would bring on starvation,” said Brad.
“Exactly. From their own excesses. So their highest and only priority from the start was getting off their planet. Finding a way to conquer interstellar travel so they could march across the galaxy the way they had once been compelled to march across their planet.”
“A goal they achieved in record time,” said Nari. “This single colony now ranges across hundreds of cubic light-years of space.”
Brad frowned deeply. “Sounds like even the Federation will be outnumbered fifty to one.”
“At least,” said Nari.
“Great,” I said, rolling my eyes. “We’ll get the chance to know what it feels like to be an ear of corn as a thick cloud of locusts approach.”
Brad grimaced from the mental picture I was painting. “You implied that such a species would also excel at quantum technology,” he said. “Why?”
“Because a hive mind requires faster-than-light communication to operate. Human brains are extremely dense. But imagine if the neurons in our brains were spread out over the entire planet. There would be too great a time lag for signals to properly fire across these separated neurons. Our brains couldn’t possibly work. Not unless these signals could travel instantaneously, something that only quantum entanglement can make happen.”
“I see,” said Tessa, nodding slowly. “So even if the nodes of the hive-mind’s collective intelligence, the drones, are separated by millions of miles, the hive-mind can still function.”