She could hear the muffled sounds of talking in the background. Manny’s voice distinct but the words unrecognizable, lost to ringing phones and a crowd.
Manny came back. “We’ve got other scientists and advisors and everybody and their mother telling us what they think is going on. None of it makes any sense, Melanie. This might as well be an alien invasion for all of what we understand.”
“It is.”
“What?”
“An alien invasion. I mean, not exactly,” she said, “but sort of.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“Okay,” Manny said. “We came to you because Steph and I knew you’d be discreet and knew you were an expert, but right now what I need is someone I can trust. Which means you. So I don’t care if you haven’t done all the research you need to. I don’t care if it hasn’t been peer-reviewed or any of that other stuff. All I need to know is this: Is it solid?”
Melanie hesitated. She hated it. She was a scientist, and she wanted more information. She wanted proof. But it was solid.
“So spiders are basically hermits. Antisocial and aggressive toward other spiders. They like to be alone. But that’s not true for all spiders. Social spiders are rare, but they exist. Any spiders, in captivity, will form small colonies. Even black widows will do it. But out in the field, in the wild, there are only a few species that do it. The most well known is the Anelosimus eximius. They’ll have colonies of forty or fifty thousand spiders.”
“Fifty thousand? Are you fucking kidding me? Fifty thousand of those giant things in your lab?”
“No, that’s the thing. Anelosimus eximius are small. They work together to care for the brood—the babies—and to build webs that can catch bigger and better prey, but that only means large insects, the occasional bat or bird. It’s a sort of cooperative. They don’t really hunt together. Not in any real sense, or at least not in the way people usually think of hunting. And they are social, not eusocial. But these are different. I don’t think they are just social. I think they are eusocial.”
“Meaning? What’s the difference?”
“Social means they work together, but eusocial means . . . Okay, so there’s the initial definition and then there’s the expanded definition that E. O. Wilson came up with.”
The voices in the background on Manny’s end suddenly got louder and then softer. “Melanie, I don’t have time for you to be in professor mode. I need this quick. Give me a rundown on the phone and then do me a favor: hop in a cab and come over. I’m going to want you to give this to Steph directly and be ready to answer questions. So, in a nutshell, what are we looking at?”
“Ants,” she said. “Ants and bees and termites. Two kinds of mole rats also, but really, think of them as ants. These spiders aren’t like spiders. They’re like ants.”
“Like ants?”
“Eusocial groups are characterized by each individual taking on a specific role in their colony. Digging tunnels, laying eggs, all that stuff. And at some point, for some kinds of eusocial animals, they reach a point where they can’t take on a different role. They become a certain kind of specialist, and all they can do is what they can do. Like a machine on an assembly line. They do one thing.”
“So you’re telling me that these particular spiders are specialized, that they’ve turned into little machines?”
“Look, we’ve dissected two, and they’ve been the same; neither one can lay eggs. So there’s no question that there are more than one kind of these spiders. They have to be able to reproduce. But the ones we’ve looked at are specialized. Again, I can’t say with one hundred percent certainty, or that all or even most of them are like this—”
“Melanie.” He wasn’t angry, but he was firm. “Enough. I get it. You might be wrong. But you might be right. What are we dealing with? People here are starting to panic. I’m willing to take the risk that you’ve got it wrong, because right now, right this minute, we don’t know what the hell is going on. The spiders in your lab are the same as the one that crawled out of Bill Henderson’s face, and we think they’re probably the same things that are on the rampage in India and caused the Chinese to drop a nuke. As far as I know, you’re the only person who’s actually studied one up close. When I was in your lab, you told me they were scary, but they were just spiders. And now you’re calling me to say maybe not. Maybe these spiders are something else. You’re saying these spiders are like little machines that can do only one thing. So please, just tell me, Melanie, what’s the one thing these spiders are designed to do?”
“Feed,” Melanie said. “They’re designed to feed.”
Desperation, California