by Guy Garcia
“Watching the animals march north to Kenya is one of the world’s great blessings,” he told them before leaning solicitously toward Cara. “It’s a deeply emotional experience for me, and it would be my pleasure to personally take you out for a closer look before sunset.”
“No, thanks,” Cara answered, glancing at the gold band on his left ring finger. “I’ve seen it before. Anyway, we’re here for the locusts.” Noticing the look of dismay on the man’s face, she added, “We’re researchers from the United States, working with the United Nations. We came to help the farmers.”
“Ah, I see. Very good. Though I have to say I think you are way too attractive to be into bugs, miss.”
“Well, thanks, but I have to say that you look exactly right to get emotional with a wildebeest,” Cara replied, whipping a tsetse fly that had the audacity to land on her bare leg. In the backseat, Eric pulled the blanket up around his head to stifle a guffaw and fend off the buzzing pests.
Malcolm sat rigidly for a while, then turned to them and said, “The driver you requested will be here in the morning. Cocktails are at six, and dinner is at seven thirty.” He added that camp rules required them to be accompanied by a Masai warrior guard anywhere outside their tent after dark. When Cara asked Malcolm if he was serious, he didn’t answer.
The creature comforts of the camp, which included permanent tents with verandas, hardwood floors, electric lights, and hot running water, pleasantly surprised Cara. The place seemed a tad extravagant for a nonprofit researcher’s budget, but there was no other lodging available on such short notice. Taking advantage of the unscheduled break, Cara rebooked their flight out of Arusha for the next day, made some notes in her journal, showered, and dressed for dinner. A few minutes later, she was lounging on the domed top of a giant boulder near the main building with Eric and Laura, Malcolm’s wife. When Laura told them that her husband was feeling ill and would take his dinner alone in their tent, Cara and Eric exchanged a knowing glance.
An African waiter served them gin and tonics from a portable bar and offered them salted cashews as the sun ballooned into a giant red disk over the plains. Cara watched as Eric recorded the scene with his phone and uploaded it to the cloud.
“Eric told me about your experiment with the locusts today,” Laura said pleasantly. “I’ve never seen these horrible creatures before. If they eat all the grass, the animals will starve, and this”—she held her hands up to indicate the estate—“will be all gone. I’ve been praying that someone would come and help us stop this plague.”
Cara sighed. “I’m afraid we’re a long way from being able to do that.”
“I’ve been told the locust migration is a result of global warming,” Laura said, offering them sweet seed cakes.
“Could be,” Eric answered. “It’s happening in other places, too. Australia and even Argentina.”
A Masai man appeared at the top of the rock lookout. “Dinner is being served, madam,” he announced.
The food was delicious, and Laura proved to be an entertaining hostess, amusing them with stories about monkeys sneaking into the gift shop and giving the tourists a scare when they went in to try on hats. Malcolm, she informed them, was a South African whose parents had left the country when Nelson Mandela was elected to the presidency. Laura had met her future husband when she was studying at the London School of Economics. “My dream was to work in international development, but my persuasive spouse had other plans,” she said wistfully. “It gets a little lonely sometimes, but to be able to live here so close to the animals is a real privilege.”
On cue, their plates were whisked away and their glasses refilled with Cape Town pinot noir. The occasionally sluggish Wi-Fi notwithstanding, the whole place had a sumptuous lost-empire atmosphere. Laura wiped her mouth with a napkin and peered at a large black shape lurking near the driveway.
“What’s that?” Eric asked.
“Oh, that’s Joe.”
“Joe?”
“We made the mistake of feeding him some leftovers, and now he thinks he’s part of the family,” Laura explained. “Just make sure you don’t get too close. Cape buffaloes can be unpredictable.”
It must be nice, Cara wanted to say, to live in this oasis of colonial accoutrements, graciously holding court over an ever-changing guest list of intriguing strangers. Out there, beyond the bronze hills and the big game parks, the continent was reeling from epidemics, famine, and civil war. But here, within the mahogany gates of the sanctuary, even dangerous beasts were treated like house pets.
After dessert, Eric, who had been exchanging glances with a pair of young women at another table, excused himself and took his coffee into the lounge, where the diehards were gathering for a nightcap.
Laura tiled her head in Eric’s direction. “Your protégé’ is rather adorable—and smart too. Our wireless was acting up, and he was able to fix it in about five minutes.” She propped her hand under her chin. “It must be nice to have such a handy young man around to help you with your work.”
“Yes, it is.”
Cara rose to leave, and Laura repeated Malcolm’s warning about never going anywhere on the property unescorted. Sure enough, when Cara got to the door that led to the grounds, a uniformed guard was waiting with a spear in one hand and a flashlight in the other. As she followed her protector down the gravel path under a blazing canopy of stars, she was grateful to know that the Masai were famously fierce hunters, fully capable of taking down a big cat if necessary.
Back in her tent, Cara undressed and climbed under the mosquito net. On the nightstand next to the bed, she found a wrapped candy and a single page of text mounted on handmade paper: a fable by Lala Salama, “How the Zebra Got Its Stripes.” It was a fanciful tale about how the Creator had originally made all animals with the same black skin. Deciding this monochromatic scheme was not lively enough, the Creator held a kind of costume party at which the animals could choose their own patterns and colors. But a voracious zebra stopped en route to gorge on grass, making him plump. When he arrived at the costume party, all that was left was a white suit, which he gladly put on. But the suit ripped to ribbons on his fattened body, letting his black skin show through. Since the suit was now too tight to take off, the zebra was forced to wear it forever, so his hide bears the black-and-white stripes of his gluttony to this very day.
Cara put the story aside. She knew that the zebra’s suit had nothing to do with grass or greed. It was part of a protective camouflage that kept predators at bay. It allowed them to merge and disappear into the herd behind the interlocking patterns. The reason the zebra still wore his black-and-white suit was that it had enabled his ancestors to survive and mate and pass their genes on to the next generation of striped zebras, and so on and on for millions of years. Cara knew it was natural selection, not the Creator, who had given the zebra its stripes—and also the hippo’s ebony skin that merged with the water and mud, the leopard’s spots that helped him hide under leafy trees, and the cheetah’s pale fur, perfectly matched to the boundless fields of golden grass.
The mind-boggling diversity of wildlife in Africa, the kaleidoscopic spectrum of patterns, shapes, and sizes, was both astounding and reassuring. After all, it was the genetic diversity required by evolution that had persuaded Cara to become a biologist in the first place. Growing up as the daughter of Korean immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area, she had wondered why people looked different, why some people had black hair and others had blond, why some were short and others tall, why some eyes were slanted and others round. Even if she had been raised Christian instead of Buddhist, she would have wanted to know why the Creator had decided that one color of skin for all the animals wasn’t good enough. What was his reason for giving the animals different clothes? And why was nature’s actual wardrobe so extravagantly varied and unpredictable?
It was a conundrum that dogged Cara until the day she sat in an introduc
tory biology class at UC Berkeley and discovered—in an epiphany that was akin to a professor’s pulling a rabbit out of his hat—that evolution requires genetic variation. Nature’s fashion show, she was fascinated to learn, has the widest range of choices possible, the better to adapt to a constantly changing environment. Being different isn’t a flaw—it is a requirement for the survival of the species, for the only way to make sure that the fittest survive is to make sure that there are as many different kinds of potential winners as possible. In the great gamble of evolution, it turns out that Mother Nature likes to hedge her bets.
It was then and there, with her pen poised above her ruled spiral notebook in a dumbstruck haze of revelation, that Cara knew she had found her life’s work. She immersed herself in Charles Darwin’s seminal texts and H.B.D. Kettlewell’s nineteenth-century studies of black-and-white English moths. It wasn’t long before she was following in the hallowed footsteps of behavioral ecologists like Deborah Gordon, whose work with harvester ants at Stanford showed that experiments with insect colonies in the field and in the lab could provide material evidence of emergent collective behavior in ordinary insects. By carefully documenting the activities of colonies and how the actions of individual ants produce elaborate communities and physical structures, Gordon had begun to bridge the gap between mathematical models of complexity theory and of the self-organizing abilities of living things, unveiling an entire new paradigm for understanding the genetic machinery behind the development and growth of social networks, cities, and even human brains.
For Cara, this groundbreaking fusion of mathematics and biology was much more than a powerful lens through which to view and understand all of nature. It was also an exhilarating source of hope. If intelligence was distributed across groups of insects, people and programs in ways that we had only begun to understand, then why couldn’t it be harnessed to fight disease, poverty, and war? If the intrinsic wisdom of crowds included and transcended any single intention or piece of information, if civilizations were the product of collective awareness expressed and amplified by the genetic fabric of human society, why couldn’t it be harnessed and directed to do something good?
Cara’s drowsy ruminations were momentarily interrupted by a guttural groan emanating from just outside her tent. It reminded her of the sound a cat makes when it’s trying to cough up a hairball, but much lower and louder. A Cape buffalo? Or an elephant? Impalas didn’t sound like that, did they? There it was again: a mournful, heavy huffing of air moving though spacious lungs. Trying to communicate what? A cry for attention or a warning? Should she be worried? Didn’t the Masai guards sleep outside the guest tents at night? Cara turned off the light and shut her eyes.
Cara’s mind resisted her body’s need for rest. In the morning, she would know if the experiment was a valid contribution to the study of emergent behavior in locusts or if it had fallen short of her primary objective, which was to help African farmers stave off famine and protect the habitats of some of Earth’s most incredible creatures. The proto-physician in her still wanted to help people, especially those who had no one else to protect them. How many farmers had lost their crops today? How many animals had lost their favorite grazing pastures? How could the zebras get fat and earn their stripes if there were no more luscious pastures of grass? Once the vegetation that nourished the herbivores was gone and the food chain broken, even the predators at the top of the ladder would eventually falter and starve. But why was some part of her alarmed by the way the swarm had evaded their sonic trap? What was the deeper significance of the day’s events that still somehow escaped her, like the dodging, startlingly intelligent blizzard of insects whirring in her thoughts?
The next time the lion’s roar rang out across the camp, Cara was fast asleep.
4
Operation Uncle Sam didn’t unfold without a few battlefield glitches. Not that there was any shortage of people willing to “fully embrace one’s right to bare arms—and a whole lot more!” as Tom put it in his encrypted call to action. By following the virtual arrows and clues that they could see on their phones, the participants had arrived on the scene with paint and other patriotic paraphernalia, ready for a time-bending skirmish with the Red Coats. Before anybody could react or stop them, the nudists began to organize on an imaginary ten-by-twenty-foot rectangular grid: the ones painted blue with white stars in one corner and those covered in all red or white lining up and then lying down lengthwise in alternate rows.
The unfurled human flag was compelling but not perfect. In the rush to remove their clothing and reveal their hued bodies, several of the freedom streakers tripped on their shorts and tumbled over one another on the lawn, their tangled limbs forging improbable sculpture. The ensuing screams of panicked picnickers alerted police sooner than expected, resulting in at least three arrests. Several yelping pranksters sprinted across the parade path and continued into the woods, never to be seen again.
As one TV commentator later noted, there were six more stars than an actual Old Glory, and several of the red stripes kept blurring the lines by groping their white stripe neighbors. In any case, the anonymously e-mailed communiqué to news media explained that Operation Uncle Sam was “a spontaneous public action against the recent arrests of nude swimmers at Lady Bird Lake by police officers who should have better things to do than tackle unclothed teenagers and wrestle them to the ground without cause or condoms.”
“Good job, guys,” Tom said, congratulating his team leaders. “Let’s wrap it up before more cops show up.” But before logging off, something on the screen caught his eye. He leaned closer to the monitor and typed out a message. “Mobile 3, zoom in, three stars right from the left-hand corner, two stars down.” The field of view narrowed to a girl with a gorgeous grin on her face. It was impossible not to notice the beckoning blue field of her chest, a white star strategically spangled on each nipple, a virtual tri-cornered hat tilted jauntily on her head. But it was the way she held herself, exuding commendable composure under the circumstances, that had attracted his attention. She wasn’t just beaming back at the camera but into it, as if somehow able to see through the lens and follow the electrical particles back to their source. Did she know who was watching her? Impossible, yet …
“Mobile 3.”
“Yes, Swarm.”
“Who is that?”
“Twinkle Tits?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s Lucy.”
“Do we have her contact info?”
“Hang on. She’s a newbie.”
The camera’s orientation jerked toward the grass for a moment, then righted itself. “Lucyinthesky2025, aka Susan Oliver. Whoa!”
Lucy was rising to her feet, leaning toward the camera, shamelessly filling the entire frame with her pixilated body. She lavishly kissed the lens, smudging it with a fog of crimson lipstick. And then she winked.
“Gotta go, gotta go,” Mobile 3 barked. “The heat’s moving in!”
Tom glimpsed disconnected body parts of nude patriots scattering in all directions, then nothing. All the cams had gone dark. It was over. Tom rewound the file to the image of Lucy kissing the camera lens and stored it as a JPEG on his desktop. The girl’s easy familiarity, the suggestiveness of the kiss, and the way she winked at the camera made an impression. They had never met before, and there was absolutely no way that she could know the identity of the actual person behind the scenes. Still, Tom was intrigued. Was the trickster being teased? There was only one way to find out.
The password generator Tom had purchased for a couple of hundred dollars coughed up the pass codes for Lucy’s Facebook, Instagram, snapchat, and mail accounts, which led him to her street address and phone number, personal documents, and Internet provider for her computer, which Tom could now control and peruse as he pleased. Even without actually seeing her room, he had no problem imagining how it looked: low lighting and beige curtains, bookshelves filled with archeological
textbooks and classics from her American lit and poetry courses, a Gerhard Richter print on the wall, and a stuffed koala bear perched on the bedspread.
It took Tom only minutes to assemble Susan Oliver’s entire life story, right down to the source of her desire to become a nurse: growing up as the only daughter of a mother of three who succumbed to cirrhosis not long after Susan was born. She was twenty-eight, held a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Texas, had two older brothers, and lived with her widowed dad in a two-bedroom apartment on the south side of town, not far from the one-story stucco where Tom lived with Sonia. Preferring to be called Lucy, even by her friends, she had an endearing habit of crossing her eyes as if to undermine her comely features, as if saying, Don’t pay attention to that. Lucy was an ardent ecologist, a defender of innocent victims, and an outspoken crusader for socially progressive causes, which at least partially explained why she would join a troupe of exhibitionists chiding the police for pushing unclothed kids around in the park after dark. She loved the music of Joni Mitchell and an Austin heavy rock band called Dog Spelled Backward, and she adored the works of the poet T. S. Eliot, particularly “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” How could a girl so nubile and sweet-tempered be drawn to a desolate hymnal of regret and squandered love? What did she know about old men who would walk alone on the beach with their trousers rolled up? A mystery that begged to be unraveled. Her favorite things about being born and raised in Austin: “Coyotes and wildcats still run wild in the hills, anyone with a guitar and an amp is a star, and the tallest building in town looks like an owl.” She was talking about the Frost Bank Tower, which many Austinites believed was intentionally created to look like a hooting bird of prey. Not true, Tom knew, because a client had informed him that the bank logo circles that looked like eyes were added only after the building was finished. But Tom also knew that owls were nocturnal, solitary, and smart, which he related to and took as an encouraging sign.