by Rich Horton
He came around the truck to her side, where she looked out the window with her binoculars. He turned to face her, got close enough that she could see the spectacular misrule of his beard escaping his mask, quivering like a bare frayed nerve. “I bet there’s a thousand birds hiding in there,” he whispered.
Hiding in there? Despite all the conventional wisdom about starlings that had been lately upended in Evelyn’s life, Thomas’ newest claim seemed like a total crock. Starlings were the very opposite of a cryptic species; outside of mating season, they were one of the most gregarious birds on Earth. They were more gregarious than humans. She felt uneasy challenging him, though, notwithstanding the twenty-two papers on Sturnus that she had authored. It wasn’t that he seemed at all violent—rather, he had a peculiar unhinged intensity that told her that to challenge him would mean hearing him defend his hypothesis for the next forty minutes. In any case, there was no need to challenge him; they were parked a few dozen yards from the field in question. There were a thousand starlings hiding in it or there weren’t.
“I’ll be surprised if there are that many,” she said as offhandedly as she could, as though they were two ancient farmhands discussing the weather from the front porch.
Thomas raised his finger to his mask to silence her. He came round the truck again, got in, whispered to her to roll up the window. In the stifling close air of the cab he took a GPS reading of their location, then switched on the radio.
“Control?” he whispered into the mouthpiece.
Gordo’s voice came back loud and oblivious. “Hey, Thomas—what’s up?”
“I’m calling in an airstrike on UTM 520755 and 5055848. You got that? It’s a vacant lot on Lower River Road, about a quarter mile south of the turnoff for Frenchman’s Bar. You copy?”
“Hang on, Thomas—” There was a pause of ten seconds or so. “Give me those UTMs again?”
Before Thomas could begin rattling off the numbers again, the field erupted—as though a bomb had struck it—into a perfectly expanding black hemisphere of starling flight. Instinctively Evelyn and Thomas both ducked inside the cab of the truck as the shock wave of birds sped towards them. Like a rushing dark veil it passed over them; a dozen birds or so smacked against the truck with enough force to likely break their necks. What had exploded was no flock, or a flock unlike anything Evelyn had seen before, each bird flying off in a different direction from its fellows, without collision with one another, and after they had spread out for a second or two, without cohesion. Each made its way towards a different field, a different tree, a different distant strip mall, a different bank of the river. There were, Evelyn estimated, fewer than a thousand birds. But a thousand was a pretty good guess.
Thomas banged his palm on the steering wheel and cursed. “That’s the fourth time that’s happened to me!” he yelled. “I swear they’re listening in on our radio frequency.”
Evelyn hoped with growing dread that Thomas was joking. She thought it wisest not to dignify his analysis with a response.
“Scratch that, Gordo,” he said into the radio. “They split up on us again.”
They got out and with long garbage tongs they dropped the collided, ruined starlings into a plastic bag and pitched the bag into the back of the truck. Then they moved on.
Evelyn regarded the empty field through the rear window of the truck as Thomas drove away. A few dozen far-off birds still flew their solitary way, each to some new weedy lot.
A few minutes passed before Thomas spoke again. “So, chief, is there anything in the literature on that?” His voice had the brittle brightness of one who had shamed himself, who hoped his listener would let the recent shouting pass without demanding an apology.
Alone with him in his truck on a back-county road Evelyn felt in no position to demand an apology, or even to hint at the need for one. “Nope,” she answered with studied ease. “If we survive this we could get a publication out of what we just saw.” Not that she would co-author a paper with him in a million years.
To Evelyn’s relief they saw no more starlings for the rest of the morning. Over the radio they heard three different agents make a sighting; each time the flock exploded and dissolved before Gordo could dispatch the spray-plane. By the time they got back to headquarters the day’s tally stood at just fifty-four birds killed between thirty agents; all of the fifty-four had smacked into a truck while escaping.
Thomas went back out on patrol alone. Evelyn spent the afternoon in the office with the map, contemplating a better strategy for wiping out the starlings. She trolled through the invasive species forums on her laptop; every task force that had anything to say about it was struggling with the question in its own grim way. The forums read like a Domesday Book of violence, a panic-fueled catalog of poisons and netting and fragmentation, of swooping aerial assaults and small calibers and zeal and stealth and sadism. Yet the flocks everywhere scattered so quickly that the enterprise seemed as fruitless as a war against the clouds.
At the end of the day, Evelyn drove back in silence to her apartment, her mind heavy with the tangle of the problem. She imagined—but could not yet conceive in full—the elegant technique by which all starlings would drop dead out of the sky. Like all great techniques, it would be so simple that its discovery would seem, in retrospect, a foregone conclusion.
As it turned out, however, any flash of insight Evelyn might have had would have come too late. The next day she arrived at headquarters to find that Thomas and Gordo and about half the other field agents had called in sick. Sick sick, Thomas had said, with the best composure he could call up. None had been tested yet, and the first symptoms were indistinguishable from those of a bad head cold, but every one of them called in with the heavy dignity of people who knew they had little chance of surviving the weekend. Evelyn spent the day pacing around the headquarters, incapable of ten seconds’ sustained thought. She was convinced Thomas had infected her.
She awoke the next morning feeling achy and stuffed up. To stave off despair, or perhaps as a substitute for despair or as a manifestation of despair, she imagined beating Thomas to death with a lead pipe. In fact she knew the infection must have been germinating in her bloodstream for at least four or five days, but still it was Thomas, whom she had met only two days before, that suffered the bludgeoning in her fantasy. As her fever rose, it struck her as deeply, crucially significant that no one had tried crushing the starlings one by one with a lead pipe. The irony of hitting upon the perfect technique only now, when it would do her no good, caused her deeper sorrow than she thought she could bear.
But something strange was happening in those days. The stoic, dignified death that she had hoped would be her consolation prize was denied her. During the worst of the infection she lay rigid as a pharaoh in his coffin, assuming that her labored breathing would grow only more ragged until everything failed her and she died. But after two days of feeling too weak even to pour herself a glass of water, on the third day she felt her fever break and a truly restful sleep come over her, so different from the fever dreams of legions of starlings that had plagued her for two days, casting their thousands of shadows against her bedroom wall in the setting sun.
Evelyn awoke to find the world transfigured. It seemed as though a dim membrane that had veiled the buildings outside her window, the trees, the river—had veiled them her whole life—had been pierced. Their light soaked into her skin like a pheromone, passed into her bloodstream, where something within her processed it like so much information. She rose from her bed and walked barefoot across the room towards her balcony. The cork flooring that so impressed her when she had first seen it now seemed of no consequence, or more properly, just one more luminous thing in a world of luminous things. As she reached to open the French doors to the balcony, she saw hidden within the baffling glow of it all several dozen starlings perched and chattering like parliamentarians on the railing.
She knew, or rather her blood told her, that there was no harm in them, that they wanted
only to speak to her. Their voices made the old familiar cacophony that had always fascinated her, the swooping mechanical whines and relays of clicks that sounded like some clockwork combobulus assembling itself in a backwoods shop.
As she opened the doors to the balcony they squawked to her in greeting. Her blood understood them, told her what the chattering birds said to one another: Subject 319-940-12-42 appears satisfactorily inoculated. Including this data point, the current success rate for Infection Protocol 4 stands at 97.1 percent plus or minus .4 percent.
Would it have troubled her, in her former life, to learn that she was data point 319-940-12-42? She could not remember. It troubled her not at all now.
“What is Infection Protocol 4?” she asked them.
They answered her in a strange English that seemed composed of many layers of whirring and clicking and which formed out of many birds a single voice. It pleases us to speak to you at last, Subject 319-940-12-42. Infection Protocol 4 meets all our criteria for success.
As though out of a dream she remembered her former life. The language of starlings reminded her of nothing so much as the language of scholarly papers, the smooth and chilly syntax devoid of contour, the maddening reliance on “the royal we” as the subject. Yet this was not the royal we, not in the sense that a pompous colleague or one of her lazy graduate students might use it: at least twenty birds had together formed the multilayered sound that came to her as English words. The light in her blood told her, too, that several thousand birds moving in their cloudlike flocks were contributing through some unknown mechanism to the communication of these birds on the balcony rail.
In concert the starlings told her of Infection Protocol 4, how they had exposed her the week before to a small dose of a weakened bacterial infection, the way a child is inoculated against tetanus. They spoke with some excitement about how ingeniously three starlings had infiltrated the air ducts of her building and died there, each corpse serving like a time-release bacterial capsule.
“So I’m an experiment, then?” Evelyn asked. She felt no rancor about it and asked out of genuine curiosity. Curiosity was in fact the only emotion she felt capable of; all the terror and self-regard and envy and hunger she had ever harbored seemed watered down now, dissolved and buffered in the new solution of her blood.
You may think of yourself that way. However, it is more accurate to speak of you as part of a project, something like a human bridge.
By way of demonstration, the birds called up the new sensitive stuff in her blood that she had felt since she last awoke. It was the infection, the billions of bacteria drifting through her arteries, somehow signaling past her brain-blood barrier, or perhaps having dismantled the barrier entirely. Somehow—she would ponder how for many years—her mind translated the ancient chemical language of the bacteria into ordinary human words, words that told her the infection formed part of a massive biological computer.
She remembered Jason from her former life, remembered his phony modesty while he tried to explain the concept of quorum sensing on which all microbial computing is based: bacteria, like a group of people, react differently in a crowd than they do in an intimate gathering of a few; both react differently than a lone bacterium. The different chemical signals each bacterium gives off when alone, when among a few, when one of a crowd, might be treated like a switch, no different, really, from the semiconductors of any silicon-based computer. A wise engineer might fashion from the bacterial habit of quorum sensing the most disperse, most powerful computer on Earth.
How the infection in her body might communicate with the bacterial colonies in other bodies remained a mystery to her. Unless the bacteria in her body were also suspended thickly in the air around her—a possibility she didn’t discount—the computing power in her own body would remain paltry and disconnected. Yet it was clear from their chemical speech that the bacteria within her were bound up and bundled with the millions of threads of blood winding through the thousands of starlings that swarmed about the place she had once called Vancouver, Washington.
“How could you possibly have engineered these bacteria?” Evelyn asked. Where were the PCR machines and autoclaves and agar cultures and primers and freezers and micropipettes? Had starlings somehow spent decades stealing into genetic engineering labs by night, working without a trace like the poor shoemaker’s elves? The likelihood of a nocturnal labor force of laboratory starlings seemed vanishingly small. Every laboratory in the country already had a cadre of nighttime elves—they were called graduate students—and no starling geneticist, no matter the hour at which she slipped in to work, could have gone undetected for long.
Many, many, many of us died in order to breed our current strain of computer. The infection you carry represents more than two hundred years of selective breeding of bacteria, and more than a thousand years of starling eugenics. They explained over the course of an hour the strange history of their study of biology, the evolutionary analysis and gene theory that they had conceived without any material culture whatsoever—without writing, for that matter—all deriving from their observations, their intuitions, really, about the crude computing power of the bacteria inside them. For a thousand years the starlings who carried a healthy load of these bacteria had mated well and reproduced much, and generation by generation the birds came to carry larger, and more complex, colonies of bacteria. Consciousness had come to the birds in the evolutionary eye-blink of a few centuries.
The fact that the starlings had said “many” three times might have seemed to Evelyn an appeal to pity, but the starlings appeared, like her, to have achieved a state of being beyond pathos or any other emotion. They seemed like her to be creatures of pure curiosity. Perhaps the expression was idiomatic: where in English one would say “many, many,” starling culture said “many, many, many.” In any case, she knew they were not speaking English but something she heard in her mind as English.
“Why were you so set on killing us?” she asked. As she said the words the question resonated deep in her blood. Her blood told her that this congress of birds would have the same question for her.
We had no intention of killing you. Infection Protocols 1, 2, and 3 each failed us for different reasons. However, it was always our goal to connect you to our computing network, ever since we knew you to be an intelligent species.
“But why didn’t you just leave us alone?”
The birds’ response came quickly, as though the mind made up of the birds had contemplated this question since long before Evelyn had asked it. Evelyn was part of this mind now, too; she was a doubting voice that this mind had learned to contend with.
The question has no answer, the starlings said. We are driven to extend our consciousness as far as we can; we cannot act for long in opposition to this drive, which is our true nature. Then, in anticipation of the questions that Evelyn had not thought to ask: We are confident now that your true nature must obey this drive as well. It remains unknown to us whether the drive to extend one’s consciousness arises as a byproduct of the evolution of consciousness, or whether it is the goal of evolution itself.
Even in her transfigured state, the thought of goal-oriented evolution gave Evelyn the creeps. It smacked of Intelligent Design, the ludicrous evangelism of engineers masquerading as biologists, their PowerPoint presentations riddled with evasions and half-truths and pseudoscience. Such thinking confused causes and effects; it complicated unnecessarily the idea of evolution, a field where explanations are valuable only for their parsimony. Even in this new country, even as she felt herself vanishing into this mind that spanned the world, she would not feel easy imagining herself as part of some plan, divine or otherwise.
Yet the worry left her quickly. Planned or not, the world was new and suffused with light, and the voice of her blood comforted her in such a way that she realized she had lived before today in an aching loneliness. “How long have you lived this way?” she asked the birds.
For over one hundred years we have hosted the
bacterial computer. However, what you experience now is the newest and most powerful iteration. We believe, also, that the addition of another hosting species (that is, your species) confers greater computing power still. We are pleased with the results so far.
They explained to her the decades-long debate the starlings had carried on about the fractious human species that had hated the starlings so fiercely. Human material culture—the buildings and roads and works that would strike any human as an obvious sign of intelligence—had for years seemed like part of an elaborate mating ritual to the starlings, useless and flamboyant as the peacock’s tail. They regarded human building in the same way they regarded the bower of the bower bird, as just so much sexual posturing. In fact, the starlings had called Homo sapiens in their language “bower bird mammals.”
When we finally concluded that all your movement and building served other purposes than mating, we agreed we must join you to us. The starlings began to fly from the balcony in a long skein like a single pulsing creature, their common voice breaking up into the static of clicks and whines that each bird made. The last words she could make out were and now we are bound together.
Evelyn looked out over the downtown, saw the cranes once again in motion at the convention center project, dozens of workers swarming the scaffolding in the ocean of light. People walked again in the street beneath the host of starlings. She obeyed her blood’s call to go down and join them, knowing at last the oneness of all things.
Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream
Maria Dahvana Headley
In the middle of the maze, there’s always a monster.
If there were no monster, people would happily set up house where it’s warm and windowless and comfortable. The monster is required. The monster is a real estate disclosure.