The Swarm: A Novel

by Frank Schätzing

  She stretched her body. Tiny golden hairs shimmered on her forearms. Her muscles were taut beneath her T-shirt. Anawak gazed at her small, broad-shouldered frame, and thought again how much he liked her.

  At that moment, she glanced up. ‘It’s going to cost you, though,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A massage. For my shoulders and back.’ She grinned. ‘Well, jump to it. You can start right away while I work on this program.’

  Rubin

  At lunchtime they made their way to the officers’ mess. Johanson was evidently feeling better, and he was getting on swimmingly with Oliviera. Neither seemed disappointed when Rubin announced that the migraine had ruined his appetite. ‘I’m going for a stroll on the roof,’ he said.

  ‘Take good care of yourself,’ grinned Johanson. ‘You wouldn’t want to slip.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be fine,’ laughed Rubin If only you knew, he thought. If only you could see just how careful I’m being, your jaw would hit the well deck. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep away from the edge.’

  ‘Well, remember we need you.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ he heard Oliviera mutter, as she and Johanson continued to the mess.

  Rubin clenched his fists. They could say what they liked about him. In the end he’d get the recognition he deserved. He was the one they’d have to thank for saving humanity. He was tired of being veiled in secrecy by the CIA, but once this business was over, there’d be nothing to stop him sharing his achievements with the world. All that stuff about confidentiality wouldn’t matter. He’d broadcast his successes and bask in admiration.

  His mood improved as he hurried up the ramp. On 03 level he turned down a passageway and arrived in front of a narrow door. It was locked. He tapped in the code. The door swung open and Rubin entered a corridor. He followed it to the end, and came to another locked door. This time when he punched in the code, a green light flashed up on the display. Above it was a camera behind a glass panel. Rubin walked up and placed his right eye in front of the glass. The camera scanned his retina and gave the all-clear.

  Authentification complete, the door slid open. He went into a large, dark room full of computers and monitors. It bore a striking resemblance to the CIC. Civilians and people in uniform were manning the control desks. The air was abuzz with the sound of computers. Li, Vanderbilt and Peak were standing around a chart table. Its transparent surface was lit from below.

  Peak looked up. ‘Come in,’ he said.

  Rubin walked over. Suddenly his self-assurance slipped. Since the events of last night they had stuck to brief factual conversations on the phone. The tone had been neutral. Now it was frosty.

  Rubin decided to pre-empt the attack. ‘We’re making good progress,’ he said. ‘We’re still one step ahead and—’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Vanderbilt. He gestured brusquely towards a chair on the opposite side of the table.

  Rubin sat. The others remained standing, leaving him in a position that made him uneasy. He sensed that he was on trial. ‘Of course, the incident last night was rather unfortunate,’ he added.

  ‘Unfortunate?’ Vanderbilt rested his knuckles on the table. ‘For Chrissakes, you jerk. Under any other circumstances I’d have made you walk the plank.’

  ‘But, really, I only—’

  ‘What the hell did you knock him out for?’

  ‘What was I supposed to do?’

  ‘You were supposed to be more careful in the first place. You shouldn’t have let him in.’

  ‘That wasn’t my fault,’ Rubin objected. ‘I didn’t think anyone could scratch their bums without you people watching.’

  ‘Why did you open the goddamned hatch?’

  ‘Because…Well, I thought we might…You see, there was a matter that I…’

  ‘That you what?’

  ‘Now, look here, Rubin,’ said Peak, ‘that hatch on the hangar deck serves one purpose and one purpose only: to let vehicles in and out. You should know that.’ His eyes flashed. ‘Maybe you could tell us what was so damned important that you opened it.’

  Rubin bit his lip.

  ‘You couldn’t be bothered to walk through the ship. It was laziness, period.’

  ‘How could you even suggest that?’

  ‘Because it’s true.’ Li walked over to Rubin and perched on the edge of the table. Her eyes looked concerned, almost friendly. ‘You said that you were going for a breath of fresh air.’

  Rubin slumped deeper into his chair. Of course he’d said that. And, of course, the surveillance system had recorded him saying it.

  ‘And then you went out a second time.’

  ‘But it didn’t look as though anyone was there,’ he defended himself. ‘And your people didn’t say different.’

  ‘They didn’t say anything because you didn’t ask - even though you need express permission to open that hatch. It happened twice in a row. They didn’t get a chance to tell you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Rubin.

  ‘I’m going to be straight with you, Mick. We didn’t do our job perfectly either. No one seems to have clocked Johanson’s return trip to the hangar deck. We’re also to blame for the fact that the whole vessel isn’t under continual surveillance. As it turns out, we couldn’t hear what Oliviera and Johanson were saying when they held their private party. The ramp and the roof are out of earshot too. But none of that changes the fact that you acted like a total jerk.’

  ‘I promise I won’t—’

  ‘You’re a security risk, Mick. A brainless asshole. I may not always agree with Jack, but if you go ahead and pull another stunt like that, I’ll volunteer to help him throw you overboard. I’ll even drum up a few sharks so I can watch them tear your heart out. Do you understand me? I will kill you.’

  Li’s deep blue eyes gazed at him amicably, but Rubin could see she’d have no reservation about carrying out her threat. The woman scared him.

  ‘I think you get my drift.’ Li thumped him on the shoulder and joined the others. ‘OK. Let’s talk about damage limitation. Did the drug work?’

  ‘We injected ten mills,’ said Peak. ‘Any more than that would have really knocked him sideways, and we need his brain. The drug’s supposed to work like an eraser on the mind. But there’s no guarantee that his memory won’t come back.’

  ‘What kind of risk are we talking?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. A word, a colour, a smell could do it. Once the brain finds a trigger, it’s capable of remembering exactly what happened.’

  ‘Well, that’s quite some risk.’ Vanderbilt scowled. ‘No drug can suppress a memory entirely. We still don’t know enough about the workings of the brain.’

  ‘We’ll have to keep him under observation,’ said Li. ‘What do you think, Mick? How much longer are we going to need him?’

  ‘Oh, we’re going great guns,’ Rubin said eagerly. Here was his chance to regain lost ground. ‘Weaver and Anawak are working on the idea of pheromone-induced aggregation. Oliviera and Johanson think it might be scent-based too. This afternoon we’ll be running some phase tests, and we should get our proof. If we’re right about aggregation being triggered by scent, we’ll soon be in a position to proceed as intended.’

  ‘If, should, could.’ Vanderbilt snorted. ‘How long until you come up with a goddamned formula?’

  ‘This is scientific research, Jack,’ said Rubin. ‘No one stood over Alexander Fleming and kept telling him to hurry up and discover penicillin.’

  Vanderbilt was on the point of responding when a woman stood up and walked over.

  ‘They’ve decoded Scratch in the CIC,’ she said.

  ‘Scratch?’

  ‘Seems that way. Crowe said to Shankar that they’d figured it out.’

  Li turned towards the desk where the audio and video footage from the CIC was being processed. A view from the overhead camera showed Shankar, Crowe and Anawak in conversation. Weaver had just walked in.

  ‘They’ll call us in a minute,’ sh
e said. ‘Good. Don’t forget to look surprised.’

  Combat Information Center

  Everyone was crowding round Crowe and Shankar, trying to get a look at the message. What they were seeing wasn’t a spectrogram but a graphic representation of the transmission they’d received the day before.

  ‘Is it a reply?’ asked Li.

  ‘Good question,’ said Crowe.

  ‘But what is Scratch anyway?’ asked Greywolf, who’d just arrived with Delaware. ‘A language?’

  ‘Well, Scratch itself might be a language, but this signal isn’t part of it, not in the way it’s been coded here,’ said Shankar. ‘It’s like the Arecibo message. I mean, humans don’t usually communicate in binary code. If you think about it, we didn’t send that message into space. Our computers did.’

  ‘The good news,’ said Crowe, ‘is that we’ve worked out its structure. You know how Scratch sounds as though a needle’s being dragged across a record? Well, it’s a staccato vibration of a very low frequency, ideally suited for propagating across the ocean. Infrasonic waves can travel incredible distances. And in this case the wavelength is extremely short. The trouble with infrasound is that we have to speed up any sound with a frequency of less than a hundred hertz to make it audible, but that would speed up the staccato. The trick to understanding this signal lies in slowing it down.’

  ‘We had to stretch it,’ said Shankar, ‘to be able to identify the individual components. So we slowed it right down until the scratching noise became a sequence of individual pulses varying in length and intensity.’

  ‘Sounds like Morse code,’ said Weaver.

  ‘It seems to work like it too.’

  ‘How are you transcribing it?’ asked Li. ‘With spectrograms?’

  ‘Yes, but they aren’t enough. When it’s a question of listening to something, it’s always better to hear it. So we used an acoustic trick. It’s a bit like false colour being added to radar images to show up the detail. In this instance we took each individual sound and replaced it with a frequency that we can hear, while keeping its original length and intensity. Whenever the original signal switched frequencies, we modified ours. That’s how we handled Scratch.’

  Crowe punched something into the keyboard. ‘The sound we detected is like this.’

  There was a rumble, like an underwater drum. The beats followed in quick succession, almost too fast to tell apart, but there could be no doubt that they were listening to a sequence of noises that varied in volume and duration.

  ‘Well, it sounds like code,’ said Anawak, ‘but what does it mean?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know?’ echoed Vanderbilt. ‘But I thought you’d cracked it.’

  ‘What we don’t know,’ Crowe explained patiently, ‘is how their language might work when they’re using it normally. We can’t make head or tail of the previous Scratch signals. But that’s beside the point.’ Smoke curled from her nostrils. ‘We’ve got something better. We’ve got contact. Murray, show them the first part.’

  Shankar clicked on an icon. The screen was lined with rows of numbers. Some columns seemed identical.

  ‘We sent them some homework, as you know,’ said Shankar. ‘Math questions. Like an IQ test. We asked them to continue decimal sequences, work out some logarithms, fill in the missing numbers, that kind of thing. If it worked, we were hoping they’d find it kind of fun and send us a reply. It would be their way of telling us that they’d heard us, that they really exist, that they know about math and can manipulate numbers.’ He pointed to the rows of figures on the screen. ‘This is their answer. Grade A. They got everything right.’

  ‘Christ,’ whispered Weaver.

  ‘That tells us two things,’ said Crowe. ‘First, Scratch is indeed a kind of language. In all probability, each of the Scratch signals contains complex information. Second, and this is the decisive point, it proves that they’re capable of adapting Scratch so that we can understand it. That’s an achievement of the highest order. It tells us that they’re every bit as smart as we are. They’re capable of decoding our messages; but they can also code their own.’

  For a while they just stared at the columns of figures, admiration mixed with fear.

  ‘But what does it prove?’ asked Johanson, breaking the silence.

  ‘I should have thought that was obvious,’ retorted Delaware. ‘It proves something’s down there. Something that can think.’

  ‘OK, but couldn’t a computer generate the same results?’

  ‘You don’t think we’re talking to a computer, do you?’

  ‘He’s got a point, you know,’ said Anawak. ‘All it proves is that our math questions have been answered. That’s impressive, but it’s not evidence of conscious intelligence.’

  ‘But what else could be sending us messages?’ asked Greywolf, disbelievingly. ‘Mackerel?’

  ‘Nonsense. Think about it. What we’re seeing here is the work of a creature that can manipulate symbols. That’s not proof of higher intelligence per se. Take chameleons, for instance. They solve a highly complex processing problem every time they change colour, but they’ve got no idea they’re doing it. If you weren’t acquainted with the IQ of chameleons, you might suppose they’re very clever - after all, they can use a program that allows them to resemble foliage one day and a rock face the next. You’d probably credit them with enormous insight because they’re reading the code of their surroundings. And you’d assume they were creative because they change their code to match.’

  ‘So what are we looking at?’ asked Delaware, helplessly.

  Crowe smiled. ‘Leon’s right,’ she said. ‘Just because someone can manipulate symbols doesn’t mean they understand them. The real proof of intelligence and creativity resides in a creature’s ability to understand and conceptualise conditions in the real world. That requires a deeper understanding. Even the most highly powered computer doesn’t deal in rules of thumb or counter-intuitive decisions. It can’t engage with its environment or experience the world. I imagine the yrr had the same considerations in mind when they formulated their reply. They tried to find something that would signal to us they’re capable of real understanding.’ Crowe pointed to the screen. ‘These are the results of the two math problems. If you look closely, you’ll see that the first answer appears eleven times in a row, then you get three repetitions of answer number two, a single occurrence of answer number one, then nine times number two and so on. At one point the second answer appears nearly thirty thousand times. But why? It makes sense to send us the results more than once, of course, even if only to make sure that the message is long enough to be detected. But why would they mix them all together?’

  ‘This is where Ms Alien comes in,’ said Shankar, with an enigmatic smile.

  ‘Jodie Foster, my alter ego.’ Crowe nodded. ‘I have to admit that if it hadn’t been for the movie, I would never have got there so quickly. You see, the sequence of answers is a code in itself. If you know how to read it, you get an image of black and white pixels - just like the messages we work on at SETI.’

  ‘I hope it’s not a picture of Hitler,’ said Rubin.

  This time he was rewarded with a laugh. By now everyone on board had seen Contact. It was about extra-terrestrials transmitting an image to Earth. The pixels of the image contained the manual for a spaceship. Humanity had been beaming pictures into space throughout its high-tech evolution, and the aliens had picked one at random as the basis for their message. Of all the available images, they’d chosen one of Hitler.

  ‘No,’ said Crowe. ‘It’s not Hitler.’

  Shankar hit a few keys. The columns of figures disappeared and made way for an image.

  ‘What is it?’ Vanderbilt leaned forward to get a better look.

  ‘Don’t you recognise it?’ asked Crowe. ‘Any suggestions?’

  ‘Looks like a skyscraper,’ said Anawak.

  ‘The Empire State Building?’ suggested Rubin.

  ‘Yeah right,
’ said Greywolf. ‘How are they supposed to know what the Empire State Building looks like? I’d say it’s a missile.’

  ‘And how would they know what a missile looks like?’ asked Delaware.

  ‘They’re lying all over the seabed! Nuclear missiles, chemical missiles…’

  ‘What’s all this stuff in the background?’ asked Oliviera. ‘Clouds?’

  ‘It could be water,’ said Weaver. ‘Maybe it’s a picture of the depths. Some kind of rock formation.’

  ‘You’re on the right track with water,’ said Crowe.

  Johanson scratched his beard. ‘It looks more like a monument. Maybe it’s a symbol. Something…religious.’

  ‘That’s a human idea if ever I heard one.’ Crowe seemed to be enjoying herself enormously. ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that there might be another way of looking at the picture?’

  They stared at it again. Li gave a start. ‘Can you rotate it by ninety degrees?’

  Shankar’s fingers danced over the keyboard and the picture shifted to the horizontal.

  ‘I still don’t get what it is,’ said Vanderbilt. ‘A fish? A huge animal?’

  Li chuckled to herself. ‘No, Jack. Those are waves in the background. It’s a snapshot taken from below. We’re looking at the surface - from the perspective of the depths.’

  ‘Huh? What about that black thing, then?’

  ‘Easy. That’s us. It’s our ship.’

  Heerema, La Palma, Canary Islands

  Maybe they shouldn’t have allowed themselves to celebrate so soon. Over the past sixteen hours the tube had been in constant operation, sucking up pinkish creatures by the tonne. The worms didn’t seem to take too kindly to the rapid change of scene. Most had exploded in transit, while the remainder writhed in their death throes, jaws twitching. Frost had run out on deck as soon as the first polychaetes spurted out of the tube into enormous nets stretched beneath it. As the water drained through the mesh, giant slides conveyed the bodies into the bowels of a freighter moored alongside the Heerema and whose load was growing steadily. Frost had plunged his hands into the mass and returned to the control room, covered with slime but brandishing a dozen corpses, which he waved triumphantly in the air. ‘The only good worm is a dead one,’ he yelled. ‘Yeee-haa!’