Swarm Mechanics

The insects returned to their programmed duties, scavenging and digging and otherwise giving their minute lives to the service of the hive. The machines followed in turn, blindly imitating the actions that the organisms around them performed. They were physically ill-equipped for most of these duties, but they imitated with enough skill that the hive was not distressed by their presence. In fact, the hive began to adapt itself to the new additions. Where the machines performed well, the insects moved aside and set themselves to novel tasks. With time, nature changed them to be better suited to those tasks, and the machines altered their own behaviors to better suit their newly-adapted partners. Thus, the organic and synthetic evolved in tandem, each moving into a new niche.

It was at this time that humans started to take note of this unusual hive, if only in a superficial manner. The insects were breeding and spreading with greater skill, constructing ever larger and more complex hives for their multiplying brood. They were a menacing new pest or a fascinating discovery, depending on one's outlook, but no one could yet assign a cause. No human eyes could see into those tunnels, into the chambers where the insects were at work on their inorganic counterparts, shaping them to better suit the hive. No one could fathom the quirk of nature and artifice that had pushed them--both of them, the man-made and the natural--down an unfathomable evolutionary line.

With the machines critical to the species, the insects had developed crude methods to repair them, but facilitating this demanded that the machines adopt a more familiar form. Repair cycle over repair cycle, the machines lost the characteristics given them by human hands and acquired new ones. Distinctions between them faded. In a sense, there were no longer machines and insects, but biological insects and synthetic ones, fully adapted to one another.

And still the hive grew, quietly, unnoticed by the greater animals above save for annoyance at the presence of ever larger numbers of pests. It acted as hives had for ages--scouting its surroundings, consuming, reproducing, founding new branches, encountering unknown hives and incorporating or conquering them--but did so with far greater success. Such success, in fact, that it could not help but catch the notice of the scientific community at large. No longer the domain of obsessive bug-watchers, this sprawling hive was a genuine biological curiosity. It was not the largest of its type, but none observed had expanded so rapidly or exhibited such emergent sophistication in its behavior, and beyond that no one had ever observed a complex species evolve in such a robust and rapid manner. There were new forms among their number that had never been observed in any other related species, the most magnificent of which were a strange, rare type that was larger than its kin, with alien movements and a peculiar carapace. This was what attracted the most attention.

The time will come when some enterprising entomologist captures one of these massive, seldom seen insects and returns it to the laboratory for further analysis. One can only wonder what his response will be when he goes to pin it to the tray.