Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

The thought thrills me. I cannot wait for the coming of dusk.

With the laptop reprogrammed, I quickly satisfy myself that the elements of my Boolean experiment are indeed workable. I create the simplest class of logic gate, an AND gate. I classify the input domain states as either being 0 or 1, and after some trials I achieve a reliable ‘truth table’ of outputs, with my gate only spitting out a ‘1’ if the two inputs share that value.

I push on. I create OR and NOT gates, a ‘not AND’ or NAND gate, a NOR gate, an XOR and XNOR gate. Each is trickier than the last, each requires defter control of the domains and vector states. To make things easier – at the burden of a high computational load on the computer and the ethernet network – I retrieve more birds from the snares, fitting them with additional digital hoods.

Now I can create finer domains, stringing them together like the modules in an electrical circuit.

I begin to ‘wire up’ the flock. I assign gates to perform logical operations, but also to store data. Again, I need only tell the computer what I want it to do – it takes care of the computational heavy-lifting. All I know is what my eyes tell me. The murmuration has grown knotted and clotted, dense with domain boundaries and threaded with the thick synapses of internal data corridors. It swoops and billows over me, a circuit of birds.

The astonishing thing is that on the level of individual starlings, they sense no strangeness – no inkling that they are participating in anything but a normal murmuration. The complexity is emergent, operating on a scale that the birds simply cannot sense, cannot share. They are cells in a larger organism.

I lash together a Perl script, a simple text to logic program on the laptop, enabling me to send natural language queries to the flock.

IS ONE AND ONE TWO?

There is a process of calculation. The circuit shuffles. I glean the flow of information along its processing channels – the physical movement of birds and their larger domain boundaries.

The answer returns. The laptop takes the Boolean configuration and converts it back into natural language.

>>YES.

I try another query.

IS ONE AND ZERO ZERO?

A swoop, a billow, a constant busy shuffling of birds.

>>NO.

I smile. Maybe a fluke.

IS ONE AND ZERO ONE?

>>YES.

I am elated.

Over the next thirty minutes, I run through question after question. The birds answer unfailingly. They are computing, and doing so with the utmost machinelike reliability.

>>YES YES NO YES YES NO NO NO.

I am doing algebra with starlings.

But as the gloom gathers, as the dusk deepens, something troubles me.

In all my interventions to date, one thing has remained true. The murmuration eventually dissipates. The roosting instinct overpowers the flocking instinct, and the birds cascade down into the trees. It happens very quickly, a kind of runaway escalation. Whenever I have witnessed it, I am always saddened, for it is the end of the show, but I am also amazed by what is another demonstration of marvellous collective action.

And then the skies are clear again, until the birds lift at dawn. This is what should happen.

But now the murmuration will not break up.

Some birds leave it, maybe a third, but a core remains. I hammer at the laptop – more puzzled than worried at first. I try to disrupt the logic flow, randomise the data, dismantle the knotty Boolean architecture. But the pattern remains obstinately present. The sky darkens, until only the cameras and rangefinders are able to track the birds, and then with difficulty.

But I can still hear them up there – a warm but unseen presence, like a clot of dark matter hovering over me.

I THINK IT’S time to recuse myself from refereeing this paper.

After all the time and work I’ve invested in the process, it’s hardly a decision I take lightly. But there is a difference between acting as a gatekeeper and a psychiatrist. I’m afraid that recent developments have given me cause for concern. We all work under some degree of stress. Science is not a carefree playground. It’s an arena where reputations can crash as readily as they soar.

Commit some error of analysis, read too much into noise, claim a premature discovery, and you may as well tie your own academic noose. Forget those keynote lectures. Forget those expenses-paid conference invitations. You’ll be tarnished – dead in the water.

I’ve felt the pressure myself. I know what solitude and overwork can do to your objectivity. All the same, there are limits. I should have sensed that things were not going well long before they reached this latest development. I explain to the journal editor that I’m no longer in a position to offer a balanced opinion on the worth of this work. Frankly, I’m not even sure it still qualifies as science.

I’m stuffing the paper back into the glove compartment when it meets some obstruction, some object lodged at the back. I push my fingers into the mess and meet a stiff, sharp-edged rectangle about the size of a credit card. For a moment there’s a tingle of recognition.

I pull out the offending object, study it under the 4WD’s dome light. It’s a piece of grey foil printed with the name and logo of a pharmaceutical company. The foil contains six blisters. All but one of the blisters have been popped and emptied of their contents.

The sixth still holds a small yellow pill.

I wonder what it does?

I SLEEP BADLY, but dare to hope that the murmuration will have gone by morning – broken up or drifted away elsewhere. But when I wake, I find it still present.

If anything, it has grown. I run a number count and find that it has been absorbing birds, sucking them into itself. More than half a million now. Enslaved to the murmuration, the individual birds will eventually exhaust themselves and drop out of the sky. But the whole does not care, any more than I concern myself with the loss of a few skin cells. As long as there are fresh starlings to be fed into the machine, it will persist.

I drive the 4WD out again, set up the laptop, try increasingly desperate and random measures to make the pattern terminate itself.

Nothing works.

But the supply of new birds is not inexhaustible. Sooner or later, if they keep coming, it will churn its way through all the starlings in the country. Long before that happens, though, the wrongness of this thing will have become known to others beside myself. They will know that I had something to do with it. They will admire me at first, for my cleverness. After that, they will start blaming me.

I want it to end. Here. Now.

So.

Desperate measures. The wind is stiff today, the bushes and trees buckling over. Even the birds struggle to hold their formation, although the will of the murmuration forces itself through.

I make it move. I can still do that.

I steer the murmuration in the direction of the wind turbine. The blades swoop around at the limit of their speed: if it were any windier, the automatic brakes would lock the turbine into immobility. The edge of the flock begins to enter the meat slicer. I hear its helicopter whoosh, the cyclic chop its great rotors. The blades knock the birds out of the sky in their hundreds, an instant bludgeoning execution. They tumble out of formation, dead before they hit the ground.

This is merciful, I tell myself. Better than being trapped in the murmuration.

But my control slackens. The domains are resisting, slipping out of my grip. The ensemble won’t allow itself to be destroyed by the wind turbine.

It knows what I have tried to do.

It knows that I am trying to murder it.

On my laptop the Perl script says:

>>NO. NO. NO.

THE PILL LEAVES a bitter but familiar aftertaste. With a clarity of mind I haven’t known – or don’t remember knowing – in quite some time, I make my way once more to the top of the turbine tower. It’s odd that I feel this compulsion, since my fear of heights hasn’t abated, and for once there’s nothing wrong with the turbine, beyond some fresh dark smears on the still-turning blades.