Invasive (3 page)

Over her shoulder, she says, “Was there a frost the night before?” It would make sense. Last expected frost date around here is probably what? May 3?

Hollis says he doesn't know, and calls over to one of the unis. The officer walks over, says there was a cold snap, so maybe. Copper comes up behind her, towering over her. “Yellow rocket,” she says, indicating the plant. “One of the first blooming weeds of spring. You can eat it.”

“Your parents teach you all this stuff?”

“They did.” She starts to stand—but then she sees it.

“Look,” she says, pointing to the ground. A footprint. In a patch
of shining mud next to the driveway, away from the stones. “Pointed toward the lake. Could match the Lowas on the victim's feet.” Hollis snaps his fingers, tells one of the cops to get pictures and a preserved mold.

The cop who comes over is the same one who tried to shove her off—the jowly, scruffy one. “Is this even a crime scene?”

“Just get the damn print,” Hollis says.

“Yeah, yeah, sure, all right. Relax.”

Together, Hannah and Copper head down a set of stairs—stairs that aren't stairs so much as a collection of flagstones stuck haphazardly in the earth, leading down to a narrow dock jutting out over the lake.

Hollis pokes around while Hannah stands and takes it all in. The moon is just a scythe hook over the dark lake—a bitten fingernail left on a blanket of stars. She tries to piece together what happened while Hollis walks out over the dock, his boots clunking on the wood as the whole thing bobs and plops against the surface. Eventually he returns, empty-handed. “Nothing.”

She stares at a fixed point on the horizon as she tells the story: “Our victim comes to the cabin. Doesn't settle in for long, because he's still got his vest on, his boots, everything. But he feeds the pellet stove, starts to get warm.” A thought occurs to her. “Did you check the outhouse? Did someone use it?”

“We checked it, but nobody used it.”

So she continues: “Somehow he dies. I know, that's a big
somehow,
but it's all we have. A health issue, maybe. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Or something more sinister than that? He dies there on the floor. And the ants come in—this is a rainy area this time of the year, and ants tend to come indoors when the weather is cold or rainy.” Like the mailbox from her memory: it had rained the night prior, hadn't it? “They have no food and choose him as their meal. But then, of course, nobody's feeding the pellet stove. The stove goes out. The chill creeps in. Cold snap. Frost. The ants perish. And here we are.”

“Sensible. And still doesn't give us the answer to the question.”

Is this a crime scene? Or is it something else entirely?

“The ants,” she says. “They might hold the key. Ants have two stomachs. Crops, they're called. One for food for themselves, one for food for the colony.”

“So, the ants might have forensic value.”

“It's something. Obviously you're going to do further analysis—a tox screen and all that.”

“We will. I'll contact someone in the Bureau who might be able to help on the forensic side.” He flinches. “It's pretty nasty in there. Ants pulling all that skin off. At least he was dead when they did it.”

She thinks but doesn't say:
We assume he was dead when they did it.

Maybe he had a heart attack or a pulmonary embolism. And along come the creepy crawlies. What's that old song?
The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah . . . The ants go marching one by one, hurrah! hurrah! . . . The ants go marching one by one, the little one stops to suck her thumb, and they all go marching down to the ground to get out of the rain . . .

Then they start to bite.

Even in the cold, she starts to sweat.

What she says to Hollis is “I'd like to handle it.”

“You're not in forensics, I'll remind you.”

“No, but I have a friend who's a forensic entomologist.”

“You sure? I thought I was interrupting a vacation.”

Visiting my parents is about as far from a vacation as Pluto is from Earth.
“It's fine. Put together a package ready for travel—ants, fungus, skin sample—I'll book a flight to Tucson. Ez Choi teaches bug science at the state university.”

“That Arizona State?”

“No, it's—” She tries to draw it up from memory. “The other one. University of Arizona.”

“We'll have to ship the package separately, if that's amenable.”

“It's fine by me, thank you.”

“Then go forth and do the work of the law, Ms. Stander.”

“Will do, Agent Copper.”

S
he sleeps in the rental car because it's too late to get a room anywhere and her flight to Tucson is early. Her sleep is restless—she's shaken by forces unseen, the threat of the future, the threat of the open door. The threat of anything and everything. A sword above everyone's heads, held by a thread. A plane hacked by hackers, crashing. Terrorists using homemade drones as bombs. A world pinned by global warming, the lack of resources plunging the planet into another Cold War—or worse, an active global conflict.

Hannah moves her hips. She bangs one knee on the stick. She bangs her other knee on the underside of the steering wheel. It's 4:00
A.M.
This is my job,
she thinks. To imagine the worst. To look far down the road to see what's coming: What technology, what social system, what change to nature will humans face? Will it elevate and evolve us? Or will it destroy us?

Or worse—and here is the crux of her work—
Will we use it to destroy ourselves?
Her brain follows the yellow brick road all the way to Oz—except this Emerald City is shattered, with spires of broken glass, skyscrapers like jagged shards. She looks ahead to see what risks await: the threat of artificial intelligence, the danger of hackable cybernetic implants, the permutations of robots as part of daily life. Will they put us out of work, will we rely too much on them, will the laws be fast enough to catch up with what they can do, will artificial intelligence one day take control of them and decide that we are the greatest threat to robotic “life”? GMO crops that don't feed us and brain modifications that allow us to read each other's minds and mass extinctions—a drain-swirl of improbable but possible scenarios.

At some point, her mind quiets down long enough for her to sleep. But her dreams are thick with terror—in the darkness of slumber she smells that foul piss-vinegar odor. She smells the earthy, turned-soil stink of fungus on skin scraps. She reaches into a mailbox and returns an arm covered in ants. She tries to scream but the sound is caught in her throat. She tries to flail but her arm is stiff and her feet are rooted to the ground. Her family's farmhouse sits in the distance. Somewhere a goat bleats, then screams. The ants begin biting. Ripping bits of skin off like pulling the wet label off a sweating beer bottle—bit by bit, in larger strips and curls, in worthless, gummy swatches. Until soon her arm is just bold vermilion—red and raw like a steak cut right from the cow. Lush, blood-slick meat braided with bruise-dark veins.

Finally she screams—

And screams herself awake. Here she is. In the airport rental lot. She sits up. Her hair is matted to her forehead with sweat. She looks at her arm. She's got three scratches down the length. Nothing serious. No blood. Just raised red furrows where her nails must have done their work.

She looks at the time. She's running late.

With a growl of frustration, Hannah gets out of the car and rescues her carry-on from the backseat. She'll call the rental place, have them find the car parked in the adjacent lot. She rushes to catch a shuttle bus.

The shuttle is slow. The lines through security are long, too long, and because she's only a consultant with the FBI and not actual FBI, she is afforded no privilege with the TSA. She has to go through the cattle chute like the rest of the traveling herd.

The plane leaves without her. They rebook her on an afternoon flight.

She calls her mother.

“You're not coming, are you.”

“It's work,” she says. Her stock answer.

“Your father wants to see you.”

“I know.”

“He needs to see you.”

“I know.”

“No, you don't know.” A sigh on the other end. Mom's voice softens a little: “Is it important, what you're doing?”

I don't know.
“Yes.”

“Do you need to warn us? Is something going on?” Her work always leads to that question.

“No. This is just standard. It's a . . .” Her mouth forms the word
murder,
but she has no evidence of that. It doesn't even add up yet. She says, “It's an ongoing investigation.”

“You didn't tell me about last year. The plane.”

“I didn't know about the plane.”

“Terrorists can hack planes and crash them into the ground? What have we done to ourselves, Hannah? We've made it all too complex. Too complex to live.”

“I have to go, Mom. I'll be in Tucson a day or two and then—”

“Don't say it. Your mouth shouldn't make promises the rest of you can't keep. We will see you when we see you.”

“I love you guys.”

A pause.

“We love you, too, Hannah.”

The flight is a roller-coaster ride. Bucking like a horse, then dropping like the horse got shot. (Here, a sudden, unexpected memory: The way to drop a whitetail deer is a lung shot. Take the air out of it and it'll fall right where it stands.) The turbulence doesn't bother her, even though her stomach takes every bounce and dip a half second later than the rest of her. But all along the way she ponders
how you'd hack the plane in flight. She's not a hacker, so she doesn't have the skills, but if she did . . .

The systems are all bound together. That's the problem. That's the vulnerability with planes. The cockpit, the Wi-Fi, the Jetway controls, they're all braided together and plugged into one another. The systems are not islands. Which means if you're really savvy, you can find your way to one system and burrow a hole—programmatically speaking—to another. Connect to the Wi-Fi, and someone of genuine talent could punch a hole into the flight systems. Even easier, though far more conspicuous: rip off part of the armrest and access the plug with a cat-5 Ethernet cable (one that is perhaps modded) and connect to a laptop, and it gets even easier because Wi-Fi has its own security protocols in place. They don't expect you to go in this way because only workers do that—which means one fewer locked door standing in your way to the flight systems.

Then from there, what? Take control? Set the autopilot? You'd have to know how to fly a plane, somewhat.

Or you just tell the systems to drop you out of the sky like a stone.

That scares her. The fragility of the thing. All the systems together. Vulnerability to people with terrible agendas.

She obsesses about this for a while when she should be obsessing about one dead man and a thousand dead ants.

They land in Tucson.

Another car rental. A Nissan. It's hot here—not even May and it's in the midnineties. Everything feels dry. The heat, squeezing her like a lemon. The air, a vampire sucking her dry. It strikes her that Arizona and its two principal cities are settlements of great hubris.

Once at the hotel—a Marriott across the street from the university—she texts Ez, tells her she's in town. Hannah gets settled in and then—
bing
. Ez doesn't respond until suddenly she does:

           
Ez:
i'm downstairs

(The text followed by a trail of emoji: hearts, smiley faces, high-fiving hands that also look like
Praise Jesus
hands, and for kicks, a tiny little cartoon ant standing on her hind legs.)

They go to a nearby pizza-and-beer place with a name as honest as it gets: Pizza & Beer. Ez sips a craft beer—something called Dragon's Milk—and Hannah goes with a glass of wine.

Ez is a little slip of a woman. Chinese descent, first-generation American. She's got a Mohawk (presently hot pink and flopped over like a wilted flower) and the sides of her head are shorn down, the stubble dyed a deep viridian. Her nose is pierced. Her eyebrow, too. Her lip. Her arms are inked with swarms of bugs: honeybees, ants, praying mantises, all woven in and around vines and leaves. Her makeup is thick, matching her hair: rich green lips, green eyebrows, a pink blush. None of it should work together and yet, on her, it sings.

She's the opposite of Hannah in many ways: Hannah is tall. Dirty-blond hair long, pulled back. No makeup. As a kid she always told her father,
I'm plain
. He always said,
Plain is pretty to me,
and then he'd kiss her brow.

“Dead ants,” Ez says, pulling a slice of sausage, pepper, and onion away from the pie. “Ants who apparently were munching on itty-bitty snippets of human skin.” She chews a glob of cheese like it's a wad of gum. “Cool.”

Hannah laughs. “Yeah. Cool.”

Ez nods. “Okay, so, the thing is? Ants don't really do that. The skin-nibbling thing.”

“It wasn't just the skin, though,” Hannah says, pulling a slice for herself. “It was fungus. Fungus that had grown
on
the skin.”

“I saw that. What's super fucking kooky about that is, that's how leaf-cutter ants work. Leaf-cutters literally scissor bits of leaf off
with their mandibles, then carry those bits back to the mound—their nest—and use them to form a substrate for fungus. Then they bring more leaves to feed the fungus. It's mutualism. They grow the fungus. Nurture it.”

“Like farmers.”

“They are farmers. A lot of ants are. Some herd aphids like livestock and—who does this sound like?—drink their milk.”

“Do they wear little cowboy hats?”

Ez claps her hands and squeals. “God, I wish! How fucking
amazing
would that be? Little ants with cowboy hats. Riding on the backs of beetles.” She freezes, eyes wide. “I could do it.
I have the power
.”

“Ease off the throttle, Dr. Frankenstein. One step at a time.” Hannah chews her pizza and around a mouthful of crunchy green pepper says: “So, what we're dealing with are leaf-cutter ants. Except given the early season and the frost, they didn't have any leaves to munch and so instead they found our victim?”

“Maybe. But New York isn't home to any leaf-cutter ants.”

“So, what's that mean? Invasive species?”

“Or a new species.”

Hannah raises an eyebrow. “Is that likely?”

“It's not impossible. Earth is home to more than twelve thousand species of ants. If you weighed all the ants and all the humans, the ants would weigh more. We discover new ant species every year. And not just in weird places, but all over.” She sighs. “That said,
disappointingly,
an invasive species is way more likely. Think of how Africanized bees invaded from South America. It was only twenty or so hives that were accidentally released, but bugs get busy fast. It's why they put the
fun
in
functional
when it comes to the lab: you can breed generations of them like boom, boom, boom.” With each “boom” she snaps her fingers. “And ants can be invasive—take the ‘tawny crazy ant' around here. One of our mandates is to study those little fuckers. They're tiny and they move like lightning. One day nobody knew what they were. Next day they were here in the
millions. They get in everything: industrial machines, electronics, cars. And if they get electrocuted, they release a swarm chemical that tells all the ants nearby to swarm. So they do. And they all get electrocuted and release the signal and whatever machine or electronic gadget they've swarmed is suddenly ruined.”