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

THE ‘HUT’ IS a couple of insulated portable cabins, with a few smaller sheds containing generators, fuel, wind turbine parts and so on. There is a chemical toilet, a wash basin, basic cooking facilities. Two or three of us can share the hut at a time, but there is not normally a need for more than one to keep an eye on the equipment. Resources being tight, lately we tend to come out on our own.

In all honesty, I prefer it this way. Birds draw out the solitude in us. They repay patience and silence – long hours of a kind of alert, anticipatory stillness. The days begin to blur into each other; weekends and weekdays becoming arbitrary distinctions. I find myself easily losing track of the calendar, birds and weather my only temporal markers. I watch the migration patterns, record their altering plumage, study the changeful skies. I could not be happier.

There is just one thing to spoil my contentment, but even that, I am confident, will soon be behind me.

I will finish the paper.

IT SOUND EASY, put like that. A vow. A recommitment, a redoubling of my own efforts. One last push.

But I have been here before.

It started easily enough – the usual set of objections, no real hint of the trouble to come. Very few papers ever go through without some amendments, so none of us were bothered that there were a few issues that needed addressing.

But when we had fixed those, the anonymous referee came back with requests for more changes.

We took care of those. Hoped that the paper would now be judged fit for publication. But still the referee wanted more of us. This kept going on. Just when we think we have addressed all possible doubts, the referee somehow manages to find something new to quibble with. I do my best to be stoic, reminding myself that the anonymous referee is just another scientist doing their job, that they too are under similar pressures, and that I should not feel under any personal attack.

But I only have to glance at their comments.

My blood boils. I entertain a momentary fantasy of meeting the referee out here, on some lonely strip of marshland, of swerving violently and running them into a ditch.

Asking, as I watch them gag on muddy water: “Rigorous enough for you now?”

THE BASIS OF our experiment is a ring of twenty tripods, arranged in a two kilometre circle. The hut is on one side of the circle, the wind turbine the other. During the day I check all the tripods, picking the least waterlogged path in the 4WD.

Each unit carries a pair of stereometric digital cameras. The lenses need to be kept the power and electronic connections verified. The cameras should be aimed into the middle of the perimeter, and elevated sufficiently to stand a good chance of catching the murmuration’s epicentre. The cameras are meant to be steerable, but not all of the motors work properly now.

Beneath each camera is a heavy grey digital control box. The boxes contain microprocessor boards, emergency batteries, and the blue plastic rectangles of their internal ethernet modules, flickering with yellow and red LEDs. The boxes are supposedly weatherproof but the rain usually finds a way into them. Like the motors, there have been some failures of the circuit board, and our spares supplies are running low.

About one in five of the stations have more equipment. On these units we also included laser/radar rangefinders and Doppler velocity recorders. These in turn require extra processors and batteries in the control boxes, which is yet more to go wrong.

The effort is worth it, though.

The equipment allows us to track the instantaneous vectors of anything up to two hundred and fifty thousand birds, perhaps even half a million, in a single compact formation. Our spatial/temporal resolution is sufficient to determine wing movements down to the level of specific feather groups. At the same time we also gather data on the attentional shifts implied by eye and head tracking of individual birds.

The human eyes see a blurring of identities, birds becoming the indistinguishable, amorphous elements of some larger whole. The cameras and computers see through all of that. I know the science, I know the algorithms, I know our data-carrying capacity. All the same, I am still quietly astonished that we can do this.

When the cameras are checked, which can take anywhere between three and six hours, I have one final inspection to perform. I drive to the wind turbine, and make a visual inspection of the high grey tower and the swooping blades. More often than not there is nothing to be done. The blades turn, the power flows, our electrical and computer systems work as they are meant to.

The rest is down to the birds.

IT’S ODD, REALLY, but there are times when I find even the hut a little too closed-in and oppressive for my tastes. Sometimes I just stop the 4WD out here, wind the window down, and watch the light change over the marsh. I like it best when the day is overcast, the clouds sagging low over the trees and bushes of the marsh, their greyness relieved only by a bold supercilial swipe of pale yellow above the horizon. Birds come and go, but it’s too early for the roosting. I watch herons, curlews, reed warblers – sometimes even the slow, methodical patrol of our resident marsh harrier, quartering the ground with the ruthless precision of a surveillance drone.

Beyond the birds, the only constancy is the regular swoosh of the turbine blades.

It’s a good time to catch up on work or reading.

I pull laser-printed pages from the unruly nest of the glove compartment, along with tissues, cough sweets, empty medicine packets, a scuffed CD without a case. I rest a stiff-backed road atlas on the steering wheel, so that I can write on the pages.

I’ve already marked up certain problematic passages in yellow highlighter. Now I use a finer pen to scribble more detailed notes in the margins. Eventually I’ll condense these notes into a short email to the journal editor. In turn they’ll forward them on to the author of the paper I am refereeing.

This is how it works. I’m engaged in a struggle with my own anonymous referee, half-convinced that they’ve got it in for me, while at the same time trying to be just as nit-picking and difficult for this other author. Doubtless they feel just as irritated by me, as I am irritated with my own referee. But from my end, I know that there’s nothing personal in it. I just want the work to be as good as it can be, the arguments as lucid, the analysis as rigorous. So what if I know the lead author, and don’t particularly care for her? I can rise above that.

I hold one of the sheets up to the yellowing sky, so that the band of light pushes through the highlit yellow passages. I read back my own scrawl in the margins:

Am I being too harsh with them?

Perhaps. But the we’ve all been through this mill.

STARLINGS GATHER, ARRIVING from all directions, concentrating in the air above the copse of trees and bushes near the middle of the study area. They come in small numbers, as individuals or in flocks of a few dozen, before falling into the greater mass. There is no exact threshold at which the concentration of birds becomes a recognisable murmuration, but it needs at least a few thousand before the form begins to emerge as a distinct phenomenon in its own right, with its swooping, gyring, folding cohesiveness – a kind of living membrane in the sky.

Meanwhile, our instruments record. One hundred parametric data points per bird per millisecond, on average, or upwards of fifty gigabytes of data for the whole murmuration. Since the murmuration may persist for several tens of minutes, our total data cube for the whole observation may contain more than thirty terabytes of data, and a petabyte is not exceptional. We use some of the same data-handling and compression routines as the particle physicists in CERN, with their need to track millions of microscopic interaction events. They are tracking tiny bundles of energy, mass, spin and charge. We are tracking warm, feathery bodies with hearts and wings and twitchy central nervous systems!

All of it is physics, though, whether you are studying starlings or quarks.

On my workstation I sift through slices of the data with tracker-wheels and mouse glides.

I graph up a diagram of the murmuration at a moment in time, from an arbitrary viewing angle. It is a smear-shaped mass of tiny dots, like a pixelated thumbprint. On the edges of the murmuration the birds are easily distinguishable. Closer to the core the dots crowd over each other, forming gradients of increasing concentration, the birds packing together with an almost Escher-like density. Confronted with those black folds and ridges, it is hard not to think of the birds as blending together, clotting into a suspended, gravity-defying whole.

I mouse click and each dot becomes a line. Now the smear is a bristly mass, like the pattern formed by iron filings in the presence of a magnetic field. These are the instantaneous vectors for each bird – the direction and speed in which they are moving.

We know from previous studies that each starling has a direct influence – and is in turn influenced by – about seven neighbours. We can verify this with the vector plots, tracking the change in direction of a particular bird, and then noting the immediate response of its neighbours. But if that were the limit of the bird’s influence, the murmuration would be sluggish to respond to an outside factor, such as the arrival of a sparrowhawk.

In fact the entity responds as a whole, dividing and twisting to outfox the intruder. It turns out the there is a correlation distance much greater than the separation between immediate neighbours. Indeed, that correlation between distant birds may be as wide as the entire murmuration. It is as if they are bound together by invisible threads, each feeling the tug of the other – a kind of rubbery net, stretching and compressing.

In fact, the murmuration may contain several distinct ‘domains’ of influence, where the flight patterns of groups of birds are highly correlated. In the plot on my workstation, these show up as sub-smears of strongly aligned vectors. They come and go as the murmuration proceeds, blending and dissipating – crowds within the larger crowd.

This is where the focus of our recent research lies. What causes these domains to form? What causes them to break up? Can we trace correlation patterns between the domains, or are they causally distinct? How sharp are the boundaries – how permeable?

This paper, the one that is bouncing back and forth between us and the referee, was only intended to set out the elements of our methodology – demonstrating that we had the physical and mathematical tools to study the murmuration at any granularity we chose. Beyond that, we had plans for a series of papers which would build on this preliminary work with increasingly complex experiments. So far we have been no more than passive observers. But if we have any claim to understand the murmuration, then we should be able to predict its response to an external stimulus.

I am starting to sense an impasse. Can we honestly go through this all over again with our next publication, and the one after? The thought of that leaves me drained. We have the tools for the next phase of our work, so why not push ahead with the follow-up study, and fold the results of that back into the present paper? Steal a march on our competitors, and dazzle our referee with the sheer effortless audacity of our work?

I think so.

THE NEXT DAY I set up the sparrowhawk.

I need hardly add that it is not a real sparrowhawk. Designed for us by our colleagues at the robotics laboratory, it is a clever, swift-moving drone. It has wings and a tail and its flight characteristics are similar to those of a real bird. It has synthetic feathers, a plastic bill, large glassy eyes containing swivel-mounted cameras. To the human eye, it looks a little crude and toy-like – surely too caricatured to pass muster. But the sparrowhawk’s visual cues have been exaggerated very carefully. From a starling’s point of view, it is maximally effective, maximally terrifying. It lights up all the right fear responses.

Come the roost, I set down a folding deck chair, balance the laptop in my lap, stub my gloved fingers onto the scuffed old keyboard, with half the letters worn away, and I watch the spectacle. The sparrowhawk whirrs from the roof of the 4WD, soars into the air, darts forward almost too quickly for my own eyes to track.

It picks a spot in the murmuration and arcs in like a guided missile. The murmuration cleaves, twists, recombines.

The sparrowhawk executes a hairpin turn and returns for the attack. It skewers through the core of the flock, jack-knifes its scissor wings, zig-zags back. It makes a low electric hum. Some birds scatter from the periphery, but the murmuration as a whole turns out to be doggedly persistent, recognising on some collective level that the sparrowhawk cannot do it any real damage, only picking off its individual units in trifling numbers.

The sparrowhawk maintains its bloodless attack. The murmuration pulses, distends, contracts, its fluctuations on the edge of chaos, like a fibrillating heart. I think of the sparrowhawk as a surgeon, drawing a scalpel through a vital organ, but the tissue healing faster than the blade can cut.

Never mind – the point is not to do harm, but to study the threat response. And by the time the sparrowhawk’s batteries start to fade, I know that our data haul will be prodigious.

I can barely sleep with anticipation.

BUT OVERNIGHT,THERE’S a power-outage. The computers crash, the data crunching fails. We run on the emergency generator for a little while, then the batteries. Come morning I drive out in the 4WD, open the little door at the base of the tower, and climb the clattery metal ladder up the inside. Inside there are battery-operated lights, but no windows in the tower itself. The ladder goes up through platforms, each a little landing, before swapping over the other side. Heights are not my thing, but it’s just about within my capabilities to go all the way to the top without getting seriously sweaty palms or stomach butterflies.

At the top, I come out inside the housing of the turbine. It’s a rectangular enclosure about the size of our generator shed. I can just about stand up in it, moving around the heavy electrical machinery occupying most of the interior space. At one end, a thick shaft goes out through the housing to connect to the blades.

The turbine is complicated, but fortunately only a few things tend to go wrong with it. There are electrical components, similar to fuses, which tend to burn out more often than they should. We keep a supply of them up in the housing, knowing how likely it is that they will need swapping out. I am actually slightly glad to see that it is one of the fuses that has gone, because at least there is no mystery about what needs to be done. I have fixed them so many times, I could do it in my sleep.

I open the spares box. Only three left in it, and I take one of them out now. I swap the fuse, then reset the safety switches. After a few moments, the blades unlock and begin to grind back into motion. The electrical gauges twitch, showing that power is being sent back to our equipment. Not much wind today, but we only need a few kilowatts.

Job done.

I think of starting down, but having overcome my qualms to get this high, I cannot resist the opportunity to poke my head out of the top. At the back of the electrical gear is a small ladder which leads to an access hatch in the roof of the housing.

I go up the short steps of the ladder, undo the catches, and heave open the access hatch.

My knees wobble a bit. I push my head through the hatch, like a tank commander. I look around. There’s a rubberised walkway on top, and a set of low handrails, so in theory I could go all the way out and stand on top of the housing. But I’ve never done that, and I doubt that I would ever have the nerve.

Still with only my head jutting out, I look back at the hut, a huddle of pale rectangles. The perimeter circle is hard to trace from this elevation, but eventually I glimpse the spaced-out sentinels of the tripods, with the scratchy traces of my own wheel tracks between them. Then I pivot around and try to pick out the causeway. But it’s harder to follow than I expect, seeming to abandon itself in a confusion of marsh and bog. I squint to the horizon, looking for a trace of its continuation.

Strange how some things are clearer to the eye at ground level, than they are from the air.

Birds must know this in their bones.

THE NEXT DAY, the computers running again, I squeeze our data until it bleeds science. With the vector tracking, we can trace the response to the sparrowhawk across all possible interaction lengths. Remarkable to see how effectively the ‘news’ of the sparrowhawk’s arrival is disseminated through that vast assemblage of birds.

Because there is no centralised order, the murmuration is best considered as a scale-free network. The internet is like that, and so is the human brain. Scale-free networks are robust against directed attacks. There is no single hub which is critical to the function of the whole, but rather a tangle of distributed pathways, no one of which is indispensible. On the other hand, the scale-free paradigm does not preclude the existence of those vector domains I mentioned earlier. Just as the internet has its top-level domains, so the brain has its hierarchies, its functional modules.

Would it be a leap too far to start thinking of the murmuration as hosting some level of modular organisation?

I jot down some speculative notes. No harm in sleeping on them. In the meantime, though, I write up the sparrowhawk results in as dry and unexciting manner as I can manage, downplaying any of the intellectual thrill I feel. Passive voice all the way. The sparrowhawk was prepared for remote control. Standard reduction methods were used in the data analysis. The murmuration was observed from twenty spatially separated viewing positions – see Fig. 3.

The way to do science is never to sound excited by it, never to sound involved, never to sound as if this is something done by people, with lives and loves and all the usual hopes and fears.

I send the latest version of the paper back to the journal, and cross my fingers.

I OPEN THE glove compartment and take out the latest version of the paper. I skim it quickly, then go back through some of the more problematic passages with the yellow highlighter, before adding more detailed notes in the margin. My initial optimism quickly turns to dismay. Why in hell have they opened up this whole other can of worms? I squint at an entire new section of the paper, hardly believing my eyes.

Sparrowhawks? Robot sparrowhawks? And pages of graphs and histograms and paragraphs of analysis, all springing from work which was not even foreshadowed in the original paper?

What are they thinking?

I’m furious at this. Furious with the journal editor, for not spotting this late addition before it was forwarded to me. Furious with the authors, for adding to our mutual workload. Furious for their presumption, that I will presumably be sufficiently distracted by this to overlook the existing flaws – like a magpie distracted by something shiny. (Except that’s a myth; corvids are not attracted to shiny things at all.)

Furious above all else that they are prepared to squander this good and original science, to slip it into this paper like a lazy afterthought, as a kind of intellectual bribe.

No, this must not stand.

I put the 4WD back into gear. I must settle my thoughts before firing back an intemperate response. But really, I’m enraged. I bet they think they know who I am. I imagine encountering them out here, running them down, feeling the bounce of my wheels over their bodies. I’d stop the 4WD, get out, walk slowly back. Savour the squelch of my boots on the marshy ground.

Their whimpering, their broken-boned pleas.

‘You think this is how we do science, do you?’ I’d ask them, entirely rhetorically. ‘You think it is a kind of game, a kind of bluff? Well, the joke’s on you. I am recommending your paper be rejected.’

And then I would walk away, ignoring their noises, get back into the 4WD, drive off. At night their cries would still come in across the marsh, but I would not let myself be troubled. After all, they brought this on themselves.

But that sparrowhawk, I’ll admit, was beautiful.

I GO OUT to the walk-in traps and collect the overnight haul. There are almost always some birds in the snares, and almost always some starlings. It is how we ring them, bring them in for study, assess their overall genetic fitness. Generally they are none the worse for having been caught up in the nets overnight.

I collect ten adult specimens, let the others go, and take the ten back to the hut.

A firm in Germany has made the digital polarising masks for us. They are elegant little contraptions, similar in design to the hoods fitted around captive birds of prey. These are smaller, though, optimised to be worn by starlings, and to offer no significant resistance to normal flight. Each hood is actually a marvel of miniature electronic engineering. Bulging out from either side are two glassy hemispheres.

In its neutral mode, the bird has an unrestricted view of its surroundings. Each hemisphere, though, is divided into digitally-controlled facets. These can be selectively darkened via wireless computer signals, effectively blocking out an area of the starling’s vision.

The consequence of this – the point of the masks – is that we can control the birds’ collision-avoidance response remotely. By making a given bird think it is about to be struck by another bird, we can cause it to fly in any direction we choose.

Again, it is asking too much of human reflexes to control a bird at such a level. But the computers can do it elegantly and repeatably. Each of our ten hooded starlings then becomes a remote-controlled agent, under our direct operation. Like the robot sparrowhawk, we can steer our agents into the murmuration. The distinction is that the hooded starlings do not trigger a threat response from their seven neighbours; they are absorbed into the whole, accepted and assimilated.

But they can influence the other birds. And by careful control of our hooded agents, we can initiate global changes in the entire murmuration. We can instigate domains, break them up, make them coalesce. Anything that happens under the influence of natural factors, we can now bring about at our will.

By we, of course, I mean I.

Old habits die hard. Science is always done in the ‘we’, even when the work is borne on a single pair of shoulders. But frankly, I am starting to doubt the commitment of my fellow researchers. There is always a division of labour in any collaborative enterprise, and sometimes that division can seem unfair. If the brunt of the work is my responsibility, though, I fail to see why I should not receive the lion’s share of the credit.

As I wait for the murmuration to form, I make some deft amendments to the list of the authors, striking out a name here, a name there.

Feathers will fly, of course.

TEN BIRDS MIGHT not seem much but these birds are like precision instruments, guided with digital finesse. To begin with, we – I – restrict myself to only minor interventions.

I make the murmuration split into two distinct elements, then recombine. Suitably encouraged, I quarter it like a flag. I pull it apart into four rippling sheets of birds, with arcs of clear air between them. The edges are improbably straight, as if the birds are glassed-in, boxed by invisible planes. But that is the power of incredibly delicate control processes, of stimulus and feedback operations happening much too swiftly for human perception. If an edge starts losing coherence, the computer makes a tiny adjustment to one or more of the control starlings and the order is reestablished. This happens many times a second, at the speed of avian reactions.

They have always lived in a faster world than us. They live a hundred days in one of our hours. To them we are slow, lumbering, ogrelike beings, pinned to the ground by the stonelike mass of our bodies. We envy them; they pity us.

I push forward. I carve geometries out of the murmuration. I fold it into a torus, then a ribbon, then a Möbius strip. I do not need to know how to make these shapes, only to instruct the laptop in my desires. It works out the rest, and becomes more adept as it goes along.

I make the murmuration spell out letters, then I coax those letters into lumpy, smeared-out words. I spell my name in birds. They banner around me like the slogans towed by light aircraft. I laugh even as I feel that I have crossed some line, some invisible threshold between pristine science and sordid exploitation.

But I carry on anyway. I am starting to think about those domains, those hints of modular organisation.

How far could I push this, if I were so determined?

ANGRY EXCHANGES OF emails. Editor not happy with this latest change of direction. Much to-ing and fro-ing. Questions over the change in the listed authors – deemed most unorthodox. Accusations of unprofessionalism. If we were in a room together, the three of us, we might get somewhere. Or we might end up throwing textbooks.

Is this a travesty of the way science ought to be done, or is it science at its shining best – as loaded with passion and conviction as the any other human enterprise? No one would doubt that poets squabble, that a work of great literature might take some toll on its creator, that art forges enemies as readily as allies. Why do we hold science to a colder, more emotionless set of standards? If we care at all about the truth, should we not celebrate this anger, this clashing of viewpoints?

It means that something vital is at stake.

Hard in the spitting crucible of all this to remember that every one of us was drawn to this discipline because of a love of birds.

But that is science.

MY PROPOSITION IS simple. The domains are controllable. I can cause them to form, contain the shape and extent of their boundaries, determine the interaction of their vector groups with the surrounding elements. I can move the domains around with the flock. I can blend one domain into another, merging them like a pair of colliding galaxies. Depending on their vector properties, I can choose whether that act results in the destruction of both domains or the formation of a larger one.

I sense the possibility of being able to execute a kind of Boolean algebra. If the domains behave in a controllable and repeatable way, and I can determine their states – their aggregate vector sums – then I can treat them as inputs in a series of logic operations.

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.

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.

I try another query.

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

I smile. Maybe a fluke.

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.

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:

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.

In the housing, I ease around the humming core of the generator and its whirring shaft. The dials are all still registering power – enough for my needs, at any rate. We’re still down to those last few replacement fuses, but there’s no need to swap one of them at the moment.

I climb the little ladder and poke my head out through the roof hatch. Steeling myself, pushing my fear aside, I put my elbows on the rim and lever my body up through the hatch. Finally I’m sitting on the rim, with my legs and feet still dangling back into the housing. The wind is hard and cold up here, a relentless solid force, but with the enclosing handrails there’s no real chance of me falling. All the same, it takes my last reserves of determination to rise from the hatch, pushing myself up until I am standing on the rubberised decking. The handrails seem too low now, and the gaps between the uprights too widely spaced. With each swoop of the blades, the housing moves under me. My knees wobble. My stomach flutters and sweat pools in the palms of my gloved hands.

But I will not fall. That’s not why I’ve come to the top of the turbine.

Once more I survey my little world from this lofty vantage. The hut, the instruments, the parked vehicle. The low sky. The boggy tracks of my daily routine.

The harder gleam of the causeway, arrowing away.

But it never gets anywhere. The causeway vanishes into bog and then the bog opens up into the silver mirror of a larger expanse of open water. I squint, trying to pick up the causeway’s continuation beyond the flooded area. There, maybe. A scratch of iron-grey, arrowing on toward the horizon. But dark shapes bordering that scratch. Cars, vans – all stopped. Some of them tipped over or emptied like skulls. Burnt out.

I might be imagining it.

Beyond the marsh, beyond the enclosing water, nothing that hints at civilisation.

I realise now that I’ve been here a lot longer than weeks. I know also that I don’t need to worry about being a scientist any more. That’s the least of anyone’s concerns. Being a scientist is just something I used to do, a long time ago.

I wish I could hold onto this. I wish I could remember that the paper doesn’t matter, that the journal doesn’t matter, that nothing matters. That the only thing left to worry about is holding on, keeping things at bay. But unless I’m mistaken that was the last of my medication.

Finally the wind and the swaying overcome my will. I start down the tower, back to the ground.

At the 4WD I stand and watch the birds. That clarity hasn’t completely left me, that knowledge of what I am and what has become of me. I can feel it slipping, draining out of my head as if there are holes in the base of my skull. For the moment, though, there’s still enough of it there. I know what happened.

But the murmuration still contains troubling structure – sharp edges, block knots of density, shifting domains and restless connections. Did I cause all of that to come into being, or is this now the way of things? Is it a kind of equivalence, order emerging in the natural world, while order is eclipsed in ours? Have I been trying to communicate with the murmuration, or is it the other way around? Which of us is the observer, which the phenomenon?

If I tried to kill it, will it find it in itself to forgive me?

I try to hold onto these questions. They seem hugely important to me now. But one pill was never going to hold the dusk at bay.

IN THE MORNING I feel much better about things. Finally, I think I can see a way through – a fresh approach, a new chance of publication. It will mean going back to the start of the process, but sometimes you have no choice – you just have to end things before they get any worse.

I draft a letter to the editor. Although it pains me to do it, I feel that we have no option but to request a new referee. Things have gone on long enough with this old one. Frankly the whole exchange was in danger of getting too personal. We all know that the anonymous part counts for very little these days, and in all honesty professional feelings were starting to get in the way. I had a suspicion about their identity, and of course mine was all to visible to them. We had history. Too much bad blood, too much accumulated recrimination and mistrust. At least this way we will be off to a clean start again.

I read it over, make a few alterations, then send the letter. It might be misplaced optimism, but this time I am quietly confident of success. I look forward to hearing from the editor.