specialized for environmental monitoring and photogrammetry—relentlessly constructing and reconstructing an ultra-high-resolution map of the Amazon basin.
Inside his monitoring station, Paulo only half watched as the constantly updating image knitted itself together on his monitor. An occasional haze of stale bluish smoke rose from the spit-soaked cigarro parked in its usual spot at the corner of his mouth.
Everything changed at precisely 14:08:24 UTC.
At that moment, a new vertical strip of mapped terrain was added to the composite image. The unseen warning light was displaced fifty pixels to the left, just peeking out from under the sticky note.
Stunned, Paulo Araña stared at the pulsing red spot.
In recovered webcam footage, he could be seen blinking frantically, trying to clear his eyes. Then he snatched away the sticky note and crumpled it in his fingers. The dot was located beside a small thumbnail image of something the Abutre-rei had found in the jungle. Something Paulo could not even begin to explain.
Paulo Araña’s job at FUNAI was to monitor and protect an exclusion zone established around the easternmost region of the Upper Amazon—over thirty-two thousand square miles of unbroken jungle. It was a priceless treasure, site of both the largest concentration of biodiversity on earth and a terra indigena that was home to approximately forty uncontacted Amazonian tribes—pockets of indigenous human civilization with little or no exposure to the technology and disease of the outside world.
With such natural riches, the land was under constant attack. Like an army of termites, destitute locals were motivated to sneak into protected territory to fish virgin rivers or poach valuable endangered species; loggers were tempted to bring down the huge kurana, cedar trees that could fetch thousands of dollars on the black market; and of course, the hordes of narcotraficantes stopping over on their way from southern Brazil to Central America were a constant and brutal menace.
Preserving the wilderness required unwavering attention.
With a nicotine-stained finger, Paulo pecked a key to activate Marvin, a computer program housed in a beige plastic box wedged under his desk. Acquired years ago from a joint research effort with an American graduate program, the battered box was unremarkable save for a faded printout of an old Simpsons cartoon character taped to the outside.
On the inside, however, Marvin housed a sophisticated neural network—an expert system that had been trained on thousands of square miles of real jungle imagery, and over a hundred million more simulated.
Marvin could reliably identify a quarter-mile airstrip hacked out of the remote jungle by drug couriers; or the logging roads that threaded like slug trails into the deep woods, with larger trees intentionally left unmolested as cover; or even the occasional maloca huts built by the uncontacted tribes—rare and intimate glimpses of another world.
Most importantly, the program could scan ten square miles of super-high-resolution terrain in seconds—a feat impossible for even the most dedicated human being.
Paulo knew that Marvin was muito inteligente, but it had outright rejected this new data as not classifiable. This was something the algorithm had never seen, not in all its petabytes of training data.
In fact, it was something nobody had ever seen.
The output simply read: CLASSIFICATION RESULTS: UNKNOWN.
Marvin hadn’t even offered a probability distribution.
Paulo didn’t like it. He made a kind of surprised grunt, the cigarette trembling on his lower lip. Tapping keys rapidly, he enlarged the thumbnail image and examined it from every available angle, trying to dismiss it as a glitch. But it was no use—the strange sight defied explanation.
Something black was rising from the deepest jungle. Something very big.
Paulo waved smoke away with one hand, his gut pressing against the cool metal desk. He squinted at the dim screen, pushing his face closer. His balding head was coated in a cold sweat, gleaming under the stark light of the bulb overhead.
“No,” Paulo was recorded as saying to himself. “Isto é impossível.”
Thumbing a switch on a battered 3-D printer, Paulo waited impatiently as the raw image data was transferred to the boxy machine. The shack soon filled with the warm wax smell of melting plastic as an array of pulsing lasers set to work. Inch by inch, a hardened layer of plastic rose from the flat bed of the printer. As the seconds ticked by, the formless sludge resolved into a three-dimensional topographic map.
The pale white plastic was rising up in the detailed shape of the jungle canopy, looking for all the world like a bed of cauliflower.
Rolling and lighting yet another cigarette by instinct, Paulo tried not to watch as a new world slowly emerged from the unformed ooze. Each layer hardened in seconds, quickly firming into a scale model of the jungle. Wheezing slightly, Paulo cracked his knuckles one by one, staring blankly and smoking in silence.
In the rare instance that Marvin returned less than an 80 percent classification probability, it was up to Paulo to make the final determination. He did so by employing a carefully honed method that was strictly unavailable to the machine: his sense of touch.
Touch is the most ancient sensory faculty of any living organism. The human body is almost entirely covered with tactile sensors. The neural circuits related to the somatosensory system overlap with multiple other areas of sensing, in ways both unknown and unstudied. Of particular sensitivity are the countless mechanoreceptors in our lips, tongue, feet, and, most especially, our fingertips.
This was Paulo’s talent—one area where man rose above machine.
Eyes half closed, he began with static contact, lightly placing all eight of his finger pads on the model surface. Gently, Paulo added steady pressure to establish a touch baseline. And finally he scanned his fingers laterally over the meticulously rendered folds of jungle canopy.
Properly honed, the discriminatory power of skin receptors can exceed visual acuity. Every inch of the model’s texture corresponded to roughly one hundred yards of real-world terrain, resulting in contours only detectable through a cutaneous spatial resolution far superior to any computer’s image analysis, no matter how clever the machine.
Paulo could run his fingertips over the roof of the jungle and feel whether an unclassified data sample was the ragged, chain-sawed destruction of an airstrip or the smooth banks of an innocent new river tributary.
Eyes closed, limp cigarette in the corner of his mouth, Paulo slouched, his face to the ceiling. His outstretched hands traced the surface of the jungle as if he were a blind god touching the face of the planet.
When his questing fingers found the hard, unnatural lines of the … thing, Paulo Araña swallowed a low moan in the back of his throat. Whatever it was, it really did exist. But there were no roads nearby. No sign of construction. It could not be possible—out there alone and colossal among the primordial trees—and yet it was as real as touching the stubble on his own face.
The thing in the jungle rose at least a hundred feet above a skirt of raw wilderness, long and slightly curved, like a barricade. It spoiled the sanctity of a rain forest otherwise unbroken for thousands of square miles. And it seemed to have appeared from nowhere.
Around the perimeter of the structure, Paulo could feel a crumbling sensation. It was the texture of death—thousands of virgin trees collapsed and sick. This thing was a kind of pestilence, polluting everything nearby.
For a long moment, Paulo sat and contemplated raising an alert on the antiquated FUNAI-issued shortwave radio sitting on his desk. His eyes lingered on its silver dials as the generator puttered outside, providing the trickle of electricity necessary to connect this isolated shack to the rest of the world.
Pushing away from the desk, Paulo felt blindly under the drawers until his fingers brushed against a business card taped beneath. It contained the phone number of a young American who had recently contacted Paulo.
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