I heard a hiss of static, and a cough. The screen image opened a small window in the corner, and now showed Fritz Leidermeyer, in Germany. The investor shifted his enormous bulk. "I'm sorry, Ms. Forman. Tell me please where is the lens?"

"There is no lens."

"How can you have a camera with no lens?"

"I'll explain that as we go," she said.

Watching, I said, "It must be a camera obscura."

"Right," she said, nodding.

Camera obscura-Latin for "dark room"-was the oldest imaging device known. The Romans had found that if you made a small hole in the wall of a dark room, an upside-down image of the exterior appeared on the opposite wall. That was because light coming through any small aperture was focused, as if by a lens. It was the same principle as a kid's pinhole camera. It was why ever since Roman times, image-recording devices were called cameras. But in this case"What makes the aperture?" I said. "Is there a pinhole?"

"I thought you knew," she said. "You're responsible for that part."

"Me?"

"Yes. Xymos licensed some agent-based algorithms that your team wrote."

"No, I didn't know. Which algorithms?"

"To control a particle network."

"Your cameras are networked? All those little cameras communicate with each other?"

"Yes," she said. "They're a swarm, actually." She was still smiling, amused by my reactions.

"A swarm." I was thinking it over, trying to understand what she was telling me. Certainly my team had written a number of programs to control swarms of agents. Those programs were modeled on behavior of bees. The programs had many useful characteristics. Because swarms were composed of many agents, the swarm could respond to the environment in a robust way. Faced with new and unexpected conditions, the swarm programs didn't crash; they just sort of flowed around the obstacles, and kept going.