The Bug That Already Knew

"It's not chasing them," Maya said. "Watch. It's not chasing."

Soren had the phone propped on his knee, filming the reeds. A big dragonfly hung over the water like it was nailed to the air. Then a midge crossed the pond, and the dragonfly was just suddenly on it. No swerve. No catch-up.

"Play it back slow," Maya said.

Soren thumbed the clip down to a crawl. They both leaned in until their heads bumped.

"There," he said. "The bug it ate. See how it's moving left?"

"Yeah."

"And the dragonfly doesn't go where the bug is. It goes to here." He tapped a spot of empty water ahead and to the side. "Nothing's there yet."

"And then the bug arrives at the empty spot," Maya said. "And the dragonfly's already there waiting."

They looked at each other.

"That's weird," Soren said.

"That's really weird. Do it again."

They caught four more. Every single time, the dragonfly flew to a place the prey was not, and the prey came to it.

"It's leading it," Maya said. "Like in soccer. You don't pass to where someone is. You pass to where they're going to be."

"But you have to know where they're going to be." Soren sat back. "When Coach passes ahead of me, he's guessing. Half the time it's wrong and I have to sprint."

"The dragonfly's not sprinting, though. It's not correcting. It just goes straight to the spot."

"Which means it isn't guessing," Soren said slowly. "Guessing would need fixing. It's not fixing anything."

Maya pulled her knees up. "So it knows. Before the bug gets there. It already knows."

"It can't know. The bug could turn."

"The bug doesn't turn."

"Bugs turn all the time."

"Then how is it ninety-something percent?" Maya said. "I read that. Dragonflies catch the thing almost every time. Lions miss way more than dragonflies."

Soren got out his notebook. He drew a dot for the dragonfly and a dot for the midge and a line between where the midge was and where it was headed. Then he drew the dragonfly's actual path. The two paths didn't point at each other. They pointed at the same future spot.

"Okay," he said. "So it's solving where the lines cross. Before they cross."

"In the air, though," Maya said. "Not on paper. Up, down, left, right, all of it at once."

"Three directions." Soren tapped the page. "That's three problems. You'd have to do all three in your head while you're flying. While the target is moving in all three too."

"It does it in like a tenth of a second."

"It does it with a brain the size of a grain of rice." Soren stared at the dot he'd drawn. "How."

Maya didn't answer right away. A new dragonfly came in, blue this time, and hovered.

"Watch its head," she said.

"What about it?"

"Its body's turning but its head stays locked. Pointed at the bug. The whole time."

Soren zoomed the camera in as far as it would go. She was right. The dragonfly's body banked and rolled, but the head stayed perfectly still, aimed like a flashlight.

"So the eyes hold the target," he said. "And the body flies to the spot. Those are separate. The eyes lock on where it is, and something else figures out where it'll be."

"And steers there," Maya said. "All while keeping the head still so it doesn't lose the lock."

They were quiet. The pond ticked with insects.

"That's a lot of things at once," Soren said finally. "My phone has a chip in it that took a thousand people to design, and it can barely follow my face in a video. It loses me if I move too fast."

"And the bug doesn't lose anything."

"The bug doesn't lose anything," he agreed. "And nobody designed it. There wasn't a meeting."

Maya laughed, but it came out small.

"What," Soren said.

"I always get told I think too far ahead," she said. "In games. In class. My brain jumps to the end and people go, slow down, stay with the question. Like jumping ahead is cheating." She watched the blue dragonfly. "And this thing wins by jumping ahead. That's the whole trick. It doesn't aim at now. It aims at next."

Soren looked at his two lines pointing at the same empty spot.

"Engineers can't build that yet," he said. "I want to check, but I think that's real. People build missiles that chase. The dragonfly doesn't chase. It intercepts. That's harder. That's the thing nobody's matched."

"With a rice-grain brain," Maya said.

"With a rice-grain brain."

The midges drifted up off the water in the heat. The blue dragonfly tipped its head, holding still, holding still, that one point of it locked on something neither of them could see yet.

"It's doing the math right now," Maya whispered. "Right this second. Some bug is flying around out there not knowing where it's going to be, and the dragonfly already knows."

"We can't see the bug," Soren said.

"The dragonfly can. And the dragonfly can see where it's gonna be, which isn't even a real place yet."

They both held their breath.

The dragonfly's body stayed put. Only the wings moved, a blur holding it in one spot of empty sky. It was looking at a future that hadn't happened. It was already there.

Then it dropped sideways into a piece of air that had been empty one breath before, and when it pulled up there was a midge folded in its legs, a midge that a half-second ago had been somewhere else entirely, flying toward the only place it was ever going to end up.

Soren's pen stopped on the page. Neither of them said anything.

The dragonfly carried its catch to a reed, turned its still head toward the open water, and began, very calmly, to look for the next place that did not exist yet.