Yet Another “Name This Story” thread. Spoilers inevetable.
Setup: Guy and female assistant travel to a far star system to try to take over a (not-intelligent) hive entity by messing with the pheromones. The hive entity hatches an intelligent drone to deal with the problem. Humans lose.
The punch line is “I’ll miss our conversations”…or something similar.
I know the story you’re talking about but I can’t recall the title. I’m pretty sure however that it was written by Gregory Benford.
It’s “Swarm” by Bruce Sterling.
Well, I guess that would explain why I wasn’t finding anything searching a Gregory Benford bibliography.
It’s one of the Shaper-Mechanist stories. I have it in the anthology Crystal Express. It’s very good. The actual last line is:
“I’m glad I don’t have to absorb you. I would have missed our conversations.”
Echoes the first line of the story, IIRC.
Yes, it’s a mirror.
Also, I wouldn’t say the humans “lose” as such. Rather that they and the swarm come to an interesting arrangement, a wager on the future.