Captain-Doctor Simon Afriel, a man that is part of the Shapers faction, is on a ship in space to the Swarm. Afriel has been genetically modified to perform better physically and be more intelligent. He is there to study the Swarm, an alien population that is seemingly without intelligence, having no language or technology. Once arrived, he meets Dr. Galina Mirny, another human researcher already living in the Swarm, as he enters the Nest. She takes him on a tour of a small portion of the Nest. He is there for a secret experiment, which he admits to her. He says it’s a preemptive strike in order to maintain security, but she points out the hypocrisy of his words. Afriel wants to ship out the genetic information from a Nest egg in order to clone workers. He has the pheromones needed to control them in his leg, and needs to test them. If it works, it would create an enslaved race. Mirny resists at first, but Afriel convinces her. They begin the pheromone tests. At one point, Mirny goes off to gather information for one of her own experiments, and does not return. Finally, Afriel goes to find her, only to be blocked by warriors, so he returns to his chambers, scared and unsure of what to do. Three warriors come for him, taking him back to the guarded tunnel. A mass of flesh in the center, who calls itself the Swarm, is piercing Mirny’s corpse’s head. It is one of the many Swarm castes, and its specialty is intelligence. It knows of Afriel’s plan to enslave the Swarm. Instead, it will make Afriel – and his clones – another symbiote in the Swarm. Afriel declares he will not give up and will fight.