[ WP ] In the near future , drones of all sizes are ubiquitous and used for all purposes . Something is making them fly in strange but determinable patterns , like crop circles .

There was another one. A little swarm of delivery quadcopters met above a four-way intersection and began circling each other. The pattern started basic, just a clockwise-turning circle, but gradually the drones' odd ballet became more and more complex as newcomers joined. They spun and spiralled, they orbited and interchanged, and at its most complex the pattern became three-dimensional. They flew spherically before morphing into a cube-ish shape that took on appendages and tunnels composed entirely of little flying bots. People stared and taped with camera phones, gawking at the mechanical spectacle. Then the swarm burst, and the hovering couriers seemed to remember the delivery they had previously been so eager to attend to. They scattered in all directions like white rabbits, determined not to be late. 
 I sat at my little cafe table on the corner. And wondered about the nature of this new development. Normally, the pattern anomalies did n't phase anyone, but then they normally only included a few drones. That swarm must have contained every flying bot in the city. There were no bugs in our code, I had checked the standard programming on every class of unit we had produced, from the scurrying little maintenance spiders, to the automated forklifts. Not a single bug in the AI. They simply had learned the behavior on their own. It was as if they'd pulled the run sequence themselves in real time from multiple sources and executables. It was almost conscious.... Not possible. 
 Then again, these incidents had been getting steadily more frequent. A group of sewer monitoring tread-bots rolled up, did a little pirouette, and moved about their business into the next manhole over. It was n't like it was affecting performance much, if at all. They generally did their thing and moved on. There had been a few times that a group had stopped in formation, but that made cleanup easier. `` Bot-circles'', they called them. Those happened more often too. Personally, it looked to me less and less like the math I put into them, and more like an expression. Like a dance. But robots do n't dance.
