Swarm

by Guy Garcia

  It was during moments like this, soaring above the savage paradise of the African bush, that Cara Park was glad she had fended off her parents’ entreaties to be a doctor and instead pursued her passion to become an evolutionary biologist. This was the payoff for those countless hours in the lab, toiling to grow insects under fluorescent lights, keeping diaries of their miniscule dramas, cataloging and combing through the busy regimens of beehives and ant colonies. Why, she wanted to know, did the locust swarms that had ravaged the western and southern parts of the continent for centuries suddenly shift eastward to the famed wildlife parklands of Kenya and Tanzania? And would the battery-powered contraption in the back of the plane, secured in place by bungee cords and hemp straps, have the same effect in the field that it had in the lab?

  In the back of the plane, Eric Wightman was fiddling with the tangle of wires and duct tape linking the device to its power source and the cluster of loudspeakers bolted to the aircraft’s belly. With his swimmer’s frame, unruly bangs, and reddish stubble, Cara’s assistant looked more like an indie rock guitarist than a scientist, which was appropriate for a gifted egghead who moonlighted as a keyboardist in a band called Rubik’s Kewb. Of all the graduate students enrolled in the biological sciences PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley, he had most impressed Cara with his empathic smile, inquiring mind, and burning enthusiasm to explore the convergence of traditional biology and cutting-edge technology. In an era in which living organisms were increasingly viewed as complex machines, and vice versa, it made sense to have a student with a grasp of biomimicry and an MS in computer programming on her research team.

  “Almost ready,” Eric announced. “This baby’s gonna rage!”

  “I hope so,” Cara said. “Did you decide on a name for it?”

  “Poly-harmonic audio-redactive omnidirectional hardware,” he replied. “But you can call it PHAROH.”

  “As in ancient Egyptians?”

  “As in biblical plagues.”

  “We’re in East Africa, not the Nile Valley,” Cara said, without letting him see her smile.

  Eric grunted and turned his attention back to the glowing radar bands on his scanner. “We’re getting close—not more than a couple of miles away. Looks like a big one.”

  Flying over the treetops, Cara, her long black hair shoved under a UC Berkeley baseball cap, felt unfettered and filled with a sense of purpose. She was here to help the local government study a sudden rash of locust swarms with the aim of fending off an agricultural catastrophe, not to mention the economic downside of scaring off the lucrative tourist trade. But Cara was motivated to understand not just why the swarms had suddenly appeared but also what they revealed about the ineffable impulse of living things to organize and assemble into something larger than themselves. Darwin’s biological imperative was apparent everywhere she looked—in the disorienting patterns zebras made when they huddled close and rested their heads on each others’ backs, in the flocking instinct of birds and the skittish herds of Thomson’s gazelles, even in the majestic processions of Cape buffalo and wildebeests, flowing to and fro with the seasons like some ancient sentient tide. The truth was that unraveling the puzzle of life on the planet, delving into the micro and macro machinations of existence itself, was more than a profession or intellectual calling. It was Cara’s religion.

  “There it is!” Eric shouted. He was pointing to a dense brown cloud drifting over the grasslands. Cara motioned to the pilot to take them lower and closer to their target. She’d seen videos of locusts on the move in the American Midwest, Australia, and northern Africa, but there was no preparation for the sight of billions of insects moving en masse, driven by a bioenvironmental trigger that caused otherwise harmless grasshoppers to morph into a ravenous scourge. A large swarm could blacken the sky as it consumed everything in its path for hundreds of miles before dissipating. Locust plagues had occurred for millennia, appearing in the Koran and the Bible. Moses summoned them to devour all the crops of Egypt after the pharaoh refused to release the Jews. But Cara knew they were not just the stuff of religious fables and ancient history. Locusts had decimated large swaths of the US plains during the 1930s, magnifying the misery of the Great Depression. Even after American farmers started fighting back with modern pesticides, locust outbreaks continued to occur in the United States and around the world to the present day.

  The insects were dead ahead, flying in a fluidly consistent formation, a shape with no edges. “I’m initiating PHAROH software!” Eric shouted above the engine noise, and Cara involuntarily clenched her fists. There was so much time and money riding on the next few moments. The swarm was thick enough to blot out the sun, and its shadow was like a stain on the defenseless vegetation below. Cara could understand why people from any century who saw the airborne eclipse coming would flee in horror.

  Cara’s interest in locusts had intensified after recent breakthroughs in understanding how they happened in the first place. For most of human history, it was assumed that the solitary and normally benign common grasshopper and its voracious Mr. Hyde–like brother were two separate species. Then, in 1921, entomologists discovered that crowding and proximity to other grasshoppers were all it took to trigger a phase change during which the grasshoppers’ bodies become darker and more muscular. The bugs also become sexually animated and aggressive, moving forward and taking flight to avoid being eaten by the cannibalized locusts swarming behind them. In 2009, researchers from the universities of Sydney, Cambridge, and Oxford pinpointed serotonin, a monoamine neurotransmitter also found in the brains of humans, as the agent that caused docile grasshoppers to morph into a gregarious, uninhibited state and mass into a frenzied collective of flying monsters.

  Cara was already a noted authority on biocollectivism and had published several papers on the emergent behaviors exhibited by ants and bees when she got wind of the new research and started musing over how it could be leveraged to prevent or disrupt locust swarms. She knew that locusts, which affected one-tenth of the world’s population, could cause famine and economic calamity and that the powerful pesticides keeping the insects at bay were too expensive for the poor, undeveloped nations of Africa. She had applied for a grant from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. With the funds, she began working on a method to deter locust swarms by using sound waves to disrupt their communication system.

  Cara had recruited Eric to help her design PHAROH on campus, and they succeeded in using it to disperse a simulated swarm in the lab, but this was the first time the device would be tested in the field. They spent two days in Nairobi prepping the plane, mounting the speakers and loading the digital equipment. Then, with the help of UN officials and meteorologists from Kenya and Tanzania, they set out to intercept a swarm last seen heading southeast over Lake Victoria. With their fluttering target finally in sight, Cara and Eric were about to find out if the PHAROH would live up to its imposing name.

  The pilot descended to under a thousand feet, close enough for the uppermost fliers to hit the plane’s windshield with a sickening splatter. Eric was poised over his contraption, recording the event with the video camera in one hand. “Here, put this deflector on,” he said, handing Cara a headset that clipped to her ears and wrapped around the back of her skull. “It’ll shield you from any PHAROH beam radiation.” He put a set on himself and indicated with a nod that PHAROH was booted up and ready.

  “Not yet,” Cara instructed as she donned the deflector and handed one to the pilot. “Wait until we’re in the middle of it.”

  The swarm was all around them now, obscuring the horizon as the cloud of wings shimmered and roiled. The heaving storm of bugs washed over the plane, coating the propeller and wings in a milky sludge. The pilot gripped the controls nervously, and Cara knew it was only a matter of seconds before he’d be forced to pull out.

  She turned to Eric. “Do it,” she said.

  2

  It w
asn’t the first time Jake Duggan had seen a mirage, but this one was in a league of its own. From Duggan’s window seat on a military transport making its final approach to Kandahar International Airport, the towering blot on the horizon looked like an advancing wall. It was uncanny how the mirage seemed to creep closer, swallowing the sky and Duggan’s peace of mind. The sun was setting, but even in the gloaming, Duggan noticed how the scalloped awnings of the terminal echoed the impermanent architecture of Bedouin tents. He turned to his escort and traveling companion, Master Sergeant Quinn Davis.

  “You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d say that big mountain over there is moving toward us,” Duggan said casually.

  Davis craned his neck to look out the window and nodded grimly. “You don’t know better, and that, my friend, is what the hajjis call a haboob.” Duggan ignored the slur. Davis handed him a pair of goggles, a dust mask, and a bandana. “You’re going to need these. The dust storms in Afghanistan are savage mothers. They can last for days, and I’ll tell you that this one looks like a real dick twister. We got here just in time before they close the base.”

  “How come I don’t feel so lucky?” Duggan muttered, fastening his seatbelt and returning his attention to the open file in his lap.

  Davis had been there to greet Duggan on the tarmac at Riyadh. After introducing himself with a firm handshake, he led Duggan to the US Air Force transport waiting to fly them to Kandahar. It was only after they were in the air and drifting above the dagger-like postmodern skyline of the Saudi capital that Davis handed Duggan a folder containing the details of his mission. Duggan broke the tamperproof security seal and settled in to read the documents that would explain what had brought him so far outside his normal jurisdiction. He immediately recognized the picture of a young soldier that was stapled to the inside corner of the briefing file. Donald Westlake, an otherwise unremarkable air force recruit from Ontario, California, had shaken the US military and generated an international diplomatic crisis by shooting half a dozen Afghan military personnel in cold blood for no apparent reason at the allied base in Kandahar. The official story was that Westlake had a history of psychological problems, which the air force had somehow overlooked, resulting in a formal apology from the secretary of defense to the government of Afghanistan and a promise to do a better job of screening military personnel assigned to politically delicate duties on foreign soil.

  It wasn’t until Duggan read through a detailed description of the shooting and got to a summary of interviews with Westlake’s barrack mates that he finally understood why his boss had sent him halfway across the world to investigate an incident that would otherwise have been handled by the Air Force’s own internal security corps. Westlake, according to several of his fellow airmen, had not only been complaining about headaches before the shooting but also claimed that he was hearing voices with a foreign accent. Even odder was the fact that Westlake told at least one other soldier that the voices were coming from his laptop. The US military intranet was one of the best-encrypted systems in the world. It would have taken the cyber equivalent of a howitzer to break the firewall, and the fallout from such an attack would be relatively easy to detect. But the internal report described evidence of any intrusion as “inconclusive.”

  When Duggan looked up from the folder, Davis was already waiting with an answer. “We need to be able to rule out a breach in the internal allied network,” he explained, “a breach that could have been used to communicate with enemy agents who would like nothing more than to drive a wedge between the States and our Afghan allies. On the other hand, if the messages to Westlake came from someone inside the air force, we can’t be sure that they haven’t infiltrated internal security.”

  “So why didn’t you call in the CIA?”

  Davis grinned and shook his head. “You know what it’s like around here. I mean, between the services, with everybody looking for the slightest excuse to grab more turf. The consensus was that you could be trusted to stick to the game plan.”

  “Which is to tell you whether Westlake was compromised and, if so, whether the messages being sent to him came from outside the base or from embedded sources. And you’re worried that your military cyber ops might be dirty too, so you can’t trust your own people to do the job.”

  Davis tipped his head and shrugged.

  Duggan had been an agent of the National Cyber Security Division of the Department of Homeland Security long enough to know that silence from a fellow operative was an implicit yes. It was even better than a yes because it eliminated the need to delve into the nuances of why Duggan’s statement might be partially, or even slightly, under certain circumstances, less than completely accurate. Plus, if the mission went unexpectedly awry, there would be no need to confirm or deny that Duggan’s assumption had been endorsed by someone who lacked the authority to do such a thing. Never saying more than necessary was a mutually understood occupational guideline that itself was better left unsaid.

  “We’ll be on the ground in a few minutes,” Davis said finally. “We can talk on the ride to base.”

  The wind was already picking up as they descended from the plane to a cordoned-off section of the runway. The tsunami of sand loomed menacingly as men in fatigues hastily loaded their bags into a waiting jeep and scurried to batten down the base. Then, as Duggan watched, the control tower half a mile away disappeared into the roiling murk.

  “Holy cow.”

  “Get in,” Davis instructed. “The sooner we get away from the airport and flying debris, the better.”

  Duggan put on the goggles and mask and tried not to focus on the countless tons of dirt coming toward them at near-hurricane speeds.

  “Look on the bright side,” Davis noted cheerfully. “If nobody can see us, they can’t shoot at us either.”

  Duggan tried to look appreciative. His job at the NCSD was to “assess and mitigate” threats to the cyber infrastructure of the United States. But as the US government had quickly discovered, the line between cyberspace and real space was more than a little fuzzy, meaning that Duggan’s beat sometimes took him into territory normally patrolled by the FBI, the CIA, and in this case, the Department of Defense, and the National Security Agency, whose penchant for secrecy had provoked speculation that its acronym actually stood for “No Such Agency.” Adding to the bureaucratic imbroglio was the creation in 2009 of an entity called Cyber Command, overseen by the Pentagon, which had instantly ignited an interagency debate over the governmental distinction between “defensive” and “offensive” cyber weapons. With so many landmines on the playing field, the NCSD was obligated to tread lightly and cooperate with the bigger players, which partly explained why Duggan had been dispatched with only the disturbingly opaque instruction to grab his passport and meet with a Defense Department liaison in Saudi Arabia. Duggan was pretty sure that his cover would include an identity designed to ruffle the fewest number of feathers among his counterintelligence counterparts in the military and probably the CIA as well, which was undoubtedly why Davis made no effort to continue the conversation that had started on the plane. That Duggan was now trapped in a sandstorm inside a moving vehicle with almost zero visibility, heading into a highly charged environment he knew nearly nothing about, only added to his discomfort.

  “So do the men in Westlake’s barracks know I’m coming?”

  Davis veered sharply to avoid an object that Duggan didn’t recognize. “They know someone is coming to inspect Westlake’s computer, which is still right where he left it. As you know from reading the file, they’ve already been interviewed several times, and as you might imagine, the whole incident is kind of a sore subject. That’s why I’m putting you up in the officers’ quarters. There’s no point in throwing you to the wolves. As far as they know, you’re just a DOD tech wonk here from Washington to check out the hard drive for computer bugs.”

  Duggan smiled mirthlessly. The best false identity, he knew, was one tha
t hewed closely to the truth, and this was a classic case of warping reality by simply withholding certain pieces of information. In fact, it was not that long ago that Duggan actually had been a private sector cyber wonk, an idealistic entrepreneur with dreams of changing the world and getting rich in the process. Back in the early nineties, fresh out of the University of Chicago with a degree in computer programming and the idea for an online TV network, Duggan had seen the Internet as a fresh start for civilization, full of possibility and promise, a place where digital visionaries could stake a claim and roll the dice, a place where anything and everything was possible. Duggan and a few college chums collected seed money from friends and family, rented a former women’s underwear factory with bad ventilation in New York’s Silicon Alley, and incorporated under the name NexTube Technologies. Everybody wore T-shirts and jeans to the office and worked twenty-hour days in exchange for free Cokes and sweat equity in a company with a T1 Internet connection and no proven revenue model. Arriving for work each morning, Duggan would look across the open-plan office—with its exposed brick walls, protruding water pipes, and dangling wires, clots of young people hunched over boxy CPUs and monochrome monitors—and feel the adrenaline jolt of an explorer who had reached the summit of an unnamed mountain. He was gazing out across an untracked panorama to be claimed, mapped, and populated, except that cyberspace had no physical boundaries or limits and its power grew exponentially with each person who logged on, an infinite parallel universe that would transform the material world and everything in it.